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May 27, 2007 the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa
Fe, New Mexico, opened Tradition and Tourism, 1870–1970, an exhibition
of recent acquisitions in celebration of the museum’s seventieth
anniversary. The Wheelwright houses extraordinary art, artifacts and
archives pertaining to Navajo, Rio Grande Pueblo and other native peoples
of New Mexico. Over the past decade, the museum has developed a unique
exhibition, publication and acquisitions program that emphasizes living
Native American artists and genres of historic Native American art that
are neglected by other institutions. Tradition and Tourism, 1870–1970
examines one of the Wheelwright’s primary interests: artforms
developed by native peoples for use by non-native consumers—items
commonly thought of as “tourist” art. The exhibition includes
textiles, folk art, baskets, and pottery, as well as recent acquisitions
pertaining to Navajo and Pueblo jewelry and related traditions.
In 1995 the Wheelwright acquired one of the most significant archives
pertaining to the development of southwestern Native American silversmithing:
the papers of anthropologist John Adair. In the late 1930s Adair, a
twenty-four-year-old graduate student, began research for his groundbreaking
book, The Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths. In print since it first appeared
in 1944, it remains the best available resource for anyone interested
in the origins of the craft. When Adair began his fieldwork in the late
1930s, Navajo silversmithing was less than seventy years old, and many
of the elders that he interviewed belonged to the first generation of
smiths. Adair’s field notes illuminate the  cross-cultural
nature of silversmithing in the Southwest: Navajos learned to work silver
from Mexican blacksmiths who also made simple silver ornaments, and
quickly taught the skill to Pueblo Indians with whom they traded. Among
the first consumers of Navajo and Pueblo silver were Anglo-Americans.
Adair’s notes also attest to the fact that, even in its earliest
stages, Navajo silver was made to be traded and sold.
Navajos learned to make silver in about 1870, after their release from
Bosque Redondo in southern New Mexico, where between 1864 and 1868 they
were prisoners of war. In an effort to subdue them, the United States
government had waged a war of terror, destroying homes, crops and the
herds of sheep that were the Navajos’ livelihood. After negotiating
their freedom, Navajos returned to a drastically reduced territory,
where their survival depended upon government-issue annuity goods and
their willingness to adjust to an increasingly cash-based economy. Most
of Adair’s informants told him that they were motivated to learn
silversmithing because they believed that they could earn cash with
it, or that they could trade silver for livestock. In his field notebooks
Adair recorded a conversation in which Grey Moustache told him that
“bridles would sell for sixty to one hundred dollars (in terms
of money), but if a Navajo was buying, he would sell them . . . for
a good horse, with saddle blankets, & saddle”—indicating
not only that the work was highly valued, but that the buyer may or
may not be Navajo (Adair 1938, 2:45). The source of silver was American
or Mexican coin, which smiths melted into ingots or pounded into shape
using rudimentary tools. Navajos who did wage labor for the railroad
or at military installations asked to be paid in Mexican coin; and some
traders supplied coin as well (Bailey 1986: 54).
Most early Navajo silver was traded to other Native Americans, but by
1880 Navajo smiths who lived and worked along the route of the Atlantic
and Pacific railroad, at Fort Wingate, New Mexico, and at the Navajo
Agency at Fort Defiance, Arizona, sold their wares to Anglo military
personnel, traders, railroad workers, and visitors. Tradition and Tourism
features about fifty examples of spoons and other tableware made for
this market. Early spoons in the Wheelwright’s collection display
motifs that came to typify Native American souvenir silver. Two small
spoons and a sugar shell, dating from 1880 to about 1891,  have
engraved profiles of Indians wearing feathered headdresses. These were
among the most popular designs on Navajo spoons and on other souvenir
silver, and although Native Americans in the southwest rarely wore such
headgear, smiths made hundreds of them. Owls were popular as well, and
while Anglos thought of them as symbols of wisdom, to nineteenth-century
Navajos they had quite a different connotation. According to the Ethnologic
Dictionary of the Navajo Language, published by the Franciscan Fathers
of St. Michaels, Arizona, “a foolish child or person is often
called . . . big owl, as this bird is good figure of stupidity”
(The Franciscan Fathers 1910: 495). In 1890, when a fad for collecting
souvenir spoons from exotic places swept the nation, Navajo smiths responded
enthusiastically, creating an array of whimsical designs that included
botanical themes, animals and birds, swastikas, and other popular symbols.
Silversmithing came to Zuni Pueblo in about 1872, when the Navajo smith
Atsidi Chon set up shop there and began making bridles, concha belts
and other ornaments to trade for sheep and horses. In exchange for a
pony, Atsidi Chon taught silversmithing to a young farmer named Lanyade
who, in 1938 at the age of about ninety-five, became Adair’s most
important Zuni consultant. By the 1870s a number of men at Zuni already
understood metalsmithing. For about forty years they had supplied local
Mexicans with brass and copper bracelets and crosses, which the Mexicans
believed warded off rheumatism. Lanyade taught silver to his friend
Palowahtiwa, the governor of the Pueblo, who recognized its economic
potential and taught it to five other men.(1) When anthropologists Frank
Hamilton Cushing and James and Matilda Coxe Stevenson arrived at Zuni
in 1879, silversmithing was on its way to becoming the Pueblo’s
most important craft.(2) Cushing and the Stevenson encouraged its development
by purchasing jewelry, supplying Zuni smiths with tools and perhaps
even introducing techniques. According to Lanyade, Palowahtiwa “learned
to make beads of silver from Cushing” (Adair 1938, 1:85).
