Native American jewelry
Native American jewelry refers to items of personal adornment, whether for personal use, sale or as art; examples of which include necklaces, earrings, bracelets, rings and pins, as well as ketohs, wampum, and labrets, made by one of the Indigenous peoples of the United States. Native American jewelry normally reflects the cultural diversity and history of its makers, but tribal groups have often borrowed and copied designs and methods from other, neighboring tribes or nations with which they had trade, and this practice continues today. Native American tribes continue to develop distinct aesthetics rooted in their personal artistic visions and cultural traditions. Artists may create jewelry for adornment, ceremonies, and display, or for sale or trade. Lois Sherr Dubin writes, "n the absence of written languages, adornment became an important element of Indian communication, conveying many levels of information." Later, jewelry and personal adornment "...signaled resistance to assimilation. It remains a major statement of tribal and individual identity."
Native American jewelry can be made from naturally occurring materials such as various metals, hardwoods, vegetal fibers, or precious and semi-precious gemstones; animal materials such as teeth, bones and hide; or man-made materials like beadwork and quillwork. Metalsmiths, beaders, carvers, and lapidaries combine these materials to create jewelry. Contemporary Native American jewelry ranges from hand-quarried and processed stones and shells to computer-fabricated steel and titanium jewelry.
File:Atsidi Sani.jpg|thumb|Bai-De-Schluch-A-Ichin or Be-Ich-Schluck-Ich-In-Et-Tzuzzigi "Metal Beater," Navajo silversmith, photo by George Ben Wittick, 1883
Origins
Jewelry in the Americas has an ancient history. The earliest known examples of North American jewelry are four bone earrings found at the Mead Site, near Fairbanks, Alaska that date back 12,000 years. Beginning as far back as 8800 BCE, Paleo-Indians in the American Southwest drilled and shaped multicolored stones and shells into beads and pendants. Olivella shell beads, dating from 6000 BCE, were found in Nevada; bone, antler, and possibly marine shell beads from 7000 BCE were found in Russell Cave in Alabama; copper jewelry was traded from Lake Superior beginning in 3000 BCE; and stone beads were carved in Poverty Point in Louisiana in 1500 BCE.Necklaces of heishe beads, or shells ground into flat discs, have been discovered in ancient ruins. Remnants of seashells that were used to make beads were also found. Oyster shell, mother of pearl, abalone, conch, and clam shells have been important trade items in the Southwest for over a thousand years.
Native beadwork continued to advance in the pre-Columbian era. Beads were made from hand-ground and filed turquoise, coral, and shell. Carved wood, animal bones, claws, and teeth were made into beads, which were then sewn onto clothing, or strung into necklaces. Turquoise is one of the dominant materials of Southwestern Native American jewelry. Thousands of pieces were found in the Ancestral Pueblo sites at Chaco Canyon. Some turquoise mines date back to Precontact times, and Ancestral Pueblo peoples traded the turquoise with Mesoamericans. Some turquoise found in southern Arizona dates back to 200 BCE.
Great Plains
are most well known for their beadwork. Beads on the Great Plains date back to at least to 8800 BCE, when a circular, incised lignite bead was left at the Lindenmeier site in Colorado. Shells such as marginella and olivella shells were traded from the Gulf of Mexico and the coasts of California into the Plains since 100 CE. Mussel shell gorgets, dentalia, and abalone were prized trade items for jewelry.Bones provided material for beads as well, especially long, cylindrical beads called hair pipes, which were extremely popular from 1880 to 1910 and are still are very common in powwow regalia today. These are used in chokers, breastplates, earrings, and necklaces worn by women and men, and in ceremonial headdresses as well.
Porcupine quillwork is a traditional embellishment for textiles on the Northern Plains, but quillwork is also used in creating bracelets, earrings, hatbands, belt buckles, headdresses, hair roaches, and hairclips, as well as umbilical cord fetishes. Glass trade beads were first introduced to the Great Plains as early as 1700 and were used in decoration in a manner similar to quillwork, but they never fully replaced it. The Lakota became particularly adept at glass bead work, especially the members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in the Western Dakotas. Several award-winning quillworkers are active in the art world today, such as Joyce Growing Thunder Fogarty.
Metal jewelry came to the Plains through Spanish and Mexican metalsmiths and trade with tribes from other regions. Southern Plains Native Americans adopted metalsmithing in the 1820s. They typically cut, stamped, and cold hammered German silver, a nickel alloy. Plains men adopted metal pectorals and armbands. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, members of the Native American Church revealed their membership to others through pins with emblems of peyote buttons, water bird, and other religious symbols. Bruce Caesar is one of the most prolific Southern Plains metalsmiths active today and was awarded the NEA's National Heritage Fellowship in 1998. US Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell is an accomplished silversmith.
