A Nambé Pueblo lapidary artist testified before a U.S. House committee earlier this month on his experience with counterfeit American Indian jewelry.

Michael NaNaPing Garcia, chairman of the Indian Arts & Crafts Association, said he and two tribal leaders spent several hours before the House Committee on Natural Resources, which is looking into amending laws on fake Indian artwork.

Garcia explained how he found one of his bracelets for sale on eBay, but with his hallmark scratched off or filled in, and attributed to the late Hopi jewelry maker Charles Loloma.

"Loloma was one of the pioneers that changed the direction of native jewelry back in the early 1970s into a more contemporary look," Garcia said. "I felt impressed that my work was comparable to his. But, still, I was angry because they're ripping off somebody — not only me, but the public."

Garcia, a 56-year-old Pascu Yaqui from southern Arizona, moved to Nambé Pueblo in 1980 to marry a local woman, Margie Garcia. He shows his inlaid-stone work at the Santa Fe Indian Market, at Packard's on the Plaza and at other galleries around the U.S. and in other countries. While visiting Washington, D.C., he filed a formal complaint with the Indian Arts and Crafts Board of the U.S. Department of the Interior about the eBay sale, but never heard anything more about it.

During his testimony, he was asked if the board "was failing us as artists," said Garcia, the only artist among the trio testifying. "The director was sitting behind me, so I felt bad because I told them ... I felt like I was let down. They don't have enough resources to go after these people. There's only 12 people to cover the whole country that work in that office. Because of that, my case probably had slipped through the cracks."

U.S. Rep. Ed Pastor, D-Ariz., is proposing to strengthen the 1990 Indian Arts and Crafts Act by increasing penalties for misrepresenting Indian arts and crafts. Pastor's amendments have yet to reach the floor of the House of Representatives. Among the committee members asking questions Dec. 2 was U.S. Rep. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M.

The Indian Arts & Crafts Association, based in Albuquerque, also is lobbying for tougher state penalties. New Mexico makes misrepresenting Indian arts and crafts a felony only if the sale is for $25,000 or more — a threshold the association says is unreasonably large for a jewelry sale.

The eBay incident wasn't Garcia's only experience with fake Indian jewelry, which has been estimated to soak up half of the $1 billion-a-year industry. While visiting Japan in 2006, he said, he walked into a gallery of dream catchers and other American Indian-style arts in a suburb of Tokyo and spotted an inlaid-stone piece that obviously was a "knockoff" of one of his original designs.

"I even found a picture of (his original piece) and sent it to the gallery owner," he said. "I may not be able to recall out of memory every piece that I've made, but when I see something I made years ago, I know I made it."

In the late 1970s, when fake Indian jewelry from overseas flooded the United States, "it destroyed me," said Garcia, who began doing lapidary work professionally in 1973. "I couldn't give away a piece of jewelry. My relatives that had been doing it for over 40 years and that I learned from, they quit making jewelry and never came back to it because of that."