The fall of Saigon ended the Vietnam War. The Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act passed, marking a major legislative shift toward tribal autonomy and away from the termination-era policies that had dominated federal Indian policy since the 1950s.
Nixon resigned the presidency in August, the first president to do so. The country was in a period of institutional crisis and self-examination. The Oil Crisis continued. The postwar prosperity that had underwritten the art market's growth in the late 1960s was definitively over.
The Oil Crisis began in October, triggered by an OPEC embargo. Gas prices spiked, travel became more expensive, and the American economy entered a period of inflation and uncertainty that would last most of the decade. The market would prove resilient — but not untouched.
The American Indian Movement occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington, D.C. during the Trail of Broken Treaties. Native political activism was at a peak of national visibility — and the questions being raised about sovereignty, representation, and self-determination were the same questions Indian Market's own governance would eventually have to answer.
The 26th Amendment lowered the voting age to 18. The war in Vietnam was grinding on. Native activists were increasingly visible in national politics, building on the energy of the Alcatraz occupation and pushing for legislative recognition of tribal sovereignty.
Art Basel launched in Switzerland this year, establishing the model for what a world-class art fair could be. The global art market was professionalizing rapidly. Indian Market — which had been running its own version of that model since 1922 — was now operating in a context that validated what it had always been.
Apollo 11 landed on the moon. Woodstock happened. The 1960s ended in a blur of extraordinary events — a decade that had begun with optimism and ended with hard-won, complicated knowledge about what American institutions were and what they needed to become.
Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago descended into chaos. The year 1968 was one of the most turbulent in American history — a year in which the post-war order cracked open and something new, still undefined, began to emerge.
The Summer of Love. The Vietnam War was escalating. American culture was in a period of extraordinary creative ferment — and the conversation about who belonged in that culture, whose art counted as art, was getting louder.
The Black Power movement was emerging alongside the Civil Rights Movement. The American Indian Movement was still two years away from its founding, but the political consciousness that would animate it was already building in cities and on reservations across the country.
The Voting Rights Act passed. The counterculture was arriving. American society was fracturing and reconstituting itself in real time. In this environment, the argument about what Native art was — and who had the right to define it — was part of a much larger argument about identity, power, and self-determination.
The Civil Rights Act passed. The Great Society programs launched. American institutions were under pressure to reckon with who they served and who they excluded — and cultural institutions, including Indian Market, were not exempt from that pressure.
President Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963. The country was shaken. The optimism of the early decade gave way to something harder and more uncertain — a mood that would define the rest of the 1960s.
The Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the edge of nuclear war. Thirteen days in October. The weapons built forty-five minutes from Santa Fe at Los Alamos were suddenly at the center of human history in a way that no one could look away from.
The Peace Corps was founded. The Freedom Riders challenged segregation on interstate buses. America was in the middle of a fundamental argument about who belonged in its institutions — and who got to decide. Indian Market's independence was, in its way, part of the same argument.
John F. Kennedy was elected president. The 1960s were beginning in earnest — a decade that would bring the Civil Rights Act, the American Indian Movement, and a wholesale reckoning with who American institutions were actually built to serve.
The postwar era was ending and the 1960s were about to begin — the decade that would reshape American culture, politics, and the relationship between Native communities and the institutions that claimed to serve them.
The late 1950s were a moment of profound cultural ferment across American art. Abstract Expressionism, Beat poetry, rock and roll — boundaries were being redrawn everywhere. Oscar Howe's letter placed Native art squarely inside that argument, not outside it.
Sputnik launched. The Space Age began. The world was changing at a pace that made old certainties feel precarious — and that included certainties about culture, tradition, and the categories used to organize both.
The Interstate Highway System was authorized under Eisenhower. American mobility was about to increase dramatically. Easier car travel to Santa Fe would, over the following decade, meaningfully expand the market's potential audience.
Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. The Civil Rights Movement accelerated. In New Mexico, the conversations about Native rights, sovereignty, and cultural self-determination were their own version of the same struggle — different in form, connected in spirit.
Brown v. Board of Education was decided by the Supreme Court, beginning the dismantling of legal segregation. The Civil Rights Movement was gathering force — and the questions it raised about representation, power, and who controls cultural institutions would eventually reshape how Indian Market understood its own governance.
The Korean War ended. House Resolution 108 formalized the federal termination policy, which would attempt to dissolve more than a hundred tribal governments over the next two decades. Native communities across the country mobilized to resist it — and cultural institutions like Indian Market were part of what they were fighting to preserve.
Mid-century America was prosperous and restless. Eisenhower would win the presidency. Television was reshaping American culture. And in New Mexico, the communities the market served were navigating federal termination policies that threatened tribal sovereignty across the country.
The Korean War was underway. Another generation of Native men was serving in the military. The pattern that had emerged in World War II — wartime service followed by cultural revival — would repeat itself in the years ahead.
The Santa Fe Indian Market has gathered artists, collectors, and community on the Plaza every August since 1922. What began as the Southwest Indian Fair and Industrial Arts and Crafts Exhibition — organized by the Museum of New Mexico to preserve and promote Native artistry — grew into the world’s largest and most prestigious juried Native American art market. This archive documents the institutional history of that journey: every year, every organizing body, every venue, and the broader world that shaped each market in its time.
