Nineteenth-century Navajo and Pueblo silver jewelry

Paula A. Baxter

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.

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.

After 1880 Indian jewelery makers developed a repertory of handmade dies to create stamped or repousse decorative elements (see PI. VI). However, these innovations were not universal, and many Indian silversmiths continued to use the same rudimentary tools until 1900, when a new wave of materials and tools altered the creation of silver jewelry.

The earliest jewelry made by the Indians for their own use consisted most frequently of rings, buttons, bracelets, conchas strung on leather belts, and pendants of najas or crosses on necklaces of round or fluted beads. Early rings and concha disks appear to be copied from the trade jewelry of the Plains Indians. The concha belts of this first phase lacked buckles, and the disks were usually more round than oval, with six to eight conchas threaded onto the leather belt through diamond-shaped cuts in the silver [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATES III, VIII OMITTED]. Buttons were fluted or domed. The first common bracelet patterns consisted of flattened, hammered, and engraved disks, or a silver band shaped into ridged, or triangular, keeled forms [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE V OMITTED]. Slender bracelets could be enlarged by joining several bands with twisted wire. By the mid-1870s cast-silver bracelets appeared, which were usually wider than their predecessors.(7) Originally, naja pendants were probably based on Spanish colonial bridle ornaments and may originally have been derived from a Moorish crescent design. The naja became a prominent fixture on Navajo silver necklaces. Cross-shaped pendants enjoyed more favor with the Pueblo, although both tribes made them [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE VII OMITTED]. Between 1880 and 1910 crosses with one or two crossbars were most often worn singly on a bead necklace. The early designs were derived from crosses traded by the French, including the double-barred cross of Lorraine.(8) The Indians attached their own symbolism to the cross, which represented the morning star to the Navajo and the dragonfly to the Pueblo [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 5 OMITTED].(9)

Despite technical limitations, the first generation of Navajo and Pueblo silversmiths devised a surprisingly formal and interesting vocabulary of design. In response to queries from observers like Matthews, the silversmiths claimed that they executed their works based on a conception of the finished product rather than a preliminary drawing.(10) They emphasized such features as mass, proportion, and repetitive patterns composed of lines and curves. Experimentation brought elaboration in design, but simplicity and a sense of balance in decoration remained. Stones were added in increasing numbers by the late 1880s, with turquoise and garnets favored [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE IV OMITTED]. Repousse work gained in popularity because it increased the sculptural effect [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE V OMITTED]. In the 1890s earrings made from wire hoops or tab stones were given dangle shapes, and increasing numbers of stones accentuated surface design.

The 1880s and early 1890s were the last. years when both the design and execution of Indian silverwork were largely untouched by external influences. The first centers for jewelry production usually developed near a government school or military base. Later, the railroads brought tourists and other visitors to the Southwest, redirecting the market for Indian crafts. Traders based on the Navajo reservation or near pueblos furnished local silversmiths with silver coins to melt and other supplies. Trading posts in Ganado, Arizona, and elsewhere acted as pawnbrokers for Indian silver jewelry or accepted it in exchange for goods sold at the posts.(11) Thus, the emphasis shifted to making jewelry more commercially acceptable to non-Indian buyers.

Museums and private collections became the first repositories for pre-commercial Navajo and Pueblo silver jewelry. Some of it was gathered in major ethnographic collecting expeditions between 1875 and 1910, but documentation on the pieces acquired is rare. More typical are observations about objects seen in the field, such as the Navajo proclivity for silver bracelets noted by Edward Palmer of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.(12) He led expeditions to the Southwest from 1876 to 1879. The Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., also led collecting expeditions. Other institutions with significant collections of early Indian silver are the American Museum of Natural History and the Brooklyn Museum in New York City, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, and the University Museum of the Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia. Anthropologists became concerned about privately organized collecting ventures because prime artifacts from the nineteenth century and earlier were being sent abroad or disappearing into private collections.

Silver jewelry was a problematic category for institutions wanting to collect Indian artifacts because its manufacture had been instigated by contact with non-Indian culture. Those museums that did collect Indian silver made before 1900, known as first-phase jewelry,(13) valued most highly those pieces of unquestionable provenance or those that demonstrated significant changes in design or technique. One of the most important of these collections, now in the Heard Museum in Phoenix, was started in 1899 by Herman Schweizer, a buyer for the Fred Harvey Company. He deliberately began the collection to provide a benchmark for future Indian silver jewelry design. In fact most museums with collections of this silver displayed pre-1900 silver in order to demonstrate its integrity of design and craftsmanship before commercialization overtook it in the twentieth century.

