Havens Trading Company is committed to the ethical purchase and sale of culturally relevant American Indian arts and crafts through carefully nurtured relationships with artists throughout the Southwest and Northwest Coast, making legitimate, authentic, quality American Indian arts and crafts even more accessible to collectors and enthusiasts worldwide, while maintaining the integrity of contributing to the cessation of the circulation of culturally sensitive and proprietary sacred objects and the increased circulation of fake “Indian” arts and crafts that has plagued the market for decades.

Through this dedication to ethics and cultural sensitivity, we hope to both expand the market for many American Indian artists and to make a reasonable profit for Havens Trading Company in the resale of their art.

This market is largely flooded with fake artifacts (“artifakes”), jewelry and trinkets made overseas, articles resembling toys for non-Indian children to play “cowboys and Indians” such as small feathered headdresses, rubber tomahawks, bows and arrows, “Indian” dolls, etc., moccasins, and other articles designed to capitalize on “Indianness” by virtue of their “Indian”-like designs. It seems that anything with feathers, a “teepee” design, fake leather, arrowheads, plastic resembling turquoise, plastic dipped in silver paint, Indian “Princesses,” in fact anything capitalizing on the “Indian” theme, will sell.

Havens Trading Company will NOT participate in these more exploitive and fraudulant aspects of the market.