Native American Jewelry in Minnesota: What It Sells For, and Why So Much of It Is Here

Squash blossoms, turquoise cuffs and Zuni inlay turn up in Minnesota houses far more often than geography would suggest. We have sold thousands of pieces of Native American jewelry out of Twin Cities estates — a plain-looking Navajo cuff estimated at $50–100 recently made $2,300. Here is what the market actually pays, what drives the number, and what to look for before you sell.

SebastianCharles Auctions

Open a jewelry box in a Minnesota house built any time after 1950 and there is a fair chance you will find turquoise. A heavy cuff. A bolo tie. A string of silver beads with a crescent hanging from it that someone once called a squash blossom. It came home from Arizona, or New Mexico, or a trading post on the way to somewhere else, and it has been in the drawer since.

We have sold thousands of pieces of Native American jewelry out of Minnesota homes, and we still see families surprised twice: first that it is here at all, and second by what it brings. This is a guide to both.

Why the Southwest ends up in Minnesota

The tribes whose silver and stone work dominates this market — Navajo (Diné), Zuni, Hopi, and the Pueblo communities of Santo Domingo (Kewa) and elsewhere — are fifteen hundred miles from the Twin Cities. Minnesota's own Native nations, the Dakota and Ojibwe, have deep artistic traditions of their own, but those run to quillwork, beadwork and birchbark rather than silver and turquoise. So nearly every squash blossom in a Minnesota house is a story of travel.

The travel had a pattern. From the 1920s onward, Minnesotans drove southwest — Route 66 through Gallup and Albuquerque, the trading posts around Flagstaff, the Fred Harvey shops in the railroad hotels — and came home with silver. After the war, the pattern became a migration: winter homes in Scottsdale, Tucson and Santa Fe, and decades of buying a piece or two each season. The people who built collections that way are now in their eighties and nineties, and their estates are being settled in Edina, Wayzata, St. Paul and Rochester rather than Phoenix.

That is why an auction house in the Twin Cities handles this material in volume. It is also why so much of it is undervalued when it surfaces: it gets sorted with the costume jewelry, or weighed as scrap silver, by people who have never had a reason to know the difference.

What we have actually sold it for

Rather than quote national records that may have nothing to do with the cuff in your drawer, here are recent results from our own sales, with the estimates we placed on them beforehand.

• Southwest Navajo silver and stone cuff — estimated $50–100, sold for $2,300. A plain-looking bracelet that the room recognized as something better than the catalogue did. Twenty-three times the high estimate.
• Zuni stamped silver box with Knifewing inlay — estimated $1,200–1,600, sold for $2,100. The Knifewing figure is the classic Zuni inlay motif of the 1930s–50s, and serious collectors compete for good examples in any form.
• Navajo sterling and turquoise bear-claw squash blossom necklace — estimated $600–900, sold for $1,450.
• Amelio and Veronica Nastacio Zuni inlay cuff — estimated $700–1,400, sold for $1,450. A signed piece by a known Zuni inlay family, with the kind of playful figural subject collectors of the Nastacios look for.
• Alfred Long Navajo squash blossom necklace — estimated $200–400, sold for $1,250.
• Large sterling and 14K gold Royston turquoise pendant, signed J.G. Koschtial — estimated $150–300, sold for $1,000. Royston is a named Nevada mine, and named stone moves the number.
• F. Charley sterling and turquoise cuff — estimated $200–400, sold for $750.

Notice the shape of that list. Every piece on it beat its high estimate, several by three times or more, and none of them were famous. That is what a competitive, well-photographed sale with a national bidder base does for Native jewelry: it lets the people who know what they are looking at set the price.

It also reflects the range. The bulk of what we sell in this category lands between $100 and $500 a lot, sometimes as groups of pieces. A smaller share reaches the four-figure results above. And a very few pieces — signed work by a handful of masters, or exceptional early silver — belong in front of a specialist audience where five figures is realistic.

What drives the number

Maker. Before roughly 1970, most Native jewelry was unsigned; hallmarks became common as individual artists gained reputations. A signed piece by a recognized name is a different object from an anonymous one. At the top of the market are makers like Charles Loloma (Hopi), whose finest work has made well into five figures at national specialist sales, and a second tier of names — Kenneth Begay, Preston Monongye, Lee Yazzie, Raymond Yazzie, Jesse Monongya and others — whose work commands a substantial premium over unsigned pieces of similar quality. Zuni families like the Nastacios sit in a category of their own, valued for particular inlay styles.

