Despite the vastness of North America, its indigenous groups once shared certain cultural features. For this discussion the most important was religion and its attendant ceremonies, since many objects made for religious purposes�masks, for example�are those reclassified as "art."

As a general rule Native North Americans experienced the world as a series of zones of which the world of here and now was only one. Most often, cosmic space was conceived as a tripartite series of strata consisting of earth, sky, and water, or underworld, linked by a central axis. The earth was the realm of living humans, but all three zones were also populated by supernatural beings, both positive and negative. Most Native North American groups had a religious specialist, or shaman, who communicated with these supernaturals. The shaman derived his or her powers through a vision quest, withdrawing from the human community, engaging in a lengthy fast, and acquiring special spirit helpers through dreams. Usually these were animals with whom the initiate developed a special, lifetime relationship. Through them the shaman communicated with beings in the other realms via spirit journeys. Generally these took place annually as world-renewal rites, but they could also occur irregularly when a catastrophe such as famine or disease overtook a community. At such times the shaman donned special regalia and embarked on a journey beyond the human realm to determine the cause of the bad fortune. Usually such ceremonies were public; often they were held at midwinter. Among the Yup'ik Eskimos of southwestern Alaska, for example, the annual Bladder Festival culminated in a rite on the ice during which a year's accumulation of sea-mammal bladders were the focus of a shamanistic seance, after which the bladders were removed from a ceremonial house and returned to the spirit world through a hole in the ice. The haunting, complex masks used during the Bladder Festival and other annual midwinter ceremonies are among the most powerful art objects known for aboriginal North Americans.

Pueblo dwellers of the Southwest, in particular the Hopi, conceptually divide the annual cycle into two parts, which culminate in midwinter ceremonies. Hopi belief teaches that the gods (katsinas) visit the earth for half the year. Beginning in August they hold a cycle of dances dedicated to various aspects of the katsinas' role as promoters of fertility among animals, plants, and humans. The most elaborate of these take place at the time of the winter solstice and employ masks, dance sticks, and other ritual paraphernalia now called art. Moreover, three-dimensional wooden figurines, loosely based on the various gods, were originally made as didactic devices for children. They are now widely replicated and made for sale to outsiders, although they are more fully representational than the kind made for children.

The first movement of people into North America from Asia may have occurred as early as fifty thousand but not later than eleven thousand years ago. The earliest groups, ancestors of the present-day American Indians, migrated southward into continental North and South America. According to Ernest Burch it is now widely accepted that the Eskimos are descendants of a later migration, which probably took place about six thousand years ago.

The earliest examples of prehistoric Native American art are from the pre-Eskimo groups of Alaska. Among the best known are the small female figures from the Okvik culture (200 B.C.�100 A.D.) of St. Lawrence Island. Carved from walrus or mastodon ivory, the figures are detailed with slashing geometric lines and the circle-and-dot motif. The figures have articulated breasts and genitalia and may have been used in fertility rites.

The mica cutouts of the Adena-Hopewell mound builders of present-day Ohio (100 B.C.�1000 A.D.) are another example of prehistoric North American art. Cut out of thin sheets of mica imported from Appalachia, they usually occur as abstractions of human hands, human figures, birds, and serpents. Their use is unknown but given the distant origin of the material and their appearance in burials, they may have been as status symbols.

The major known art form from the prehistoric Southwest is pottery. For instance, during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Mogollon peoples of the Mimbres Valley (in what is now southern New Mexico) made distinctive black-on-white pottery bowls. Although crudely formed the vessels, which are ritually "killed" with a hole at the center, are imaginatively painted with bird or animal designs.

The dates of the historic period vary according to when a Native North American group first encountered non-Natives, although most had received European trade goods well before. Most Native North American art of the historic period shows European influence, whether in style, materials, technology, or intended audience. Despite the insistence to the contrary of Native American art collectors who wish to exoticize this material, it is important to celebrate the creative hybridity of the historic period.