In 2006 the Wheelwright acquired a pair of earrings made by Kuwishti,
a Zuni blacksmith who was also one of the first men at the Pueblo to
work silver. Adair sketched the earrings in his notebook, and his photograph
of them appears in The Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths (1944, plate 20).
Although we do not know precisely when Kuwishti took up silversmithing,
or from whom he learned (he was not one of the five taught by Palowahtiwa),
we know that he had a long career. When Adair saw Kuwishti’s earrings,
they belonged to an elderly Zuni woman, the mother-in-law of one of
his informants. He understood them to be “much older” than
the bracelets she wore, which were made in about 1890. A picture of
Kuwishti, from a photograph taken in about 1898, appears in Matilda
Coxe Stevenson’s 1904 report to the Bureau of American Ethnology.
C. G. Wallace, who began trading at Zuni in 1919 and was influential
in the commercialization of Zuni jewelry, told Adair that when he arrived
at the Pueblo, Kuwishti was one of the f ew
Zuni smiths who “could make much of anything.” He was “what
you might call the community silversmith; then when he heard that the
traders were interested in it he began to make it up for them”
(Adair 1938, 1:34–35).
By the early 1870s Navajo craftsmen had carried silversmithing to the
Rio Grande Pueblos as well. Among the characteristic items made by Pueblo
smiths were manta pins, which Pueblo women used to fasten the sides
of their wrap-around blanket dresses. However in Acoma, Laguna and Isleta
Pueblos, jewelry reflected the influence of goldsmiths and silversmiths
who lived in nearby Mexican communities. Adair remarked, “often
it is difficult to tell whether a piece was made by a Mexican smith
who sold it to a Pueblo Indian, or by a Pueblo smith in imitation of
the Mexican jewelry” (1944: 182–183). Particularly at Isleta,
Mexican-style filigree jewelry was popular well into the twentieth century,
and at least one Isleta jeweler made gold filigree. In 1938 Adair tried
without success to visit “Pat Olguin, who does the filigree gold
and silver work.” His interpreter told him that Olguin learned
to make filigree in about 1930, and Adair assumed that he “must
have learned in Albuquerque from a Mexican.” He noticed several
women at Isleta wearing Olguin’s gold earrings (1938, 5:122).
The Wheelwright has acquired a significant collection of New Mexican
filigree jewelry, much of which was acquired at Isleta Pueblo. Several
pieces are attributed to an Isleta goldsmith.
Filigree became fashionable in New Mexico after 1876, when the Santa
Fe firm of Fisher and Lucas advertised it in the Daily New Mexican.
Almost immediately jewelry shops in Albuquerque, Socorro and Las Vegas,
New Mexico, began promoting it as well (Weber 1982: 83, 41). In September
1879 Ernest Ingersoll, writing for Harper’s Bazaar, described
the process of making filigree and proclaimed that Santa Fe, Chihuahua
and Mexico City were its centers of production. “American skill,”
he said, “has invented patterns which display much beauty and
when worked into form in gold or silver are attractive, tasteful and
handsome ornaments.” Filigree shops flourished, employing dozens
of Hispanic craftsmen who, as an additional promotional strategy, often
worked in full view of the public.
Filigree’s sudden popularity in the mid-1870s may be linked to
New Mexico’s celebration of the United States Centennial. In its
bid for statehood, New Mexico Territory found that its greatest obstacle
was racism—of the Mexican lands annexed by the United States in
1848, most were sparsely populated. Only New Mexico had a large number
of Hispanic residents. In centennial celebrations, local boosters likened
the American Revolution to Mexico’s fight for independence from
Spain, and emphasized the European heritage of New Mexico’s citizenry
(Wilson 1997: 72–73). Beautiful filigree, promoted as authentic
“Mexican” jewelry, made from locally mined silver and gold,
signified New Mexico’s cultural sophistication and natural resources.
Among the most influential figures in the development of tourist-oriented
Native American silver was Herman Schweizer of the Fred Harvey Company.
In 1887, as the sixteen-year-old manager of the Harvey Company’s
lunchroom at Coolidge, New Mexico, Schweizer began collecting silver
jewelry and other crafts from Navajos in the area and selling it to
his clientele (Howard and Pardue 1996: 10). By 1899 he had moved to
company headquarters in Kansas City where, he told Adair in a 1938 interview,
“[w]e used to sell a little pawn . . . But a lot of the pawn was
too heavy for the tourists’ taste, so at that time I started having
silver made up to order. It was in 1899 that the turquoise from the
north (Nevada and Colorado) began to come in here.” Schweizer
persuaded the owner of a Nevada mine “to cut the stones for Indian
use—cutting flat square oblong stones.” Schweizer gave stones
and silver to a trader in Thoreau, New Mexico, who in turn farmed them
out to local smiths, who fashioned them into lightweight versions of
Navajo jewelry. “From there,” he said, “we branched
out to Sheep Springs and the surrounding regions” (Adair 1938,
6:1).
