Jonathan Batkin wants to make a few things about New Mexico's curio trade and silversmithing perfectly clear. If he debunks some myths along the way, so much the better.

And so much the easier for him. Batkin, director of The Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, has studied and lived with this subject for decades. He knows the ins and outs of the trade, which arose in the 1880s as a trader-Indian partnership to feed the country's insatiable thirst for Native American goods. He knows the players and their protocols. And he knows all of its romantic, enticing, and ultimately false "facts."

Batkin has codified his knowledge in a superbly researched, well-illustrated, and beautifully written volume, The Native American Curio Trade in New Mexico, just published by the Wheelwright. It's the rare kind of scholarly book that not only makes its case astutely but also reads easily and invitingly. He signs copies on Saturday, May 17, in the Wheelwright Library. An exhibit built around pieces shown in the book opens on Sunday, May 18, and continues through April 19, 2009.

Batkin spoke with Pasatiempo about his studies, about trading myths, and about some famous curio dealers: 19th-century traders like Jake Gold and J.S. Candelario of Santa Fe, Francis Lester of Mesilla Park, Thomas Dozier of Española, and the Hubbells of Gallup; as well as 20th-century icons like Albuquerque's Maisel family and the Gans clan of Santa Fe.



Pasatiempo: When did you start in on this subject?

Jonathan Batkin: I started it more than 20 years ago, when I was working on a catalog of Pueblo pottery for the Taylor Museum in Colorado Springs. I got interested in Jake Gold and J.S. Candelario back then.

After I moved to Santa Fe, I dug in the Candelario collection at the state archives when time permitted. Whenever I was on the road with the Wheelwright's tin cup, I would take side trips constantly to museums, archives, libraries — to see what objects they might have that fit this story, what ephemera they might have, what collections might correspond [to the period]. I made several trips to the University of Arizona to work on the Hubbell papers. On one of those trips, I worked on Thomas Dozier's papers. I made a few trips to Las Cruces to work on Francis Lester.

Pasa: How did you decide to narrow your focus to, first, curio dealers, then silversmiths in curio shops?

Batkin: I gradually could see that I had to bring it up to World War II, anyway. I did not want to tackle all of the curio dealers and all the types of objects that moved through the trade then, so I started to focus on jewelry. The second half of the book covers Maisel's Indian Trading Post and Gans' Southwest Arts & Crafts.

I started in 2000 by interviewing [S.L.] "Bud" Maisel. He unfortunately passed away last month, so I got to him just in time. He had a fantastic collection of photographs of the operation from the 1930s up to the 1950s, and a tremendous memory.

The next person I interviewed was Harold Gans. Harold only passed away a few weeks before Bud did. He started working there in the shop as a little kid, even learning how to do some silversmithing. He remembered the Pueblo silversmiths by name and had wonderful stories about them. I could not have pulled the whole story together without his recollections.

In 2001, also, I was able to meet Manuel Naranjo from Santa Clara Pueblo. Manuel learned silversmithing at Maisel's in 1929 after graduating from the Santa Fe Indian School. Soon after that, he moved to Denver and ended up working there off and on, till he was forced to retire in 1983 when he was 84. All of the first instructors in silversmithing at the Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Fort Wingate Indian schools either learned silversmithing in the curio shops or worked in the shops.

Pasa: How did you locate him?

Batkin: By chance, the Wheelwright had ended up with Manuel's workbench. A visitor to the museum put two and two together and realized what it was and who had worked at it. Her parents got him to talk to me. He had this incredibly rich story of his life and the [Santa Fe] Indian School and Maisel's.

I also looked at student files of people now deceased, that Manuel knew about, and who had been students with him. Including his sister and his brothers. I found one story in a file where Manuel and some other kids from Santa Clara Pueblo broke through a wall to get into the kitchen to get food. The students were starving. He had forgotten all about that.

I also knew John Adair, who had connections back to the '30s, when the Wheelwright was being founded. I talked to him a lot about his papers, which relate heavily to Navajo and Zuni work. His 1944 book is still the book on early silversmithing.

We acquired his papers in 1995. His field notes were a wonderful resource for my projects. Over and over, his interviews of people in 1938 and 1940 echoed everything I was hearing from Gans and Maisel and Manuel Naranjo.

Pasa: In the book, you talk about the big divide between authentic Pueblo or Navajo silverwork and what the shops were turning out.

Batkin: Silversmithing was a fairly young art form among the Navajo and Pueblo. The things silversmiths were making for their own internal use in their communities or cultures had an entirely different sensibility than the shops were making.

