Iroquois Silverwork

At Indian art markets, in online storefronts, and even in the Smithsonian’s own Roanoke Museum Store at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), American Indian jewelry is in high demand, especially ornaments in silver. Iroquois Silverwork catalogs an astonishing variety of silver jewelry, once in the collection of the Museum of the American Indian, now in the National Museum of the American Indian. The Haudenosaunee people (also known as members of the Iroqouis Confederacy, or of the tribes of the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Seneca, Tuscarora people) gained a reputation not only as wearers of silver, but as expert crafters of the metal. In making brooches that were worn by the literal dozens or creating ad hoc coinage to use in the fur trade, this book shows the Haudenosaunee at their most ingenious, while emphasizing the depth of NMAI’s object collections and a resource for research into the provenance of the objects we hold in trust from America’s indigenous peoples.