Stone. Turquoise is not one thing. Natural, untreated stone from a named American mine — Lander Blue, Bisbee, Number 8, Morenci, Royston, Sleeping Beauty — is worth many times as much as stabilized or treated material, and some of those mines are exhausted, which only pushes the number up. Coral, jet, mother-of-pearl and spiny oyster carry their own distinctions. Identifying stone is a specialist skill and it is where a careful catalogue entry earns its keep.

Silver and construction. Early Navajo work was made from melted coins and ingots, hand-hammered and heavy. Trading-post and Fred Harvey era pieces from the 1900s–1940s were made lighter for tourists, with stamped thunderbirds and arrows, and are collected today as a category of their own, though generally at modest prices. Post-war work is mostly sterling, and the weight, the hand-stamping, the quality of the bezels and the way the naja or the blossoms were formed all tell an experienced eye when and by whom a piece was made.

Type. Squash blossom necklaces are the form everyone knows and the form most often faked or reproduced, so authentic examples with good stone do well. Concho belts can be heavy and valuable. Zuni petit point, needlepoint and channel inlay; Hopi overlay with its dark oxidized backgrounds; Santo Domingo heishi and mosaic — each has its own collectors and its own price logic.

Condition and originality. Replaced stones, resized cuffs, re-strung necklaces and polished-away patina all cost money. Do not clean it. A piece that has been dipped and buffed to a mirror shine has lost something a collector wanted.

The word "Native" matters, legally

The Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 makes it illegal to sell any item as Native American made unless it was made by an enrolled member of a federally or state-recognized tribe, or a certified artisan. That is a truth-in-marketing law, and it cuts both ways for a seller. Southwestern-style jewelry made in the Philippines or by non-Native shops in Albuquerque has been sold at trading posts for decades, and a great deal of it lives in Minnesota jewelry boxes next to the real thing.

An auction house that handles this material seriously has to be able to tell them apart and to describe each piece honestly. When we are not sure of a maker's identity or affiliation, we say so and describe the piece by what it is — silver, stone, style and quality — rather than by a claim we cannot support. That protects the buyer, protects the seller, and, in our experience, produces better prices than overstatement ever does, because the bidders who pay the most are the ones who trust the catalogue.

If you want to check a piece yourself before calling anyone, our guide to identifying antique Native American jewelry walks through hallmarks, construction and stone, and we have written more generally about whether silver and turquoise jewelry is valuable and what Native American jewelry is worth today.

What not to do

Do not sell it for the silver weight. Sterling scrap value is a floor, not a value, and on a signed cuff or a squash blossom with natural stone it can be one-tenth of what the piece would bring in the right sale. We have seen collections that had already been "picked" by a scrap buyer before they reached us, and the pieces that were taken were usually the wrong ones to take.

Do not separate the pieces from the story. A photograph of your parents at a trading post in 1962, a receipt from a Scottsdale gallery, a note that says "bought from the maker at Santa Fe Indian Market" — any of that is provenance, and provenance sells.

Do not assume the plain one is the cheap one. The $2,300 cuff on the list above did not look like much.

How we can help

We handle Native American jewelry as a category rather than an afterthought. It comes through our sales regularly, and we build dedicated auctions around it: this fall's sale, The American West: Native Art, Fine Jewelry & Silver, takes place on September 29, 2026, and we are accepting consignments for it now. Alongside jewelry, we also handle Native and Western fine art — an Allan Houser bronze, a George Morrison, an Edward S. Curtis photogravure — and those sales draw the same national bidders.

What we would want to see for a first opinion: photographs of the front and back of each piece, any hallmarks or signatures, a close-up of the stone, and whatever the family knows about where it was bought. On a single piece, photographs are usually enough. On a collection, we will arrange to see it in person, and we are used to working with families settling an estate on a deadline.

Jewelry is a core department for us, and you can see more of what we have sold on our auction highlights page. If there is turquoise in a drawer somewhere, ask us for a free estimate — no obligation, and no charge for a first look.