[DAVID YETMAN] Humans have craved turquoise for millennia.

In search of this gemstone, we stop at a Tucson museum and a turquoise expert.

And from there we go to a mine in Bisbee.

Next is Turquoise Central, Albuquerque, where one source furnishes a host of artists with their stone.

Finally, it's a trove of jewelry and artistry hidden among the boulders of Arizona's Texas canyon.

[ANNOUNCER] Funding for In the Americans with David Yetman was provided by Robert and Carol Dorsey, the Gilford Fund, Arch and Laura Brown, and Hugh and Joyce Bell [DAVID YETMAN] Turquoise has been precious to Native Americans for many hundreds of years.

It remains a central emblem of Southwestern Jewelry.

One of the repositories of prehistoric and contemporary turquoise is the Arizona State Museum on the campus of the University of Arizona.

{BRIGHT ACOUSTIC GUITAR} [DIANE DITTEMORE] Continuity and innovation in Southwest Native jewelry is represented in an exhibit called “Ancient Modern.” [ARTHUR VOKES] From an archeological point of view, people have been adorning themselves, going back hundreds of thousands of years using shell and then later stone and various other types of materials, ultimately getting into the metal, creating very elaborate types of personal adornments and also symbols for their their roles in the in their culture and society.

The Southwest has been a center of sort of sedentary agriculture and fairly stable communities for 3000 years.

And as soon as people settled down, people started to exchange materials and things.

Well, we know that Turquoise was a special stone to a lot of Native American cultures today, and that seems to go back into pre contact period as early as about 700 A.D., we start to see turquoise being mined in some of these areas.

[DIANE] This exhibit we talked to or saw references by a number of Native people abo the significance of turquoise.

And it very often is because of the blue, because the association with water and that in this very arid climate we live in, you think of Hopi, you think of Zuni, people who rely upon rain for their livelihood.

[ARTHUR] One of the things with the southwest is that turquoise is here.

It is also, you know, potentially have religious significance.

The colors are definitely have a religious significance, ritual significance in terms of direction and also in terms of life and associated with water and childbirth and things.

So in that way, carving in stone in particular.

But these some of this shell really comes in at around 600 A.D.

The fetishes would have had significance in terms of protection or symbolic of the person's identity.

And these fetishes would have been worn but also kept in a medicine pouch sort of thing.

This was a cache of material that was approximately 100,000 beads.

[DAVID] 100,000, each made round with a hole in it.

[ARTHUR] And it's mostly a clay stone and steatite, which is your soapstone, but also there's some turquoise and shell mixed in.

This was found inside of this vessel.

[DAVID] In this pot right here?

[ARTHUR] This pot.

There's a bunch of copper bells.

[DAVID] And where would those copper bells have come from?

[ARTHUR] They would have come from West Mexico.

[DAVID] Native people here were trading all the way down to Tropical Mexico.

[ARTHUR] Oh, yes.

[DAVID] Oh, my gosh.

On foot?

[ARTHUR] On foot.

It probably was a series of sequential trades, but the connections go all the way down to the coast.

There's an example on the display of one that's been coiled up, but with stone and shell beads.

[DAVID] In downtown Tucson, there are a number of Indian art stores, but one of the stores is owned by Mark Bathi, who has a very unusual story to tell about the origin of some jewelry that is very famous now in the southwestern United States and internationally.

[MARK BAHTI] My dad had an undergraduate degree in archeology from UNM and moved into the Indian arts business because he found living Indians way more interesting than dead ones and their remains.

There was a ancient holocom seasonal site we used to climb up and down the butte and my sister one day we looked under a little ledge there and saw this really cool round rock, and that's what she thought it was.

She came bounding down the hill to show it to my dad and she handed it to him.

He realized it was a lid to a little small bowl.

He opened it up with a shell and turquoise beads in there.

It was really pretty stunning.

My dad's, ethic was, you know, this doesn't belong to any one.

It belongs to the community, to the region.

And that's how it wound up at the Arizona State Museum that monday.

And the thing about turquoise is that worldwide, it's found usually in conjunction with copper deposits because it's a hydrous aluminum phosphate colored by copper salts.

And where do you find copper?

You find it in arid regions.

And what is striking about turquoise is it's bright blue or blue green, it's color of sky and it's a color of water and it stands out against those dark desert landscapes.

And just looking at it is like looking at the tiny oasis in your hand.

About 1872 was the first time Turquoise was set.

But, you know, basically the 1880s, you really see it starting to take off.

The original market for decades was an inter-tribal and intra-tribal one.

[DAVID] Indigenous Arizonans hid that treasure trove of turquoise on a mountainside in Arizona, not far from one or several places where historic pockets of turquoise were mined by ancient peoples.

Another source has been the giant copper mines of Arizona, especially the now closed mine at Bisbee.

