The making and selling of Southwestern Native American jewellery is a thriving business throughout the United States of America, and in the past two decades it has begun to have an international impact on contemporary jewellery design. The Southwest is a region that can be generally defined as the states of Arizona, New Mexico, and the southern portions of neighbouring Utah and Colorado [1]. Jewellery is made predominantly by various Pueblo peoples of New Mexico and Arizona, most notably the Hopi, Zuni, and Santo Domingo, and by the largest native group in the United States, the Navajo Nation. However, these and other Native Americans also produce jewellery off the reservations, working out of homes, studios, and galleries in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Taos, and Gallup, all in New Mexico, and in the Arizona cities of Phoenix, Scottsdale, and Tucson. These cities are the major production centres both for the making of jewellery and for the retail of contemporary and older works. In addition, consumer demand for shows and sales of Southwestern Indian jewellery extends into the states of California (especially in San Diego, Marin County, and the region around San Francisco), Nevada, Texas, and across the country to Washington, DC. There are strong markets in Japan and Germany for this jewellery outside the United States. While the production and sales of Southwestern Indian jewellery has become a multi-million-dollar industry, there have been only a few attempts to understand its design history. Historical, scholarly, and popular writings on this subject contain various misunderstandings about its social context. Until the mid-twentieth century, Indian jewellery was treated as an element of indigenous material culture, with ethnological data stressed above other considerations. For the most part, literature has been either anthropological or collector-oriented in focus. Post1950S popular publications were concerned with explaining Indian jewellery materials and market value. Over the last twenty years, there have been some stabs at formalist evaluation, mainly in the form of museum exhibition catalogue essays. Increasingly, shifts between anthropological and art historical explanations are the product of varied approaches adopted by scholarly investigators. The gr wth of studies in the late 198os and now in the 1990S that explore multicultural themes and the cumulative effects of acculturation on artistic production offers a new and opportune direction for writing on the topic of Indian jewellery. Alas, this direction has not yet been utilized to any extent. The published literature on Southwestern Indian jewellery tries, but often fails, to reflect the differing and inconsistent ideologies of the industry's principal players. These players comprise three groups that may be conveniently designated as: makers, purveyors, and consumers. While Native Americans themselves are represented solely in the first category, and have a place in the other two, it is nonIndians who have dominated the roles of purveyors and consumers. Non-Indians have created the bulk