Lanyade — Zuni Silversmith

Lanyade was the first silversmith at Zuni. Margery Bedinger's Indian Silver: Navajo and Pueblo Jewelers calls him "the first Zuni silversmith" (Bedinger 1973, p. 169), and the sources agree that the Navajo smith Atsidi Chon taught him around 1872 (Turnbaugh and Turnbaugh 2007, p. 53; Hougart 2022, p. 31).

Bedinger, drawing on what Lanyade told the anthropologist John Adair, records that he made open-centered conchas, silver beads, bowguard mountings and buttons (Bedinger 1973, p. 134), and that his first pupil was Balawade (Bedinger 1973, p. 141). Wright notes that his teacher lived with him a year and taught him to make his own dies (Wright 2003, p. 28).

He carried the craft beyond Zuni. He taught the Hopi smith Sikyatala: in 1898, by the account Lanyade gave Adair (Bedinger 1973, pp. 156–157), or "in about 1890," in the Turnbaughs' telling (Turnbaugh and Turnbaugh 2007, p. 61). Margaret Nickelson Wright's Hopi Silver, a register of Hopi smiths and their hallmarks, notes that the accounts vary (Wright 2003, p. 9). Close to 1900 he was working at Isleta (Bedinger 1973, p. 169). He was still making an occasional piece in the 1920s, and was 95 when Adair talked with him in 1938 (Bedinger 1973, p. 138).