The vast reaches of Native North America, and the thousands of small-scale groups it comprises, can be usefully classified into a subset of regional variations sharing cultural features including art styles. Eastern Woodland groups are known for magnificent beadwork on moccasins, pouches, and pin cushions, a significant proportion of which were made for the non-Native souvenir market. A creative synthesis of earlier quillwork, floral beadwork was introduced by Ursuline nuns, but the Eastern Woodland seamstresses combined it imaginatively with such indigenous motifs as the double S-curve. By the end of the nineteenth century, floral beadwork had spread northwestward as far as the Subarctic and Plateau regions of western Canada, western Washington, and Alaska. Along the way beadworkers added their own regional touches such as the pictorial images on Plateau beaded bags or the black background for floral beadwork from the Fort Yukon Athabascans of the upper Yukon River. To the south, Plains Indian beadwork reached its apogee during the late-nineteenth-century reservation period when its orderly diagrammatics flourished in the forms of parfl�ches (large skin bags) and personal regalia. Almost from its start, Plains beadwork was created both for local consumption and the burgeoning non-Native collectors' market. In the Southwest artists developed spectacular Pueblo pottery such as the renowned black-on-black of San Ildefonso, which built on skills developed during the prehistoric period. The Navajo, on the other hand, created silver and turquoise jewelry and blankets from techniques they borrowed from the Spanish. Pottery and jewelry reached their pinnacle after the founding of the Santa Fe Railroad brought tourists to the Southwest. Meanwhile from the Southwest all the way north as far as coastal Alaska, groups such as the Chumash, Hupa, Nuchalnuth, Tlingit, Aleut, and Eskimo responded to the early-twentieth-century basket craze, producing coiled and twined ware of fibers as diverse as grasses and baleen for a thriving collectors' market. In the far North, Alaskan Eskimo men developed consummate ivory carving and engraving skills in response to the tourist trade. To summarize, the non-Native market acted as a catalyst for Native American art forms of the past two hundred years.

At the turn of the twentieth century Native American cultures were thought to be in the final stages of decay. Today, it is known that this perspective was a form of social Darwinism and was more often than not a justification for neglect or mistreatment. By the early twenty-first century, many Native American groups were not only alive but, thanks in part to the ethnic awareness fostered by the social protests of the 1960s, many had managed to balance the threat of assimilation with the maintenance of individual and group integrity.

Not surprisingly, the Native American art market reflects these trends. Nelson Graburn has categorized the consumers of contemporary Native art into a continuum moving from functional-traditional arts (objects made in the old way for local consumption) on one end to assimilated-fine arts (those created by indigenous artists in a Western format) based on their intended audience. Native American artists tend to work for the non-Native audience creating works such as marble sculpture or oil paintings that are either completely divorced from traditional prototypes, in technique or medium or that replicate for the external market traditional prototypes, such as snowshoes, birchbark baskets, or masks. Whichever approach they choose, their work usually engages with the personal experiences of a minority population on the losing end of the struggle for hegemony.

There are signs that the "Native American as object" paradigm for scholarly research is fading. This is perhaps clearer with respect to Native American art than in other domains. One empowering trend is the federally mandated Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation act (NAGPRA) of 1990, passed to bring an end to the widespread practice of grave robbing in the name of science and to return human remains from the shelves of museums to Native American communities for reburial. More recently, NAGPRA has been expanded to allow for the return of objects of cultural patrimony (objects owned collectively or those central to the maintenance of religious practices). For the most part, participating in the decisions about repatriation has not only improved understanding between mainstream and Native American cultures. It has also given Native Americans an appreciation for the arts of past generations, thus fostering ethnic pride. Finally, ethnic awareness on the part of mainstream culture has also brought Native Americans into museums as collaborators rather than objects. Most contemporary exhibitions of Native American art in public institutions routinely call on Native American artists and other knowledgeable community members in exhibition planning. In this way Native Americans have gained greater control over the way that they and their cultures are represented in museums. In the main it has been an empowering experience and certainly one that has led to greater understanding between museum staffs and their Native American constituencies. The process has not only nurtured positive relations between Native and non-Native Americans but also has enriched the documentation of objects, once thought to be irretrievable.