In the early 1950s, the state of Arizona celebrated the opening of a huge new mine deposit, an open pit mine called the Lavender Pit.

It was state-of-the-art at the time and had vast copper resources, but it also opened a new deposit of turquoise, which became very famous as Bisbee Turquoise from Bisbee, Arizona.

The turquoise that we all know Bisbee blue did come from the old Lavender Pit.

The underground did find trace amounts, but not not anything that you find in jewelry or anything.

[DOUG GRAHAM] My family came here for mining.

I came down in 1883, coming out of Utah.

Grandpa started underground here, and then Dad ended up being a geologist here in Bisbee.

The mines here started off as underground operations.

Okay?

And as the technology changes, you know, open pit mining became viable, largely attributed to the Panama Canal, developing steam shovels, etc..

But it did set the stage for the opening of the Lavender Pit, which started in the early 1950s and ran all the way until 1974.

The Bisbee turquoise was first discovered in the early 1950s.

Turquoise is a copper aluminum phosphate, so it needs that copper coming off the porphyry to develop.

Bisbee does have some very distinctive features to the turquoise.

I do want to see that a little bit darker color and that red brown matrix to it.

[DAVID] So the Lavendar Pit█s where the turquoise was, and that's new, but the old mines where the real history in that the interest lies and yeah we can actually go in here [DOUG] Yeah yeah we're going to go into the Queen Tunnel here driven in 1915.

{METAL DOOR CLANGING} [DAVID] That's a serious door.

{LAUGHS} [DOUG] We have 2200 miles of workings down there.

[DAVE] 2200 miles [DOUG] miles.

Yeah.

[DAVE] My goodness.

{WISTFUL GUITAR} [DAVE] That was a lot of copper came out of here.

[DOUG] Yes.

Eight billion pouds.

Our turquoise, it goes down almost 600 feet from the edge of the pit.

[DAVID] That's different from other sources?

[DOUG] Yeah.

Most of the time that, you know, a couple hundred feet usually-- [DAVID] And that that's because the formation of it requires leaching water, water percolating through it?

And that's about as deep as it goes?

[DOUG] Exactly.

At this point.

It intercepts the Copper Queen shaft, which was sunk back in 1881, the first real mining Bisbee.

Before that, it was pretty much just prospecting.

A little turquoise does come from the underground.

We get turquoise crystals and a little bit after the 1300.

But it's not the stuff that you see in jewelry.

A lot of it has a green tinge to it.

[DAVID] In those days, my understanding was the miners would bring their lunch pails in and leave if they found the turquoise and take it out with them.

Is at the case?

[DOUG] The mining company didn't really mind until they hit the turquoise inside the pit wasn't so much the money in on it.

It was the safety side Where the turquoise was found was in the Glance conglomerate and it was unstable and they didn't want the miners up close to the the high walls.

[DAVID] But the sources of turquoise in the world are very, very limited, right?

[DOUG] Usually around copper deposits, [DAVID] They seem to be limited in the US to the southwest.

[DOUG] It's because of the near-surface environments.

{WISTFUL GUITAR} [DAVID] I do appreciate what the miners of the underground days, you know, faced when they went to work every day.

[DOUG] Yeah, I'm very proud of, of those guys.

Highly skilled labor.

[DAVE] Highly skilled, very hard, and actually quite dangerous work.

Many people want to welcome the open pit then?

[DOUG] There's a deep love for the underground.

{ACOUSTIC GUITAR SWELLS} [DAVE] Turquoise from sources in New Mexico made its way into jewelry hundreds of miles away for many centuries.

Today, an authority on that turquoise and the world's sources of turquoise is an artist in Albuquerque.

Downtown Albuquerque, New Mexico, is the place where most Native American artisans come to find the turquoise.

There's a good reason for that.

There's a place called Sunwest Silver, founded by Ernie Montoya.

He is the greatest collector of turquoise in the world and supplies many, if not most, of the best artisans for Southwestern jewelry anywhere.

{HAPPY GUITAR CONTINUES} [ERNIE MONTOYA] Out here, I have mostly one of a kinds where the retail people can come in shop strands like shells, and I do a lot of turquoise strands of the different mines.

[DAVID] Where are your customers coming from?

We█re in Albuquerque.

And that's not a big center of the universe.

[ERNIE] Well, they come from all over the world.

I have customers area, Australia, Germany, Italy, almost every place in the US.

[DAVID] You█ve got room after room here.

[ERNIE] Oh, yeah.

[DAVID] Each of these represents a different then?

[ERNIE] Yes, sir.

And then back in here, when the turquoise comes in, this is where we, we grade it.

Yeah.

Wets it and then starts grading for, right but gets all the blue out of here and separates it and puts it in the jars.

And then then on the green in a different jar.

So and then we graded by size, different sizes.

Small sizes are made that pretty much into beads, bigger stuff, polished and ready for, to set jewelry.

