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Nineteenth-century Navajo and Pueblo silver jewelry

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 1998 by Paula A. Baxter

The Navajo and Pueblo peoples of the American Southwest transformed the borrowed craft of silversmithing into a unique aspect of their material culture well before it became commercial property in the non-Indian world. Between 1868 and 1900 they created remarkable silver jewelry through a vigorous process of experimentation.

The results were so attractive that the jewelry was readily appropriated and altered for non-Indian consumption, and by the early twentieth century it was part of the nascent ethnic art market.

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This redirection of a native art into a regional industry has been variously treated in studies relating to the opening of the Southwest to tourism and commerce. A focus on tourism and commericalization has diverted attention from the late nineteenth-century origins of the jewelry. Nineteenth-century Indian jewelry was meant almost entirely for Indian use, yet it evoked in others a keen aesthetic appreciation, revealing much about how responsive design can bridge time and cultures.

Anthropologists and others have frequently expressed more interest in Navajo and Pueblo pottery, weaving, and even basketry than jewelry. Commentary usually focuses on the skill of the Indian silversmiths, armed only with rough tools and improvised forges [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. In the early 1880s Washington Matthews, a surgeon in the United States Army, reported to the recently created Bureau of American Ethnology that "the appliances and processes of the smith are much the same among the Navajo as among the Pueblo Indians."(1) But he found the Navajo silversmiths "quite fertile in design."(2)

In 1892 the writer and traveler Charles Fletcher Lummis (1859-1928) summarized the prevailing attitude toward Indian enterprise:

Both Navajos and Pueblos are admirable silversmiths, and make ali their own jewelry. Their silver rings, bracelets, earrings, buttons, belts, dress pins, and bridle ornaments are very well fashioned with a few rude tools. The Navajo smith works on a flat stone under a tree; but the Pueblo artificer has generally a bench and a little forge in a room of his house.(3)

The approving tone of these remarks is significant in the context of the Southwest in the second half of the nineteenth century. The United States had only acquired possession of the region from Mexico in 1848, and the territorial government was anxious to implant American values in an alien society. The Navajo in particular presented a problem, for their attempts to resist the influx of settlers brought military retaliation by the United States Army between 1864 and 1868. This led to the defeat of the Navajos and their incarceration at Fort Sumner in the New Mexico territory. After they returned from internment in 1868, silversmithing was one of the crafts encouraged by the authorities. The facility with which both the Navajo and Pueblo Indians took up the craft was nothing short of wondrous, and they quickly made it their own [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED]. Their first instructors in silverwork were itinerant Mexican blacksmiths whom they encountered at forts, trading posts, and local settlements. Later silversmiths were hired for the same purpose by the government.(4)

Precedents for Pueblo shell and stone jewelry can be traced to the ancient inhabitants of the region, including the Anasazi and Hohokam, who had vanished long before the advent of the Spanish ([ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE IX OMITTED] and [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED]). With the Spanish came silver ornaments on their horse tackle and clothing. Coinand German-silver jewelry from neighboring tribes in the Rocky Mountains or southern plains regions could be found at trade fairs. Those Indians, in turn, had the jewelry from fur traders from the eastern United States and Canada.(5)

Oral history has yielded the names of the earliest known Indian silversmiths, with most sources crediting Atsidi Sani (d. 1918) as the first Navajo silversmith. He taught many others, who spread the craft to the Zuni, Hopi, and Rio Grande pueblos(6) during the late 1860s and into the 1870s. In this seminal period, jewelry was simple: single crescent (called naja) pendants, occasionally terminating in the shape of two human hands; plain band rings; twisted wire or carinated bracelets; and cast-silver bracelets [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE IV OMITTED]. Slightly later, hollow beads appeared, and stones were set into bezels with notched or saw-tooth edges. These stones were broadly spaced on concha jewelry.

Despite the relative crudeness of the tools available to the first Navajo and Pueblo silversmiths, their earliest ventures into jewelry making were typically well conceived [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 6 OMITTED]. In most cases coins were melted into ingots and then hammered into sheets in preparation for casting. Silversmiths cut their molds from soft sandstone or tufa, and, after casting, the decoration was impressed with cold chisels and files or created with simple incised lines and rocker-engraving. Buttons and beads were fashioned around round-pointed dies. A pleasing asymmetry developed during these first decades of jewelry making. The patina varied from bluish to yellowish white depending on whether Mexican pesos or United States dollar coins had been malted down for use. Liquid rock salt was used as a blanching agent, and before sandpaper and emery paper, the smiths used ashes, sand, and stones to smooth the surface.

Nineteenth-century Navajo and Pueblo silver jewelry

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 1998 by Paula A. Baxter

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