Northeastern Woodlands
Before European contact and at least 1,500 years ago indigenous peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands produced barrel-shaped and discoidal shell beads, as well as perforated small whole shells. The earliest beads are larger when compared to later beads and those of wampum, with hand drilled holes. The use of the more slender iron drills much improved drilling."Wampum" is a Wampanoag word referring to the white shells of the channeled whelk shell. The term now refers to both those and the purple beads from quahog clamshells. Wampum workshops were located among the Narragansett tribe, an Algonquian people located along the southern New England coast. The Narragansett tribal bead makers were buried with wampum supplies and tools to finish work in progress in the afterlife. Wampum was highly sought as a trade good throughout the Eastern Woodlands, including the Great Lakes region.
Narragansett favored teardrop-shaped shell pendants, and the claw pendants made of purple shell were worn by Iroquois in the Hudson Valley, around the Connecticut River. The Seneca and Munsee made shell pendants with drilled columns, decorated with a circular shell called a runtee. Whelk shells were carved into bird, turtle, fish, and other shaped pendants, as well as ear spools.
Carved stone pendants in the Northeastern Woodlands date back as far as the Hopewell tradition from 1—400 CE. Bird motifs were common, ranging from the stylized heads of raptors to ducks. Carved shells and incised animal teeth, especially bear teeth, have been popular for pendants. Historically, pearls are incorporated into necklace and bear teeth have been inlaid with pearls. Seneca and other Iroquois carved small pendants with human faces, which were believed to be protective amulets, from bone, wood, and stone, including catlinite.
Haudenosaunee artists have carved ornamental hair combs from antlers, often from moose, since 2000 BCE. The combs are topped with anthropomorphic or zoomorphic imagery. These became more elaborate after the introduction of metal knives from Europe in the late 16th and 17th centuries.
In the Northeast Woodlands and Great Lakes regions, rectangular gorgets have been carved from slate and other stones, dating back to the late archaic period.
Copper was worked in precontact times, but Europeans introduced silversmithing to the northeast in the mid-17th century. Today several Iroquois silversmiths are active. German silver is more popular among Great Lakes silversmiths.
Northwest Coast
In the past, walrus ivory was an important material for carving bracelets and other items. In the 1820s, a major argillite quarry was discovered on Haida Gwaii, and this stone proved easier to carve than ivory or bone and was adopted as a carving material. Venetian glass seed beads were introduced in great numbers by Russian traders in the late 18th century, as part of the fur trade. Red and amber were the most popular colors, followed by blue. Historical Chinese coins with defenestrated section were strung as beads.Copper, initially traded from tribes near the Coppermine River in the interior, was worked into jewelry even before European contact. Later, silver and gold became popular materials for jewelry. Bracelets in particular are hammered and then carved with heraldic or mythic designs, and given away at potlatches. Northwest Coast jewelers increasingly use repoussé techniques in metalworking. Charles Edenshaw and Bill Reid were highly influential Northwest Coast jewelers.
Dentalium shells have been traditional beads, used in necklaces, earrings, and other adornment. Kwakwaka'wakw and Nuu-chah-nulth people used to harvest the shell from the waters off Vancouver Island, but that stock is depleted and today most dentalia are harvested from southeast Asia. Abalone shell provides beads and jewelry. High-ranking women traditionally wore large abalone shell earrings.
Today Haida and Tlingit basket weavers often create miniature red cedar, yellow cedar, and spruce root baskets to be worn as pendants or earrings.
Southeastern Woodlands
In the Mississippian culture of the Southeast, dating from 800 BCE to 1500 CE, clay, stone, and pearl beads were worn. Shell gorgets were incised with bold imagery from the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex. These are still carved today by several Muscogee, Chickasaw, and Cherokee jewelers. Long-nosed god maskettes were made from bone, copper and marine shells. These are small shield-shaped faces with squared-off foreheads, circular eyes, and large noses of various lengths. They are often shown on SECC representations of falcon impersonators as ear ornaments. Before Europeans brought glass beads to the southeast in the 16th century, pearls and Job's tears were popular materials for necklaces. Ear spools of stone, or sometimes wood overlaid with copper foil, were popular, and many have been found at Spiro Mounds from 1100 to 1400 CE.European contact introduced glass beads and silversmithing technology. Silver and brass armbands and gorgets became popular among Southeastern men in the 18th and 19th centuries. Sequoyah was an 18th/19th-century Cherokee silversmith. Until the 19th century, Choctaw men wore horsehair collars when playing stickball. Choctaw women's dance regalia incorporates ornamental silver combs and openwork beaded collars. Caddo women wear hourglass-shaped hair ornaments, called dush-tohs when dancing.