Darwyn Cowboy — Fifth-Generation Navajo Pearls Bead Maker
Handmade Navajo pearls in the Haley family tradition. Photographed for the T.Skies Journal. © Turquoise Skies Inc.
Fifth-generation bead maker, Haley family · Gallup, New Mexico · documented in the T.Skies Journal since 2015
Five generations of beads
Darwyn Cowboy is a fifth-generation bead maker — the latest of the Haley family, the well-known Navajo bead makers of Gallup, New Mexico, to take up the craft of the handmade silver beads known as Navajo pearls. When the family's orders outgrew its hands, they asked Darwyn and his wife Vinita Cowboy to join the work. The couple agreed, and the bench became theirs too.
The family process is the full, old one: heavy-gauge sterling silver melted, rolled, and cut to length; each bead punched as near center as a steady hand allows, stacked, rounded, sanded, polished, and strung. Six to eight necklaces come off the bench in four or five days, each bead unlike its neighbor — the signature of hand work that no machine strand can fake. The family's most requested style is the "old-fashioned" bead: oxidized dark, rubbed back with steel wool to an antique glow.
For Darwyn, the work is heritage in the most literal sense — a craft carried through five generations of one family and still made the same way. Beads, like other handmade jewelry, come to be known by the hands that made them, and the Haley family's reputation was earned strand by strand.
His marks
Hallmark documentation for Darwyn's work is in progress — his stamp will be photographed and added to this page and the hallmark index.
Know more about Darwyn or the Haley bead-making family? Collectors, family members, and researchers are invited to reach out through our contact page — verified details help us build a more complete record for every artist in the directory.
References
- "Vinita Cowboy: Navajo Pearls, Traditional Handmade Silver Beads," T.Skies Journal, September 2015 — firsthand interview and process documentation of the family's bead making.
This profile is maintained in support of Native American silversmiths and compiled from our own published interviews and gallery records. See something inaccurate, or want to add to it? Contact us.