Schweizer’s idea for made-to-order jewelry revolutionized the
market. During the first years of the twentieth century traders on the
Navajo reservation supplied silver to large mercantile companies in
 Gallup
and Albuquerque, which in turn fed a burgeoning mail-order curio trade
that involved large-scale entrepreneurs such as J. S. Candelario in
Santa Fe.
By the 1920s Native American jewelry had become an extremely popular
souvenir product, and demand far exceeded what Navajo smiths could produce.
Rather than depending upon supplies from reservation traders, merchants
in Albuquerque and Santa Fe devised a way to control production by having
“Indian style” jewelry made on the premises by Native American
employees. Navajo and Pueblo people found work in Anglo-owned shops
like Maisel’s in Albuquerque and Southwest Arts and Crafts in
Santa Fe, where they were hired to operate machinery that punched out
blanks for common items like bracelets and rings. Many of these employees
learned basic silversmithing techniques by performing rudimentary finishing
tasks on these products. While some shops employed native workers to
operate the machinery, and could therefore call their product “Indian”
made, other firms used no native labor at all and simply used Indian-looking
motifs on their jewelry in the hopes that the average consumer could
not tell the difference (Jonathan Batkin, personal communication, 2006).
Among the items made by native smiths for Anglo consumption were silver
shoehorns. In 2006 the Wheelwright acquired a collection of two hundred
shoehorns, of which forty-six are featured in the exhibition. Although
most of the smiths represented in this collection remain anonymous,
a few pieces bear the hallmarks of craftsmen who today are considered
masters of mid-twentieth-century design. Some of these smiths, including
Allen Kee, who worked for the White Hogan in Scottsdale, Joe Yazzie
and Austin Wilson, who was one of a number of Navajo smiths who worked
for trader C. G. Wallace at Zuni, became known for making ashtrays,
barware and other decorative utensils. One piece by Awa Tsireh of San
Ildefonso Pueblo, who is better known as a painter, is a small masterpiece.
Awa Tsireh made silver for the Garden of the Gods Trading Post in Colorado
Springs. 
In about 1920 traders at Zuni began to encourage the smiths there to
make distinctive jewelry and other items for the tourist market. The
styles that developed drew upon Zuni’s long tradition of lapidary,
and emphasized the use of turquoise, coral and other materials over
silver. In addition to wearable jewelry, Zuni lapidaries made small,
freestanding sculptures, often made from stones found near the Pueblo,
and based on ceremonial fetishes that are important components in Zuni
traditional practice. Carvers such as Leekya Deyuse became known for
fetishes, and also for animal carvings that were set into jewelry. By
the 1950s Zunis produced most of the lapidary work for Native American
jewelry, while Navajo smiths created the silver into which the stones
were set (Neumann [1950] 1971).
Tradition and Tourism features nearly two hundred fifty examples of
Navajo and Pueblo jewelry, tableware, fetishes, and decorative objects,
ranging from early forms intended for native use, to modernist expressions
designed for a collectors’ market. These objects are a testament
to the skill, ingenuity and artistry of generations of native Southwestern
jewelers. The exhibition runs through October 21, 2007. All photographs
by Addison Doty, courtesy of Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian,
Santa Fe, New Mexico. www.wheelwright.org
NOTES
1. Adair (1938, 1944) calls Lanyade’s friend Balawade. Willard
Walker identifies him as Palowahtiwa, and describes him as an “entrepreneur
and organizer” who played a crucial role in the development of
silversmithing at Zuni (1974: 73-74).
2. By the mid-1960s, ninety percent of men and women at Zuni were involved
in making jewelry (Eggan and Pandey 1979: 479).
References
Adair, John 1938 Journals 1-6. Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian,
Santa Fe.
—1944 The Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths. Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press.
Bailey, Garrick and Roberta Glenn Bailey 1986 A History of the Navajos:
The Reservation Years. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
Eggan, Fred and T. N. Pandey 1979 Zuni History, 1850-1970. Pp.
474-481 in
The Southwest. Alfonso Ortiz, ed. Handbook of North American Indians
9. William C. Sturtevant, gen. ed. Washington: Smithsonian Institution.
Franciscan Fathers 1910 An Ethnologic Dictionary of the Navajo Language.
St. Michaels, Arizona: The Franciscan Fathers.
Howard, Kathleen L. and Diana F. Pardue 1996 Inventing the Southwest:
The Fred Harvey Company and Native American Art. Flagstaff: Northland
Publishing Company.
Neumann, David L. 1971 Modern Developments in Indian Jewelry. In Navajo
Silversmithing. Betty T. Tolouse, ed. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico.
Weber, Michael 1982-83 Filigree Jewelry of New Mexico. El Palacio 88(4):
39-47.
Wilson, Chris 1997 The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional
Tradition. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
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