The colonizer's world did not exclude indigenous aesthetics entirely. However, throughout the vast majority of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was considered 'primitive art. "Ethnographic objects were thought to have come before the great "art" traditions of Western civilization in an evolutionary sense." In the framework of developing a 'national' culture distinct from the imperial core, indigenous aesthetic designs began to emerge in settlement structures, on stamps, coins, and other tangible goods. In addition, understanding is born out of the interdependence and inseparability of the human, spiritual, and material realms.

contemporary, Indigenous, art,