In 1993 when I first began working in the curatorial department of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), I ran across a collection of large oil paintings, covered in dust, sitting in a cluttered aisle of the museum's archaeological collection. There was no love lost on the part of some staff: the paintings weren't "pretty" Indian paintings. Dark and thickly textured, the majority were portraits of people with thick limbs and features. Further inquiry revealed that these paintings were by a New York Native American artist named Bonita Wa Wa Calachaw Nuñez, who signed her paintings as "Wa Wa Chaw."

In the years since I began studying this all but unknown artist, the question of Wa Wa Chaw's authenticity as a Native artist continues to be raised periodically. Although the paintings were recently cleaned revealing the artist's vibrant and expressive vision, her claims to Indian identity have become less clear. The American Indian Arts and Crafts Act (1), created as legislation in 1990 primarily to protect contemporary Native artists from imitators, has focused attention on the "authenticity" of all Native artists. But should we also scrutinize the authenticity of artists who lived before the legislation?

According to her own account, Wa Wa Chaw was adopted at birth from the Rincon Band of the Luiseño in 1888 by Mary Duggan, an Indian rights advocate, and her brother Cornelius Duggan, a physician. She was raised in their wealthy Manhattan home and socialized with many of their friends and associates.

Her story is intriguing. She was a New York artist, an early urban Indian and a staunch advocate for Indian rights. But after exhaustive research, I have been able to confirm only some of her story. Public records show she was married to Manuel Nuñez, a Puerto Rican cigar manufacturer, and lived on public assistance in her later life in Spanish Harlem until her death in 1972.

Although she exhibited and is included in several publications as Luiseño, I have been unable to confirm her Native identity. No enrollment existed for the Luiseño until the 1920s, long after Wa Wa Chaw would have been removed from her Native community. Though she does mention briefly attending the Sherman Indian School in Riverside, no records of her attendance exist. Records of her adoptive parents also continue to be elusive.

What does this lack of confirmation tell us about Wa Wa Chaw's identity? Is it reasonable to expect corroboration of a nineteenth-century birth in a community before Federal enrollment began? If her story is untrue, was she actually a fraud or did she truly believe the story of her Native origins? What does this lack of "proof" tell us about the Native identity she so clearly expresses in her paintings? And, more telling, what does this need for confirmation reveal about how we judge Native identity today?

After spending countless hours examining her diaries, correspondences, paintings and drawings, I have no doubt in my mind that Wa Wa Chaw passionately believed in her identity as a Native woman. Her paintings explore painful aspects of her personal history, including her removal from her Native community. In recalling the curiosity of strangers, she clearly expressed her own feelings of isolation as an outsider in New York:
"What is she?"
"She's an Indian, I think."
"An Indian! Why, are there any Indians now alive? I thought they were all dead."
"Oh, let's take a look at her."(2)
Despite the lack of firm "proof" of her identity, I have found that her work elicits a passionate response from many Native people who can relate to the pain she expresses. She also equally offends some people by the brashness of her work and her melodramatic life story.

Wa Wa Chaw addressed the contradictions and ambiguity of her life with a frankness that those of us who live in "The City" today recognize. In the end, we may only be able to find Wa Wa Chaw's identity in her writings and paintings where she expressed herself as both a Native woman and a New Yorker. Maybe that should be enough.

(1) PL 101-644, Summary of Text of Title I, Public Law 101-644 [104 Stat. 4662], Act of 11/29/90, Indian Arts and Crafts Board, U.S. Department of the Interior.

(2) Steiner, Stan, ed .Spirit Woman: The Diaries and Paintings of Bonita Wa Wa Calachaw Nuñez (Harper & Row, 1980): 234.

NOTE: If you knew Wa Wa Chaw, or own one of her paintings or drawings, please contact the author through Amerinda.