There is a certain irony in the perception that nineteenth-century Navajo and Pueblo silver jewelry, instigated by non-Indians, was a purer form of adornment than its twentieth-century counterpart. The argument is that since this jewelry was made solely for Indian consumers it reflected their true sense of aesthetics better than later pieces that embodied commercial compromises [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE II OMITTED]. Even the changes that came with improved lapidary tools, allowing jewelry makers to embellish pieces with more and smaller stones, were measured according to the standards perceived by Indian arts enthusiasts, and thus consumers, to be genuine native design.

Navajo and Pueblo jewelry of the first thirty years (c. 1868-1900) was known as traditional, a description soon replaced by the term classic. Harry P. Mera at the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe, analyzed this jewelry extensively, and his most important book, volume one of Indian Silverwork of the Southwest, published in 1959, molded scholarly opinion and collectors' attitudes. His influence can be seen in subsequent publications that attribute a significant design role to early jewelry.(14)

Anthropologists feared for the survival of the arts of the American Indians, but in the case of silver jewelry production such fears were unfounded. Silversmithing developed as a cross-cultural craft that evolved and adapted to new circumstances. While anthropologists saw the first phase as a more truthful approximation of the Indians' design intentions, there are identifiable differences between the design and execution of jewelry in the early 1870s and in the 1890s. It was in fact an anthropologist who observed in 1893 that the Navajo silversmiths "are in a very interesting stage of transition, and clearly one of very material progress."(15)

By the 1920s and 1930s the pre-1900 jewelry was considered purer than subsequent production, and in the 1940s it was held up as the model of classic form and design for young Indian silversmiths by such Santa Fe institutions as the Laboratory of Anthropology, the Santa Fe Indian School, and the Indian Arts Fund.(16)

Collecting nineteenth-century Navajo and Pueblo jewelry can be difficult, partly because only a limited amount is available. Some of the finest examples are now in museums [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE X OMITTED]. Scarcity makes antique jewelry expensive, so it is important to rely on reputable dealers. Counterfeit pieces have appeared from time to time, and Indian jewelers have also revived earlier styles, which reputable makers and dealers identify as reproductions. The alder jewelry is usually of heavy silver, bears telltale signs of wear, and the evidence of relatively crude tools. Despite repetitive rhythms in the patterned and smooth surfaces, nineteenth-century designs are quiet and inert.

Today the silverwork of the nineteenth century has transcended its ethnographic context and can be seen as material evidence of the transition of a craft into a modern art form. Throughout the twentieth century Indian silversmiths have acknowledged the debt they owe to early silver designs by returning to them again and again for inspiration. The result has been an enrichment of modern Indian jewelry through reference to the past.

I would like to give special thanks to Joan Caballero for her advice and review of this article.

1 "Navajo Silversmiths," 2nd Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1880-1881 (Washington, D.C., 1883), p. 171.

2 Ibid., p. 177.

3 Some Strange Corners of Our Country: The Wonderland of the Southwest (New York, 1892), p. 207.

4 The two most authoritative publications about the origins and early history of Indian silversmithing are John Adair, The Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths (University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1944), pp. 5-6; and Margery Bedinger, Indian Silver: Navajo and Pueblo Jewelers (University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1975), p. 5.

5 Arthur Woodward, Navajo Silver: A Brief History of Navajo Silversmithing, (Northland Press, Flagstaff, Arizona, 1971), pp. 8-11.

6 Ibid. For a more detailed chronology of the spread of silversmithing through the pueblos, see Adair, The Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths, pp. 193-194.

7 Adair, The Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths, p. 39.

8 See Allison Bird, Heart of the Dragonfly: The Historical Development of the Cross Necklaces of the Pueblo and Navajo Peoples (Avanyu Publishing, Albuquerque, 1991), p. 15.

9 Ibid., p. 21.

10 Matthews, "Navajo Silversmiths," pp. 178-179.

11 See Frank McNitt, The Indian Traders (University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1962).

12 Bedinger, Indian Silver, p. 13.

13 Larry Frank and Millard J. Holbrook, Indian Silver Jewelry of the Southwest, 1868-1930 (Schiller Publishing, West Chester, Pennsylvania, 1990), p. 9. The illustrations in this book (pp. 9-24), drawn from key museum collections, offer an excellent visual survey of first-phase Indian jewelry.

14 One of the few catalogues of a museum collection of this jewelry also attempts to characterize its aesthetics: "The very limits of that [early] technology thoroughly infuse the forms developed, however, so early phase material represents a kind of archaic expression rather than a sophisticated reflection of over-ornamentation" (While Metal Universe: Navajo Silver from the Fred Harvey Collection, ed. E. W. Jernigan [Heard Museum, Phoenix, 1981], p. 12).

15 A. M. Stephen, "The Navajo," American Anthropologist, vol. 6 (October 1893), pp. 345-362.

16 See Catherine Chambliss, "Metal of the Moon," Arizona Highways, vol. 17 (December 1941), pp. 26-37.

PAULA A. BAXTER is the curator of the art and architecture department at the New York Public Library in New York City.

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