What Is Kewa (Santo Domingo) Jewelry Worth?

Kewa jewelry is the Southwest tradition most often undersold in a Southern California estate, and the reason is almost always the same. The pieces are beads. They do not announce themselves with a big stone or a heavy stamped cuff, they rarely carry a hallmark, and to a first-time seller a strand of small graded discs reads as a craft-fair necklace rather than as several hundred hours of hand work. Sometimes it is exactly that. Sometimes it is the strand in the drawer that a specialist would drive to see.

Kewa or Santo Domingo? Which name to use

Both names describe the same pueblo in New Mexico, and Kewa is the correct current one. Kewa is what the people have always called themselves in their own Keres language; Santo Domingo is the name the Spanish attached in the seventeenth century. In 2009 the tribal council voted to make Kewa the official name and changed the pueblo’s seal, signs, and letterhead accordingly. Older tags, auction catalogues, and trading post paperwork will say Santo Domingo, and that is not a red flag on an old piece. It is simply the vocabulary of the year the label was written.

What heishi actually is

Heishi, also written heishe and said hee-shee, is the Eastern Keres word for shell bead. It describes small flat discs of shell or stone, drilled and ground into a strand so even that it moves like a cord rather than like a string of separate beads. This is the oldest jewelry tradition on the continent that is still practised commercially: documented heishi runs back to roughly 6000 BCE, and it predates the use of metal in jewelry among these people by thousands of years. When a Kewa strand is described as traditional, that is the scale of tradition being referred to.

The making is the part that explains the price. Raw shell or stone is broken into rough fragments, each fragment is shaped and drilled, and hundreds or thousands of them are then strung together. Only then does the strand get rolled, by hand, along an abrasive surface, traditionally a sandstone slab kept wet, until the whole mass of irregular chips abrades down into matched discs. Nothing is cut to size individually. The uniformity you are holding was arrived at collectively, by grinding, which is why fine heishi is measured in weeks of work and why the best strands run only two to four millimetres per bead. Olivella shell traded up from the Pacific coast is the material most prized in old work.

Are heishi necklaces real shell, or plastic?

Run the strand slowly through your fingers and then look at it in daylight. Genuine hand-rolled heishi feels almost liquid, with no rough edges, and every disc differs very slightly from its neighbours in diameter and thickness because a human hand made it. The surface is matte rather than glassy. Machine-cut and imported beads are the opposite: perfectly identical, brightly polished, often with visible tool marks, and their flaws repeat in a pattern rather than wandering. Dyed reconstituted block, which is powdered stone bound in resin, is the other common substitute, and it shows an unnaturally even colour with no matrix drift from bead to bead.

• Variation is the proof. Hand-rolled discs vary faintly and irregularly. Machine beads are identical, and where they are flawed, the flaw repeats.
• Finish. Hand-rolled heishi is matte and soft-surfaced. A slick high polish across an entire strand points to machine work.
• Drape. A fine strand hangs and moves as one supple line. Machine beads sit stiffly against each other.
• Colour. Natural shell and stone drift in tone along the strand. Flat uniform colour, especially in reds and blues, suggests dyed reconstituted block.
• Sound and weight. Real shell and stone are cool to the touch and click quietly. Plastic warms in the hand almost immediately.
• The ends. Look at how the strand is finished and wrapped, and at any jaclas, the small looped bead drops that hang at the front of a necklace or are worn as earrings. Original wrapping and original jaclas are part of the piece.

Depression-era thunderbird necklaces, the battery birds

This is the Kewa category most likely to be thrown away by mistake. After the 1929 crash the tourist trade collapsed and the materials for fine jewelry, coral and good turquoise above all, went out of reach. Kewa makers built necklaces from whatever was to hand instead, and what was to hand was rubbish. The glossy black in these necklaces is usually the casing of a six-volt car battery. The reds come from things like plastic combs, toothbrush handles, and dime-store dinner plates. Comb teeth became tail feathers, gypsum from the White Sands country became white beads, and bone and real turquoise appear alongside all of it. Collections of these pieces held by the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe were gathered between 1930 and 1950, and production carried on at a lower rate into the middle of the century.

The bird pendant that gives them their name is not a documented traditional Kewa motif under that name, and where the word thunderbird came from is genuinely unknown. Angie Reano Owen, whose own mother made this jewelry, has said she does not know either and suspects a trader began using it. Collectors also call them battery bird or Depression necklaces. Whatever they are called, treat them as historical objects rather than as damaged jewelry: the battery casing is not a defect to be improved on, it is the entire reason the necklace is collected.

How much is Kewa jewelry worth?

Ranges, not promises. Every figure in the table below is a realised auction price including buyer’s premium, with the sale and date attached, except the last line, which is a dealer’s asking price and is labelled as one. That gap is the useful part: a specialist who has identified, dated, and photographed a necklace properly is selling something quite different from an unlabelled strand in a tray of estate jewelry, and the ask sits well above the auction result to match.

