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A Field Guide to Southwest Jewelry · by Mateo James

Heishi Making: Shell Bead Drilling and the Kewa Tradition

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Heishi is the art of making small, flat, disc-shaped beads from shell, turquoise, or other stone, drilled through the center and ground to uniform thinness, then strung in graduated strands. The word heishi derives from Keresan, the language of Kewa (Santo Domingo) Pueblo, and means simply "shell." Kewa artists have practiced this craft for centuries, long before silver arrived in the Southwest, making it one of the oldest continuously documented jewelry traditions in the region.

Mateo's Field Notes

The photographic record in Larry Frank's Indian Silver Jewelry of the Southwest (ISJ-1868) captures a Hopi man photographed between 1903 and 1911 wearing, among other things, "a white shell (heishe) and turquoise necklace." The caption reads the heishe strand almost in passing — it was so ordinary a part of dress that it needed no explanation. That casualness is itself evidence: heishi had been woven into Southwest adornment long before the camera arrived. (ISJ-1868, ~line 1409)

Bedinger's account of Kewa Pueblo makes the tradition plain: "Their traditional craft is making shell and turquoise beads." (Bedinger 1973, ~p. 145) The process is painstaking. Raw shell or stone is first reduced to rough blanks, each piece pierced with a slender drill. Early drills were made from cactus spine or a thin stick rotated with a bow-drill; the drilling itself can account for much of the material loss. Once pierced, the blanks are strung on a cord, then ground against an abrasive stone — sandstone, in the historic record — until every bead in the strand reaches the same diameter and the faces become flat. Material loss through this grinding stage is substantial; estimates in the keyword literature run from sixty to seventy percent of the original blank weight. What survives is a strand of matched, luminous discs that earned Kewa women their regional reputation as the Southwest's master traders.

The materials expanded over time. Shell — white clam, spiny oyster, abalone — was the original substrate; turquoise followed, then coral, jet, and other stones. The heishi form itself remained constant: small, flat, drilled through the axis, strung graduated from largest at center to smallest at the clasp. Bedinger's documentation of Zuni small-stone jewelry notes the same massed-stone aesthetic at work in Zuni mosaic traditions, but at Kewa the bead form is definitive. (Bedinger 1973, ~pp. 195–196)

A related form worth distinguishing: nugget-style beads. Where heishi is flat and disc-shaped, worked to uniformity, nugget beads are irregular chunks of turquoise (or other stone) drilled through and strung with minimal shaping. The visual effect is rougher, more geological. Both forms appear together in historic necklaces — a heishi strand with graduated turquoise nuggets at center is among the most common Southwest necklace configurations in the photographic record. The corpus does not document a single inventor for the nugget style; it appears as a natural extension of stone-bead making wherever turquoise was drilled rather than cut flat.

Collector's Handbook

  • Shell vs. stone vs. synthetic. Genuine heishi shell will show the natural layering of the shell wall under magnification. Turquoise heishi should show matrix variation bead to bead. Uniform color and perfect smoothness across every bead in a long strand is a warning sign — plastic, resin, or reconstituted material behaves too consistently.
  • Examine the drill hole. Hand-drilled heishi typically shows slight irregularity in the hole placement and diameter. Machine-drilled beads are mechanically centered and perfectly round in cross-section. Both can produce quality work, but knowing which you have tells you about the maker's process.
  • Strand graduation. In traditional strands, beads graduate from largest at center to smallest near the ends. In quick commercial work, graduation is absent or reversed. Consistent graduation indicates intentional design, not random stringing.
  • Kewa attribution. Not all shell bead jewelry is Kewa-made. The corpus documents Kewa as the primary heishi-making community, but the technique has spread. IACA compliance requires documentation of tribal membership, not just bead style.
  • Nugget vs. heishi in one strand. A strand combining heishi with central turquoise nuggets is a traditional configuration documented in early photographs. The combination is not a later hybrid — it reflects how the traditions were actually worn.

In the Directory

Kewa (Santo Domingo) artists documented in our directory who work in shell and bead traditions: Cordell Pajarito (Kewa) · Kevin Coriz (Kewa) · Julian Lovato (Kewa) · Ray Lovato (Kewa) · Jeremy Rosetta (Kewa) · Lorenzo Coriz (Kewa) · Roderick Tenorio (Kewa)

Primary Sources

  • Frank, Larry. Indian Silver Jewelry of the Southwest, 1868–1930. Schiffer Publishing. ~line 1409.
  • Bedinger, Margery. Indian Silver: Navajo and Pueblo Jewelers. University of New Mexico Press, 1973. ~pp. 145, 195–196.

Related Entries

Kewa (Santo Domingo) Pueblo · Lapidary Stone Cutting · Mosaic Inlay · Shell, Heishi, and Mother-of-Pearl · Zuni Nation