The entire look of what was made in these shops was essentially invented by the H.H. Tammen company in Denver. They invented this whole notion that when a smith worked, the designs he stamped into his jewelry were meaningful or symbolic. That was completely false. The mass producers invented those designs and stole them from each other. Then they'd publish these charts of Indian symbols, so you could look at these pieces and read meaning into something that a guy just whacked out at a bench.

It wasn't just made here. After World War II and even prior to the war, there was jewelry made all over: Denver, California, Missouri, even Rhode Island. It got carried a step further when a lot of manufacturers moved overseas. It's very difficult now to identify what was made then overseas as opposed to by people here. That's something for somebody else to figure out!

Pasa: You debunk quite a few popular myths in your book. Which is the most important?

Batkin: I think the important thing about the story has been misunderstood by everybody. The curio shops, in some people's minds, may have cheapened Native American arts. But I think they played as big a role in preserving those arts as Indian Market and the Gallup Ceremonial did. They taught these silversmiths skills and business practices, and a lot of them went on to become independent jewelers after the war.

There's an interesting story from the Indian School. Ambrose Roanhorse was a teacher who didn't like teaching Pueblo kids Navajo silversmithing. He was a Navajo. I don't know if he felt it was a traditional art form and that made him uncomfortable, or if it was something else. But the students felt there was no Pueblo style of jewelry they were making.

Roanhorse left the Indian School in 1939, and some of the students from Santo Domingo came in with pins they'd made in their own designs. Wilfred Jones, who had become their instructor, and Alfreda Ward, head of arts and crafts, went to Kenneth Chapman's book on Santo Domingo pottery and extracted designs from it. The students made dies from that, and some of their jewelry was entered at the 1940 Gallup Ceremonial.

Pasa: Do any of that generation still work?

Batkin: There's a jeweler who still brings us work at the Case Trading Post, who was one of Wilfred Jones' students at the Santa Fe Indian School just before the war: Vidal Aragon. He's a wonderful jeweler, and his learning is actually part of that genealogical tree that came out of the curio trade.

Pasa: This book has been a long path for you.

Batkin: I have to say, by 2000, I felt I was done with most of what I wanted to do with the early trade — as far as researching. Then when I started on the silver, it's as if the story carried me. I was driven to get it done. The discoveries that kept reinforcing connections between pieces kept me going. Pulling it together was a very strange feeling. It felt it was meant to be. All these connections I made to people and to archival connections — it all fell together and landed in my lap.

You know you talk about a light-bulb moment, now and then? This was like being struck by lightning 100 times.

Factoids on steroids

Here a few of the points Batkin clears up in his book.

<25BC> People talk about "Fred Harvey jewelry," but it never existed as such.

True, one of the restaurant-hotel-tour company's lunchroom managers — the 16-year-old Herman Schweizer in Coolidge, New Mexico — bought Navajo jewelry to resell to patrons as early as 1887. Later, as head of Harvey's Indian Department, he encouraged production of pieces that were simpler than the heavy pawn jewelry many tourists disliked.

Harvey Houses also often had silversmiths on staff. There was one at the Alvarado Hotel in Albuquerque as early as 1903, and many thereafter. But the company never had its own factory, and certainly never fostered and marketed efining style of jewelry.

<25BC> If you do own a piece of what's popularly called Fred Harvey jewelry, don't get too excited.

The designs on such a piece are not sacred First People symbols. They were invented by Anglo businessmen in Denver who pilfered ideas from one another with glee, made up an entire glossary for them, and created a worldwide mail-order hunger for such products — a hunger that still exists today.

<25BC> Products of that mail-order madness were never fully handmade: mass-production of silver jewelry predated Indians working in curio shops.

Even in the early part of the last century, the silver blanks for a pair of earrings, a pin, or a bracelet would have been machine-stamped, not sand-cast or hammered by hand. Afterward, Native craftsmen would have incised the designs, so the manufacturers could claim a piece was authentic, handmade Indian work — until at least 1950, when everything became machine-stamped.

<25BC> Twentieth-century curio and jewelry stores were not nasty sweatshops taki Pueblo or Navajo craftsmen.

The shops and their owners, especially Maisel's in Albuquerque and the Ganses' Southwest Arts & Crafts, were supportive cradles for an entire generation of silversmiths. That included many Pueblo Indians, of whom Manuel Naranjo of Santa Clara was perhaps the most vital and creative.





details

Book signing by Jonathan Batkin, The Native American

Curio Trade in New Mexico

5-7 p.m. Saturday, May 17

Opening of the exhibit From the Railroad to Route 66:

The Native American Curio Trade in New Mexico

1 p.m. Sunday, May 18; exhibit continues through April 19, 2009

Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, 704 Camino Lejo

on Museum Hill

No charge; 982-4636