Bronson Mitchell. Diné — Red Streak Earth, born for Bitter Water. Sixth generation. Most casters buy their tufa; he digs his own.
A tufa cast begins with a stone soft enough to carve and dense enough to hold molten silver — and most silversmiths buy that stone. Bronson Mitchell doesn't. He goes out to the reservation deposits and mines his own tufa by hand, then cuts the mold to spec and pours the metal himself. It's the far end of self-sufficiency in a craft that prizes it: he starts not with a design but with the rock.
We don't have a hallmark on record for him under his own name — his work runs under the family's Dark Horse Navajo Jewelry brand rather than an individually cataloged mark — so we won't invent one. His pieces are identified by their hand-cut tufa casting and by that family line. (Hold a marked piece? That's the first-hand detail this directory is built to capture.)
He is Diné — Red Streak Earth clan, born for Bitter Water — and he is a sixth-generation silversmith. His father, Reginald Mitchell, is fifth generation; his grandfather, Eugene Mitchell, was a master silversmith, and together the family runs Dark Horse Navajo Jewelry. Bronson came up from Gallup and now works out of Albuquerque. Six generations is not a figure of speech here — it's a working shop, the knowledge handed down bench to bench.
Mitchell casts — tufa and sand casting — and does it from the ground up. He hand-mines the tufa stone himself from reservation deposits, carves the mold to spec (he'll show you a ring mold he cut), and hand-pours the silver and gold; he doesn't work from purchased refined stock. The forms are the traditional Navajo cast vocabulary — najas, bracelets, bowguards, buckles, earrings — built the oldest way, by pouring metal into carved stone. The distinguishing fact is the sourcing: a maker who digs his own casting stone is making something with his hands from the first step to the last.
Meet Bronson at the bench, in our footage:
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