Masaqueva — "Little Sun" — Snow Clan, Shungopavi. 1935–2011.
Some silversmiths are known by a light touch. Bernard Dawahoya was known for the opposite — heavier-gauge silver than nearly anyone else working in overlay, cut clean and matted crisp, so that his work has a weight and a boldness you can feel in the hand before you ever read the mark. He was, in the words of hallmark scholars Pat and Kim Messier, "one of the most prominent silversmiths of his generation."
Dawahoya's personal hallmark is a snow cloud — a fitting stamp for a man of the Snow Clan. Look for it on his independent work from Second Mesa.
There's a second mark collectors need to know: during the years he worked with Wayne and Emory Sekaquaptewa's operation, his pieces often carry the shared "Hopicrafts" shop hallmark rather than his personal snow cloud. So an early Dawahoya piece may be signed by the shop, not the man — an important distinction when you're identifying his hand.
He was born in 1935 in Shungopavi, on Second Mesa, and given the Hopi name Masaqueva — "Little Sun," or "Wings of the Sun." He belonged to the Snow Clan. Silver came to him early: he learned from his grandfather and from his uncles, Sidney Sekakuku and Washington Talayumptewa, beginning at about the age of seven, and later studied through the Hopi Silvercraft Cooperative Guild — the teaching co-op founded in 1958 by Paul Saufkie, Fred Kabotie, and returning Hopi veterans to help Hopi smiths learn the craft and market their work.
He spent years at the Sekaquaptewa brothers' Hopi Enterprise in Phoenix, later moving with the shop toward Kykotsmovi, and in 1960 he came home to open his own Dawa's Crafts Shop on Second Mesa. From there he showed at arts and craft fairs for the rest of his life — his first blue ribbon came in 1971 — and worked in silver almost until the end. He died on April 17, 2011.
Silver was only part of it. Dawahoya was also a weaver, a painter, a katsina-doll carver, a leatherworker, and a natural storyteller, known for narrating the meaning behind his own designs to the people who collected them.
Dawahoya was a master of Hopi overlay — the technique where a design is hand-sawn from one sheet of silver and soldered over a second, the background then oxidized dark and textured. What set his apart was the metal itself: he favored a heavier gauge than most overlay artists, and his matting in the negative space was unusually precise. His designs, the Messiers wrote, were "bold and elegant; his cuts were crisp and precise."
His motifs read like a catalog of the Southwest: eagles and roadrunners, Kokopelli, corn plants and spiders, the badger paw, and figures long carried in Hopi trade silver — the Crow Mother, the Snake Dancer, the Mudheads. He also worked the Man in the Maze, a motif adapted from the Tohono O'odham emergence story and widely shared across Southwestern silver. Beyond flatwork he raised silver vessels in the squat, generous shape of Sikyátki pottery, and set turquoise from the Sleeping Beauty, Kingman, and Spider mines.
(We name these figures as they appear in his silver — as generations of collectors and museums have — and leave their ceremonial meaning to the Hopi people and to the artist's own words.)
In 1998 Dawahoya was named an Arizona Living Treasure. His work is held in permanent collections including the Peabody Museum at Harvard and the Mint Museum, with pieces recorded at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. Mark Bahti, in Silver + Stone, credits him as a teacher of the next generation — writing that he trained some thirty smiths in the craft (a figure from Bahti's profile, pending our confirmation against the printed page).
Know more about Bernard? Contact T.Skies.