Who We Are…

As a boy I was enthralled by the West’s awesome landscape and by the Native Americans who were its first inhabitants.  That became a life long passion for the West’s natural landscape and for Native American history, culture and arts.  My professional career focused on helping to protect western environmental quality and protecting those amazing landscapes, ecosystems, & cultural & archeological resources in perpetuity, by enactment of legislation to designate National Parks, Wilderness, National Monuments, Wild & Scenic Rivers.  Many of those areas also are of high cultural or religious significance for Native Americans.

With knowledge and travel, I learned that Native Americans are not only America’s first inhabitants.  They are in fact America’s ‘FIRST’ everything:  first farmers; first architects and masons; first astronomers, explorers and scientists; first weavers, jewelers, potters; first American shoe and clothing fashion designers; and certainly America’s first realism & abstract painters!  The list is endless.  [Neither John Wesley Powell nor the Spanish ‘discovered’ the Grand Canyon, nor was Powell the first to ‘map’ and traverse its length—Native Americans did so hundreds if not thousands of years before, and even lived within the Grand Canyon.]

My wife Harriet shares that passion for the western landscape and Native American culture and arts.  Her first ‘immersed exposure’ to them was during our 1983 honeymoon.  I took her hiking and camping in a few of those awe-inspiring lands—Canyon de Chelley, Monument Valley, Chaco Canyon, Paria Canyon & Plateau, Tsegi Canyon’s Betatakin Anasazi cliff dwellings.  We visited with Navajo weavers and Pueblo potters and visited Santa Domingo and Santa Clara Pueblos and numerous Anasazi ruins.  So for more than 40 years now we have studied, collected, and been awed by Pueblo and Diné [Navajo] art. 

As you know, each Native American artist’s jewelry—and other art—reflects their unique vision and skill.  It also reflects the history, knowledge, vision, & methods passed down from their ancestors over hundreds or thousands of years.  We started this web gallery of original Southwest Native American art to share our passion with you and to help support Native American artists who rely on their art to support themselves and their families.  Foreign mass-produced fake ‘American Indian’ jewelry & fake ‘Navajo’ weaving has flooded the US market, threatening the livelihood of Native American artists.  We hope you enjoy our online gallery and share our joy, delight and passion for authentic Native American arts.  Thank you!

Terry & Harriet Sopher