Two things move a Kewa piece above that band. The first is the work itself: bead count, how fine and how consistent the discs are, whether the strand is one of eight or one of twenty, and whether the original wrapping and jaclas survive. The second is a name, and there are only a handful of names that carry a market on their own.

Mosaic on shell, and the artist who brought it back

The other Kewa signature is mosaic: thin slices of turquoise, jet, coral, and shell laid up in a pattern and bonded onto a shell base, then ground flush and polished. Ancestral Pueblo and Hohokam artisans were doing this a thousand years ago, and the technique had fallen out of active practice. Angie Reano Owen, born at the pueblo in 1946 into a family known for heishi, saw precontact mosaic inlay on a trip to Tucson and set out in the 1970s to work out how it had been done. She developed her own method, including an adhesive the family has kept to itself, and revived mosaic on shell as a living art form. She was named a Ronald and Susan Dubin Artist Fellow in 1995, has taken Best of Division at both Santa Fe Indian Market and the Heard Museum Guild Fair, and her work is held by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, and the Nelson-Atkins. Her brother, her sister-in-law, and her children work in the technique she reconstructed.

The names that change the number

• Angie Reano Owen (born 1946) and the wider Reano family, including Joe Reano, Charlene Reano, and Angie P. Reano. Mosaic on shell, frequently signed on the back. A Joe and Angie Reano suite realised $1,020 at Bonhams in April 2023.
• Julian Lovato (1922 to 2018). Kewa, apprenticed from about the age of nine, then trained at Frank Patania’s Thunderbird Shop in Santa Fe alongside the early modern Southwest smiths. He worked in both the traditional heishi idiom and a clean modernist one, and is regarded as one of the most inventive Native American jewelers of the late twentieth century.
• Ray Lovato (born 1946). A bead maker whose turquoise strands and jaclas trade as work by a known hand; a group of his beadwork realised $704 at Bonhams in August 2024.
• Robert Tenorio (born 1950). Better known as a potter working in the historic Kewa polychrome tradition, and his painted pottery fetish necklaces cross into the jewelry sales; one realised $384 in October 2024.
• Ellouise Padilla Toya. Contemporary Kewa work that reaches the specialist jewelry auctions; a reversible necklace with a second piece realised $512 in October 2024.

Telling the pueblos apart in ten seconds

The mistakes that destroy value

• Improving a Depression necklace. Replacing the battery-casing tabs or the plastic pendant because they look like junk removes the only thing that made the necklace historic. Leave every original component on it, including the ugly ones.
• Restringing it yourself. The original cord, the original wrap at the neck, and the original knot order are part of an old strand. If a necklace has broken, put every bead in a bag in the order they came off and let a specialist restring it.
• Topping up a broken strand with modern beads. A few machine discs mixed into hand-rolled heishi are visible immediately and knock the whole strand down to the level of its worst bead.
• Ultrasonic or steam cleaning. Turquoise is porous, old shell is fragile, and the adhesives in mosaic work do not survive vibration and heat.
• Polishing it bright. Hand-rolled heishi is matte by nature. A high polish across a strand makes genuine work read as machine-made to the one person qualified to tell the difference.
• Splitting jaclas from their necklace, or breaking up a matched set of necklace and earrings. They are worth more together, and they are almost impossible to reunite.
• Letting it be priced by weight. These are beads. Weight is the least informative thing about them, and that road is not reversible.
• Throwing away the paperwork. Trading post receipts, gallery labels, Indian Market ribbons, and a photograph of the original owner wearing the piece all add real money here, because documented provenance in this category is scarce.

What to do if you have a piece

Photograph the strand flat in daylight, then take one close view of a few beads so their edges are visible, one of how the necklace is finished at the neck, and one of the back of any pendant or signature. Keep any tags or paperwork with it. Then have it read by someone who handles Southwestern jewelry regularly, in person across Southern California or on a free video call anywhere in the country. We name what we see: pueblo, technique, era, and maker where a maker can honestly be established. We have no stake in the answer, and where a piece belongs with a specialist buyer we will tell you who takes Kewa work seriously and point you to the right one. The identification costs nothing either way, and the honest answer is sometimes that a strand is a $200 strand. When it is not, you will know exactly which details made the difference.

One note on what tends to surface from the same closets. The Navajo rugs, the baskets, the pottery, and the Southwestern paintings that come out alongside these collections are pieces we actively buy, in person and for cash, and they travel well with the same house call.

If the drawer holds more than beadwork, and it usually does, the companion guides cover the rest of it: Navajo silverwork, squash blossoms, and concho belts, Zuni petit point, needlepoint, and inlay, Hopi overlay and the Loloma market, how turquoise itself is graded and priced, what a named mine can and cannot prove, and how to find and read the mark on the back.