Native American Indian Jewelry: How to Identify Genuine Lander Turquoise in Indian Jewelry

Native American jewelry expert Dr. Mark Sublette of Medicine Man Gallery with 25 years experience in the Indian art business gives tips on how to identify genuine early turquoise in Navajo jewelry. Excellent tutorial for beginning to advanced collectors on the characteristics one looks for when buying Native American old pawn jewelry with turquoise.

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Native American Indian Jewelry: How to Identify Genuine Lander Turquoise in Indian Jewelry

Hi, today I want to talk to you about turquoise: this kind of stuff. Specific mines are very important to understand because this has a lot to do with how we, dealers, go about pricing things. When I look at a piece of jewelry, and it's brought in to me, one of the first things I do (if it has turquoise in it), is to take my loop out and really examine it. There are a lot of good reasons to do this.

One is that you can see cracks, or if it has matrix, you may see that there really isn't a crack, but it's just the line of the matrix, and this makes a big difference. A stone that's broken is not going to be worth as much, (than) if it's just a matrix fissure. So, look at it closely. If you don't have a loop, at least get it under good light.

The most (probably) valuable turquoise today is called Lander. Lander turquoise comes from Northern Nevada, and it is an amazing-looking turquoise. It has very dark, deep blue (almost to black), with lots of matrix. The problem is there's just not much of it. Lander was found (the original) mined in 1973 by two sisters, Rita Hapgood and her sister Marilyn. They took their two boys up, and they went out looking for turquoise. They heard there was turquoise in Nevada, and they wanted to go find themselves a mine.

The story goes, is that they actually used a Ouija board (which said), “Go up the hill and start looking,” and they did, and then one of the kids found a little teeny stone with this beautiful brown-black kind of matrix, and that actually turned out to be Lander turquoise. It's also what we call a hat mine. A hat mine is a mine that is so small that you could throw your hat on it and cover the entire mine, and in this case, it really was.

There was only a hundred and eight pounds found of this turquoise, and it didn't start coming out till about 1974. Rita sold her mine claim to another group, who really knew how to go ahead and develop the mine, in 1974. So, between 1974 and 1977 (we’ll say) a lot of that great turquoise really got into the market.

So, one of the things you have to realize if somebody is telling you its Lander turquoise; remember there's a very small amount, and it probably isn't genuine Lander, unless you have a great provenance, or you have somebody who knows that it's Lander turquoise. If you have a dealer who’s been in the business and is going to guarantee it’s Lander, then that's fine – not a problem. You have pieces like (Charles Loloma did this) wonderful bracelet with a huge chunk of Lander.

It makes sense; he was a well-known artist, who could afford the turquoise, which was even expensive at that time. It's really been in the last ten years or even less (really in the last five years, I would say), that Lander has started to go up so much in value. People have really understood that this is a rare type of turquoise, and that it really has a great essence beyond just the jewelry.

So, it's important when you're looking at Native American jewelry, and if you think it is a stone of importance, that you do a little research, and if it's genuine Lander, well, you've hit the jackpot just like Rita Hapgood.