Native American Indian Jewelry

The jewelry of the Pueblo and Navajo Peoples has won world recognition for its beauty and creativity as an indigenous American art form. Because of the high quality, early jewelry is especially prized. Gem-stone quality turqouise, heavy-gauge silver, and designs derived from nature hold special meanings to the maker, the wearer and the viewer; exceptional silver working techniques embody the Pueblo and Navajo ideal of beauty.

The aesthetic quality of Navajo and Pueblo silver jewelry is responsible for its fame. Whether the jewelry is based on ancestral tradition or owes its origins to Spanish, Mexican or Plains Indians roots, or to a combination of these sources, at its finest, it possesses a rich artistic integrity and imagination. The wonderful variety of design on beaten silver, often combined with an extraordinary profusion of turquoise stones of all shades, colors and textures emerges in the hands of Navajo and Pueblo artists as strikingly strong and beautiful in pattern and design. Motifs abstracted from nature - suns, flowers, leaves, petals, stars and moons - are represented in a wide variety of powerful forms and special relationships. For the complexity of design, the jewelry manages to have a sense of order and simplicity. The maker puts his own interpretations into the piece and at the same time uses designs which have special meanings or symbols that have come down through the generations. Indian jewelry holds its place and fascination in the world today as it goes beyond mere ornament and makes a forceful, imaginative and meaningful statement of a creative people.

The hidden meaning phenomenon in the Pueblo and Navajo world is characterized by both visible outer forms and hidden, or inner, qualities. "The tendency toward 'hiddenness' in the material world of the Pueblo Indians is there now and may have been from time immemorial." observed writer Ian Thompson. "I have encountered numerous instances in the archaeological record where something I thought was created for the public was, in fact, hidden from view from the moment the act of creation was completed. It may be connected to 'understated sacredness' in the Puebloan cosmos."