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Nineteenth-century Navajo and Pueblo silver jewelry
02/08/12
Antiques
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."
But he found the Navajo silversmiths "quite fertile in design."
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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.
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. 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.
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. 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.
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 . 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. 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. 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. 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.
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. The Indians attached
their own symbolism to the cross, which represented the morning star to the
Navajo and the dragonfly to the Pueblo.
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. 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. Repousse work gained in popularity because it increased the sculptural
effect. In the 1890s earrings made from wire hoops or tab stones were given
dangle shapes, and increasing numbers of stones accentuated surface design.
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