I've been collecting turquoise approximately 40 to 45 years, and those days it was pretty cheap.

$18 a pound for mine run.

Today it's two, three thousand a pound.

That's kind of gives you an idea how expensive it is.

[DAVID] Through all of this labyrinth.

We are going to the basement where the really good stuff is stored.

And I guess the most unusual way.

[ERNIE] Down here is my collection of stones that I've picked up all over the world.

[DAVID] Well, these aren't stones.

These are jars.

I had heard about the theme of Ernie's basement, and I expected expensive trays, displays, maybe even a vault.

But here we have storage in quart jars.

But there's no better way to show the variety of turquoise.

All 5000 of them.

[ERNIE] The Zuni█s used to make their petit point and needlepoint out of this stone.

And then here are my specimens.

My different specimens that I've collected through the years.

[DAVID] Oh, my.

Oh, wow.

[ERNIE] Most of them are super rare like this is Bisbee up here.

[DAVID] They're not making turquoise anymore in Ernie Montoya's basement.

Not a lot of people get in to see it, but it's where he keeps his personal treasures.

{ROCKS CLATTER} [ERNIE] There█s probably a good 20 different colors there.

Carico.

[DAVID] Clams.

[ERNIE] Yeah, they were live clams.

[DAVE] When the miners find these, they're actually identifiable as fossils.

[ERNIE] Yes.

They█re fossils.

Greens have a lot of zinc.

The blues have the copper.

A little bit of gold in these {ROCKS CLATTER} Let█s see here.

The Carico green.

Let me show you some other ones.

But this is what the, the super rare.

Very rare.

{ROCKS CLATTER} Yeah, very rare turquoise.

[DAVID] Now, that's also green.

[ERNIE] It's a yellow.

Turquoise.

More of a yellow.

This is a Lone Mountain Nugget, very rare {unintelligible} [DAVID] But it sounds like Nevada is really the center of turquoise production in the U.S.. [ERNIE] Well, it's the center of the best turquoise.

This is a good grade, of sleeping beauty.

Even diamond dealers that want to buy turquoise jewelry from me because diamonds and all, they█re being manmade a you can't tell the difference.

This you cannot replace.

And a lot of people say that turquoise has a spirit to it.

That it just keeping that heals, heals you and it makes you feel good.

The natives really adore it.

Once in a while I'll kind of piece to a native and grab it and kiss it and and they think it's something mystical about it.

{BLUES GUITAR CONTINUES} [DAVE] This is a collection of native jewelry from mostly from New Mexico.

What they have in common is superb artistry, but they also all incorporate turquoise that came from Ernie Montoya.

Ernie has taken it upon himself to make sure that the best jewelers and those who are aspiring to be the best can get high quality or the best quality Turquoise.

There's nowhere else they can get it.

{PAN FLUTE BEGINS} {PAN FLUTE CONTINUES} [DAVID] A burgeoning demand for Indian jewelry has led to a rapid expansion of expert native jewelers.

One location has been the custodian of a vast collection of this exquisite art, the Amerind Foundation near Dragoon, Arizona.

{UPLIFTING MUSIC CRESCENDOS} Every time I come to the Amerind in Texas Canyon I see these granite boulders, I have a feeling Apaches are still watching and waiting.

[ERIC CALDWELL] It's also traditionally Tohono O█odam country.

It's also, there are footsteps left behind by people whose community members are at Hopi and the Pueblo Zuni.

It█s very rich in story and special to so many different people.

[DAVID] Their artistic representations are well represented here.

[ERIC] So we have things from all over copper, turquoise, seashell are the people of the southwest were connected.

The people in northwestern Mexico, we're connected.

And in this vast homeland, they traded in very important things.

The Amerind was founded back in 1937 by two individuals, William Shirley Fulton and his wife, Rose Hayden Fulton.

Mr. and Mrs. Fulton were interested in Native American arts and crafts.

So after arriving here in Arizona, they started to build a museum that would be dedicated to their personal collection.

It was in the 1980s at the Amerind actually opened to the public with regular visitation hours.

The galleries that you come and visit today, which is about 8000 square feet of space, can house many exhibits from the native peoples throughout the Americas.

The Vanderwagen family, who had operated trading posts in the Pueblo Zuni over the course of three generations of their family, amassed a collection of Navajo and Zuni jewelry.

That spanned about a century of time.

After many generations of caring for this collection.

It was the third generation that decided it was time to donate their collection to a museum.

[DAVID] I am lucky enough to be down in the bowels, the very deep recesses of the Amerind Foundation museum where they have stored some 30,000 artifacts of native peoples of the Southwest.

It's a remarkable place when you see the cultures who are represented here and the number of different artifacts that they made in different kinds.

But most of all, to see the new collection in which a donor has bestowed upon the museum.

