Verma Nequatewa — Hopi Jeweler, "Sonwai" & Her Mark

b. 1949, Hotevilla, Third Mesa. She signs her work with the Hopi word for beauty.

There is a masculine Hopi word for beauty — Loloma — and it belonged to the most influential Native jeweler of the twentieth century, Charles Loloma. There is also a feminine one: Sonwai. Verma Nequatewa is his niece, she was his principal stone-setter for more than twenty years, and when it came time to sign her own work she took that feminine word as her name, with his encouragement. She isn't a jeweler influenced by Loloma. She is the one who carries his aesthetic forward — and she does it, still, from the studio he built.

The Smith

She was born in 1949 in Hotevilla, on Third Mesa, and she has never left. In the mid-1960s, when Loloma came home to Hotevilla, she began helping in his studio, and she stayed at that bench for over two decades, becoming his lead stone-setter — the one who cut and fit the inlay. "Charles taught that beauty is all around us on Hopi," she says, "in the environment, in the culture, in ceremony." When his studio closed in the late 1980s and Loloma died in 1991, she opened her own — working in and around his original studio space, continuing his teachings as her own. For part of that history she wasn't alone: her sister, the jeweler Sherian Honhongva, also trained under Loloma and worked beside her under the shared "Sonwai" mark until the two began signing separately in 1993.

The Work

Sonwai works the tradition Loloma opened up — fine hand-cut stone inlay raised in sculptural, height-relief settings of 18-karat gold and silver, a mosaic she describes as fitting "like a puzzle." Her palette runs deep: turquoise, coral, lapis, sugilite, opal, charoite, ironwood, fossilized ivory, and diamonds, and she tufa-casts as well as fabricates. What she'll tell you is that the stone leads. "Often, it is the stones that tell me what to do with the inlay," she says. "My role is to allow the stones to become what they can, in the way that they need to be." The result is unmistakably hers — a Sonwai aesthetic that grew out of Loloma's and stands on its own, its color and layered inlay often read as the rocky northern-Arizona landscape around her home.

The Mark

She signs "Sonwai," the word itself, rendered in a script hand-stamp rather than a pictograph or clan symbol (documented on pieces by Adobe Gallery). One note for collectors: because she and her sister Sherian shared the Sonwai mark from 1976 to 1993, a "Sonwai"-stamped piece from before 1993 may reflect either sister's hand — the sisters have signed separately since.

The Standing

In 2018 the Heard Museum named Sonwai its Moondance honoree — its flagship annual honor for a single major artist — and that same season mounted her first solo retrospective, Sonwai: The Jewelry of Verma Nequatewa, curated by the Heard's longtime jewelry curator Diana Pardue. Her work is now held in the Heard's Basha Family Collection (shown in Adorned with Memory, 2025–26) and at the Museum of Northern Arizona, and it is the subject of a monograph, Visions of Sonwai (2007), catalogued in the Smithsonian's library. She still shows at Santa Fe Indian Market, and still works on Third Mesa — in the studio her uncle built.