Werito Navajo woman 'adorned'

Werito family photograph of Annabelle.
Photo courtesy of Jane Yazzie Family photos.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

This is a photograph of my maternal grandmother's older sister Annabelle who was born in 1928 in New Mexico.

This is a part of a larger collection of my family's Werito family photographs of their lives on the eastern Navajo nation in northwestern New Mexico. This image depicts her in her finest Navajo cultural adornments via her silver and turquoise jewelry items. As you can see she is wearing a velveteen shirt, which has a collar adorned with silver buttons.

In conversations with my grandmother I found that her father, my great-grandfather Jim regularly would commission a local Navajo silversmith to make such silver buttons for his wife and daughters.