The Turquoise Guide · Old Town Scottsdale
Walk any tourist corridor in the Southwest and you will pass cases of “authentic Indian jewelry” — some of it exactly that, and some of it imported, machine-made, or set with dyed imitation stone. The difference is knowable. There is a federal law written to protect you, a hallmark tradition you can learn to read in a minute, and a short list of questions that separates a real dealer from a souvenir stand. Here is all three.
Start with the strongest fact in your favor: when it comes to Native American art, authentic is not marketing language. Under the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990, it is a federal crime to sell, display, or offer any product in a way that falsely suggests it was made by a Native American — a member of a federally or state-recognized tribe, or a certified tribal artisan. The penalties have teeth. A first offense can bring an individual up to $250,000 in fines and five years in prison, and a business up to $1,000,000. The law was strengthened again in 2010, and it is enforced by the Indian Arts and Crafts Board at the U.S. Department of the Interior.
What that means at the counter is simple. When a dealer tells you a cuff is Navajo handmade, they are making a legal representation, not a sales pitch — and an honest one will put it in writing without being asked twice. Notice, too, the hedges that sellers of imported goods use to stay on the right side of this law: “Native American style,” “Southwest inspired,” “in the tradition of.” Those phrases are doing exactly the work they appear to be doing. Read them as the disclosure they are.
A certificate of authenticity is only as good as the store that signs it — there is no government-issued card that settles the question for you. The real assurances are the artist’s name, the dealer’s willingness to put every claim on the receipt, and the law above standing behind both.
Turn the piece over. The back of a bracelet, the inside of a ring band, the flat of a pendant — this is where Native American jewelry has long carried its documentation, stamped into the silver itself. You are looking for up to three kinds of marks:
“Sterling” or “.925” tells you the silver is what it should be. Early pieces were often worked from coin silver and many were never stamped at all — absence of a metal mark on an old piece is normal, not damning.
Initials, a full name, or a small pictorial stamp — the maker’s signature in silver. This is the mark collectors care most about, because it ties the piece to a particular artist and lets its history be traced.
Some pieces also carry the stamp of the shop or trading post that commissioned them. On older Southwestern silver these marks help date a piece and place it, even when the maker went unrecorded.
Now the honest caveats, because a hallmark is a thread to pull, not a verdict. Stamps can be imitated, so a mark on an otherwise doubtful piece proves little by itself. And the reverse matters more: a great deal of genuine early work — including much of what fills a good Old Pawn case — was made before signing became common practice and carries no hallmark at all. An unmarked piece deserves examination, not automatic suspicion; construction, silverwork, and stones tell an experienced eye what the back of the piece does not. Our guide to Old Pawn jewelry covers how age is actually assessed.
The practical move is to ask the dealer to read the mark with you. A specialist can usually name the artist on the spot, or at least place the piece by era and region — and how confidently and specifically a store answers is itself one of the better authenticity tests you can run.
Here is the simplest way to think about authenticity: a genuine piece of Native American jewelry is the work of a particular pair of hands, and the trade’s way of honoring that — and of protecting you — is attribution. A named artist means a piece with a traceable history, a maker whose work can be studied and compared, and real answers to the questions above. It is also what holds value: decades from now, “a turquoise cuff” is a description, but a cuff by a known Navajo or Zuni silversmith is a provenance.
This is why serious galleries lead with names. In our own cases you will find work by artists such as Calvin Begay, the Navajo artist celebrated for his precision inlay, and Effie Calavaza, the Zuni silversmith famed for her snake motifs — artists whose pieces are collected nationally, sold here with the name on the tag. When a store cannot tell you who made anything in the case, that is not a small gap in the paperwork. It is the answer to your question.
One respectful clarification belongs here: attribution is not about pedigree for its own sake. It is how the artistry stays connected to the artist — and how buyers avoid the imported reproductions that divert money from the Native makers whose designs they copy. Buying attributed work from a reputable dealer is the single most effective thing a collector does to support the tradition itself.
Who made it is half of authenticity; what it is made of is the other half. Genuine turquoise comes in an honesty ladder the trade uses every day — natural stone, cut and polished only; stabilized stone, genuine turquoise hardened with resin, legitimate and common so long as it is disclosed; and below those, treated, reconstituted, and outright imitation material that has no business being called turquoise at all. A good dealer names the grade unprompted, and names the mine too: Sleeping Beauty, Kingman, Royston, Bisbee, Carico Lake — stones with origins are stones with value. The same honesty applies to White Buffalo, a striking Nevada stone we love and sell — and will happily tell you is not technically turquoise. For the hands-on checks you can do in any store, see our guide to telling real turquoise from fake, and for the full local picture, our Scottsdale turquoise guide — two chapters of The Turquoise Guide, our full buyer’s series.
You do not need a loupe or a gemology course. You need six questions, asked in a friendly voice, and attention to how they are answered. A trustworthy shop enjoys these. We do.
Everything above funnels into one habit: whatever you were told out loud, have it written down. A proper receipt for a genuine piece reads like a small provenance document — the artist’s name and affiliation as represented, the materials (“sterling silver”, not “silver-tone”), the stone and its mine where known, whether it is natural or stabilized, and the return terms. A verbal “authentic” costs a seller nothing; a written one carries federal weight under the Act. If a store will not write down what it just told you, believe the paper, not the pitch — and spend your money where the two match.
That standard is the one to hold every store to, ours included. Ask us any of the six questions above about any piece in the gallery — from a modest pair of earrings to a museum-grade squash blossom — and you will get the same kind of answer, on the tag and on the receipt. It is how our family has kept its name good on Main Street for decades, and it is the whole reason a small gallery earns customers for life while the souvenir stands churn through tourists.
Meet the Makers
Every piece in our Old Town gallery is sold with its story told straight — artist, stone, mine, and grade, disclosed on the tag and the receipt. Meet the artists whose work fills our cases, or browse the collection and see the difference attribution makes.
Sunrise Jewelry & Gallery · 7254 E Main St, Suite 101, Old Town Scottsdale, AZ 85251
Open 7 days, 10:00–6:30 · (480) 425-9944