In her studio

Way back when, I remember Richard Mouw saying that the Christian world would do well to take seriously ye olde Sunday School line, "I'd rather have Jesus than silver or gold." In me at least, that admonition sticks with real adhesive power, even though, for the most part, I don't think I am, by nature or practice, a man whose great treasures are stored up in barns. 

No matter. I know my sin. And were the old lyric somehow messed with in this way--"I'd rather have Jesus than silver or turquoise"-- it might just have even more sting. I'm capable of leaving Southwestern jewelry behind when I leave New Mexico, but not without some grinding teeth. I don't know why I've always loved it, but I have and I do. If I don't stop at a place to buy it, I'm okay. If I do, I don't leave without something.

Some years ago, I saw it being made in the home of a silversmith in Zuni, New Mexico, a woman who said her work paid for her children's Christian school tuition. A goodly percentage of the Indian jewelry sold in Santa Fe, in Taos, in Albuquerque and Buffalo and Minneapolis and London and Melbourne--which is to say around the world--is created right there in the Zuni pueblo, where silversmithing of a particular kind--Zuni, inlaid--is not just a but the major way of making a living.

I'd never before seen it being made, never before had I been in a home where Mom cuts and welds and grinds and glues and polishes and buffs out on the dinner table, never watched the flames and the whole operation right up to the moment when what you see is what you would in some fancy jewelry store in San Fran or wherever.

Zuni is, as are many reservations in North America, among the nation's poorest neighborhoods, a fact which, in this particular case, may well be as ironic as it is tragic. The caged bird sings beautifully in Zuni--the jewelry locals turn out is as stunning as anything created by individual craftsmen and women anywhere in the world; but the nature of day-to-day life for many artists in Zuni is grinding poverty.

You can call the them victims--after all, conscienceless traders have taken advantage of them for decades. You can call them shiftless--many of them could create far more income than they do with some organization and just a little bit more time in what you might call the studio. Deep-seated poverty has many roots and many faces, and those who think it simply attributable to this cause or another are short-sighted fools.

I came away from her kitchen table cluttered with her materials and tools, thinking of that old Sunday School song--not as it applies to her, but as it still applies to me. He wasn't wrong, even if I tell excuse myself by telling you I'm certainly no hoarder. The lyric still stings: "I'd rather have Jesus than silver or gold" still makes me feel uncomfortably like that rich young ruler, even though, Lord knows, I'm not.

By the way, for the record?--I didn't leave empty-handed.

But the great gift of that day's hour-long visit in the kitchen of a Zuni silversmith was not some regal necklace or perfect pendant, but a memory that stays with me, having been there in her kitchen, watching her, a memory that is something precious, neither silver or gold.