Orville Tsinnie — Diné Silversmith & His Mark

Orville Z. Tsinnie, 1943–2017. Shiprock, New Mexico. The lawman who picked up the tools at twenty-seven — and never put them down.

Orville Tsinnie didn't come up through the great Navajo silversmithing lineage. He came up through the Navajo Nation's personnel office and the Navajo Police Department. He was twenty-seven, visiting his sister and her husband — a Hopi silversmith — when he sat down with a set of tools that happened to be there and made his first piece. That was the whole beginning. From that afternoon, with no formal training, he built himself into one of the most respected silversmiths on the Navajo Nation — and in 1999 the Indian Arts and Crafts Association gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award, an honor it reserves for the very top of the field.

The Smith

He was born September 30, 1943, in Tuba City, to Ann Yellowhorse, herself a jeweler, and he lived and worked most of his life in Shiprock, in the shadow of the great rock formation the Diné call Tsé Bit'a'í. His entry into the craft came through his brother-in-law, the Hopi silversmith Horace Emerson — but Tsinnie quickly turned away from the Hopi inlay style he first saw and set himself toward something else entirely. He wanted, in his own words, "pure Navajo, simple 1900's style, bold, clean, solid." He ran a home studio and gallery in Shiprock with his wife, Darlene Tsinnie, a well-known jeweler in her own right — the two often shared the same stamps and worked side by side. Alongside the silver, he carved katsina dolls.

The Work

Tsinnie's signature is weight and stamp. He worked heavy-gauge sterling, hand-fabricated rather than cast, and covered it in dense, precise, large-scale stampwork — bold lines and deep-struck patterns that read as unmistakably his. He was a perfectionist about stone, hand-picking and polishing only top-grade naturals: Morenci turquoise early on, later lapis, sugilite, jasper, obsidian, coral, and a material he prized above most — fossilized dinosaur bone. Nothing about the work is fussy or ornamental for its own sake. It's the "bold, clean, solid" idiom he set out to make, held to for a lifetime.

The Mark

His hallmark is his home. Tsinnie stamped his pieces with the silhouette of the Shiprock formation — sometimes twice — alongside his name, "New Mexico," and "Sterling." The man and the mark were rooted in the same ground. One note for collectors: because he and Darlene shared stamps, a Shiprock-marked piece can't always be assigned to one hand over the other on the mark alone.

The Standing

Beyond the 1999 IACA Lifetime Achievement Award — and a separate IACA Artist of the Year honor — Tsinnie took first place at the 37th Navajo Craftsman Exhibition at the Museum of Northern Arizona in 1986, and his work entered the permanent collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian (a bracelet, a necklace, and a belt buckle among the pieces held there). His silver was shown in a New York exhibition of wearable art in 1989, and he was a fixture for decades on the Santa Fe Indian Market and Gallup Ceremonial circuit. He died in Shiprock on May 23, 2017, at seventy-three.