[ERIC] We had about a 30,000 piece of collection that included native American pots, basketry, clothing, many, many different sorts of items.

After the donation of the Vanderwagons, we had a 10,000 pieces collection, all of it in jewelry, much of it rich in turquoise.

The artworks of Navajo and Zuni people.

It's oftentimes a team effort.

So you may have a silversmith who might be Zuni, he might be Navajo, she might be Zuni, she might be Navajo.

There's certainly an equal number of women and men represented in the creation of these things.

The lapidary could be done by one family, but the silver settings could be done by a different family... And to the peoples of the American Southwest in northern Mexico, who have traditionally predominantly been farming peoples, that association with the sky, with rain, was really very important to their lives.

So you see carvings that are emblematic of animals and other sorts of objects that are associated with our monsoon season.

And you see people decorating their clothes, their regalia, their persons with this very beautiful, very important stone.

So I mean, turquoise was initially being manufactured by native people to be consumed and worn by native people.

When American tourists got into the American Southwest, they fell in love with that jewelry that they were seeing Native people wear and very quickly became commercially quite viable.

And it particularly took off as the train started to connect the continent, as people started to fall in love and read stories and articles about the native peoples of the Southwest, that jewelry took off across the continent and ultimately took out across the world.

That is a stone that is really unique to our part of the world and valued by the people who've lived here for centuries.

{INSPIRING ACOUSTIC GUITAR} [DAVID] At the Amerind Museum, they often have an artist in residence, and right now it is a Laguna Jewelry artist, well-known artist named Duane Maktima.

[DUANE MAKTIMA] Hey!

[DAVID] I know Duane, hi.

And you're you're Jan. [DUANE] And I'm Duane.

[DAVID] Well, thank you for letting me come out.

[DUANE] Oh, you're more than welcome-- [DAVID] Take a look at your work.

[DUANE] That's part of my life.

[DAVID] Okay, right.

[DUANE] Turquoise to our people has always been prolifically used in our culture, not only as an ornament or to make jewelry with, but it's a it was at one time a very sacred material because it was so hard to get to in our other language, it's called the Sky Blue Stone.

We're the children of the sun, the Pueblo Indian people that inclusive to Zunis and in Hopis.

But when the Sun father takes the passing of the day, he puts him in a home in the Pacific Ocean.

So we make this path for these spirits to come with turquoise little pieces.

And those are in the offerings we make to allow the spirits to come from the ocean as form in form of clouds, enticing the spirits by talking about all these things that we offer them to come to bless our land with rain.

It's religion and it's culture and it's art.

You know, it's a lot of things.

{LOUD MACHINERY} {HAMMER POUNDING} {LOUD GRINDING} Turquoise at one time was, the ordinary people weren't allowed to touch it.

It was only for the medicine clans, the spirit people.

After a certain point, the medicine clan people said, “Well, these people need to learn how to make a living.” So they started allowing the people to use turquoise as a way of making a living.

Through trade.

You can manipulate silver with a hammer {HAMMER CLANGS} by just shaping it.

This is one of my trademarks today.

Is this piece, this this piece that I just showed you.

It's an accessory to the pendant, this texture I use on these two pieces, these lines.

I've named it Rain Texture, because talking that story about the spirits which emulates is when the rain in the sun starts to glimmer.

And that's what I'm emulating here.

I almost can close my eyes and do this, you know.

But that's what being an artist is, is, you know, being very aware of your material and your your craft and your skill.

{HAMMER BANGS} Today, being a modern metal smith jeweler, we are very we have steel.

We have all these things we can grinding machines and but you got to think way back.

They had all the time in the world, you know, they could sit there and develop their craft through, through their passed down through, like a tradition in their family.

And their families were known for certain items that they made.

{INSPIRING GUITAR SWELLS} {MUSIC CONCLUDES} [DAVID] Join us next time In the Americas with me, David Yetman.

Puerto Rico is owned by the United States.

It is a US colony.

Its residents are U.S. citizens.

But it is as different from the Lower 48 as can be.

It is home to our largest colonial fortress, {BOMBA MUSIC SWELLS} our only tropical rainforest, and the origin of some of our best music.

{MUSIC HALTS} [DAVID] Now, Earnie, this looks like my mother's canning when I was a kid.

Except it's turquoise.

[ERNIE] Yeah, I've been canning for probably 25 years now.

Or, jarring.

{LAUGHS} [DAN] Why the jars?

[ERNIE] My warehouse it was just five gallon buckets, and I had a mixture of everything.

So I found some old jars like these jars right here.

So we're up to, I don't know, 5,000 jars or so.

[DAVID] Five thousand jars.

[ANNOUNCER] Funding for In the Americans with David Yetman was provided by Robert and Carol Dorsey, the Gilford Fund, Arch and Laura Brown, and Hugh and Joyce Bell