ZUNI SILVERSMITHING BOOK

With a tradition of Zuni jewelry making extending back more than a thousand years, and with more than a thousand currently practicing silversmiths, the immediate problem in writing a book about the rich history and the very creative present of Zuni is what do you leave in and what do you leave out; more precisely, who do you leave in and who do you leave out.

Our first acknowledgment is clearly to Zuni artists, to those who assisted us with interviews and with examples of their work pictured in this book, and also to those artists who for reasons of individual privacy or for reasons of professional modesty elected not to be interviewed or to have their work pictured. They are all preeminent artistic contributors to what the world has come to identify as Zuni jewelry.

This book is a collaboration among Zuni artists, a museum curator, a Zuni artist and entrepreneur, a Zuni trader, and two photographers. It is also a collaboration between an anthropology museum, a Zuni museum, and a for-profit enterprise of the Zuni tribe.

We hope that it is only a beginning for Zuni artists to discuss their ideas and their art.

We would like to thank the University of New Mexico and fellow staff members of Marian Rodee, especially photographer Michael Mouchette, whose adaptability to unusual lighting and field situations was remarkable. Also thanks to Sheila Edwards, Hisako Moriyama, and Valerie Royal of the UNM Publications Office for their patience and design and coordination talents.

Aztec Media Corporation, Dale W. Anderson and Anna M. Chávez, have contributed to this book with photographs and by steering us through the complexities of electronic imaging prepress in publishing this work.

Over the past several years many museums made their collections available to us for study and photography. They include the National Museum of the American Indian, San Diego Museum of Man, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, the Brooklyn Museum, the Laboratory of Anthropology of the Museum of New Mexico, the Wheelwright Museum, the Peabody Museum of Harvard University, the Museum of Northern Arizona, the National Museum of Natural History, and the Heard Museum.

At Zuni we especially would like to thank Josephine Nahohai for her gracious hospital-ity, and for sharing her knowledge and opinions about Zuni jewelry with us. We would also like to thank Mary Ghahate and Charles Hustito for allowing us to look over their shoulders in order to understand meanings and contexts for Zuni jewelry.