Following the 2024 Smithsonian Folklife Festival’s Indigenous Voices of the Americas program, Folklife Magazine continues to spotlight Native artists and experts.
Shane Hendren’s earliest memories of silver are the shiny belt buckles and ornate bridles of cowboys. He calls them buckaroos.
All their equipment is not only functional but beautiful: Giant Garcia spurs from J.M. Capriola Co. in Nevada, long tapaderos (hooded stirrups) hanging off the sides of saddles, embellished spade bits, a horse’s mouthpiece that helps convey signals from a rider’s hands.
And the cowboys’ personae were just as embellished as their saddles. The memory of one man in particular stuck with Hendren through the years: his big mustache, silk scarf, and a pistol on his belt. He always carried a quirt, a short riding whip made of braided leather.
For young Hendren, these things were a novelty.
Back on the Navajo reservation where he was born, nobody looked like that. Nobody had equipment like that. Nobody had high-top boots with their pants tucked in. Nobody rolled their own cigarettes.
“He was one of them guys,” Hendren said. “I never forgot this guy.”
More than forty-five years later, Hendren’s memories of the buckaroos remain vivid. Now he makes jewelry pieces just as ornate as the ones he saw in his family’s barn. An award-winning metalsmith and jewelry maker based in New Mexico, he continues the legacy of buckaroos, making pieces that blend his family’s history of rodeo and ranching with his Navajo identity.
By the time he was a toddler, Hendren knew how to draw his surroundings with a pencil: cows, horses, chickens, doves, the animals on his family’s ranch in Fallon, Nevada. Born in New Mexico, his family had moved to Nevada for his dad’s job as a high school rodeo coach. They also raised animals and trained horses on their ranch, which is how he got to know the buckaroos of Nevada.
One time, that memorable cowboy gave Hendren some advice. He explained that horses were prideful animals that should always be treated with love, kindness, and respect. He said, “You should always have the best equipment, because they like to look good too.”
It planted a seed of a dream: equipment could be art.
His grandfather raised world-champion American quarter horses. Wanting to have the nicest equipment when showing horses, he would buy ornate, silver Mexican ranching equipment. As a child, Hendren would accompany him across the border into northern Mexico. The craftsmen would take a piece of metal, maybe a car spring, and then they would hammer and forge the scrap, turning it into a beautiful bit that you would put in a horse’s mouth. His grandfather also bought from them braided rawhide reins, romal reins, and lassos.
“When I looked at these Mexican artisans as a kid, I didn’t see that there was a difference between me and them,” he said. He could make beautiful things too.
Now, Hendren typically works with silver and turquoise to make intricate belt buckles, rings, and pendants. With recycled metal scraps and old family jewelry, Hendren creates custom pieces for clients using their jewels to fashion something new.
Other times, he creates entirely for himself. A material will “speak” to him before he knows what it will be. At the 2024 Santa Fe Indian Market, a piece of Stormy Mountain Nevada turquoise spoke to Hendren.
“This stone has amazing character,” he said. “It looks nothing like any other stuff. As soon as I saw it, I knew I had to have it. So the beginning of that creative process is that I have this stone. Now, what will happen?”
Maybe, like some pieces of stone, it will sit in his home studio for years until it’s ready for the right project. Hendren will take hours, days, years to perfect a piece. Through rounds under his Leica A60 microscope, at the engraving station, soldering station, and drawing table, he will craft each work of art. He sits at his bench, built by hand in college, and uses practices of silversmithing brought to the Navajo through Spanish colonists.
“Everything I make is Navajo because it’s all rooted in me and what I do.”
*****
Along with his other jobs, Hendren’s father served as the reservation artists’ middleman when they moved to Arizona. Artisans selling rugs, pottery, and jewelry would come to their door, selling their products at what seemed a fraction of the price they were worth. His dad would then sell to places like the Grand Canyon gift shop, which would then price them even higher than what he sold them for. Through this, Hendren grew up seeing a behind-the-curtain view of the art business.
He learned the value of his work and how to properly price his art, factoring in both material prices and the time it took to create each piece. By the time he was in elementary school, Hendren bought his first bicycle from his art money. At a trading post he also bought something he would later be able to make himself: a sterling silver concho belt buckle with a piece of turquoise in the middle.
All through high school, Hendren was involved with the ranch: riding horses, participating in rodeos, farm chores each morning. He had scholarship offers to go to colleges to judge livestock or compete in rodeos, but his mom advised him to pursue something he was truly passionate about.
Hendren enrolled at the Santa Fe-based Institute of American Indian Arts, receiving an associate’s degree in museum management. As an elective, he signed up for Metalsmithing 101 and learned metal construction techniques for jewelry and small sculpture. He was just in it for the grade, at first, but he realized he could work with metal just like the artisans he grew up watching with his grandpa.
During his schooling and up until the age of thirty-two, Hendren also worked as a professional rodeo cowboy, using prize money to supplemental income to help raise his children and support his extended family.
“[Family] is who you are,” he said. Any awards Hendren has won—in both rodeo and art—have just been a byproduct of trying to be the best for his family, past, present, and future.
Hendren likes to say that he is the product of his ancestors’ prayers.
“They may not have specifically said, ‘We want some cowboy with a master’s degree that makes art,’” he said. “But they put it out there in the ether that they wanted to continue their legacy.”
And he continues this lineage by praying for future generations, that they will realize their own hopes and dreams.
After graduating, Hendren worked as a museum exhibit installer and curator but didn’t love it. He quit his job at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts and walked across the street to the La Fonda hotel bar for a drink. There, Gibson Nez, a silversmith and old cowboy who used to rodeo with his dad, sat down next to him and asked what was wrong. He looked at him and said, “Boy, you went to that fancy art school, and you learned how to pound metal. You ought to come to work for me. Help me make jewelry.”
Hendren agreed, working for Nez and eventually working for himself.
Another seed was planted: jewelry making could be a job.
*****
For Hendren, working with metal is like riding a bull.
“When you ride bulls, to do it successfully, you have to be able to turn off your conscious mind,” he said. “It’s just not humanly possible to think fast enough to match a bull, jump for jump.”
He believes jewelry making has to be unconscious too. It has to be natural. It has to flow from you unobstructed.
“When I’m making a piece of jewelry, one that is just in that flow state, it’s the same thing,” he said. “There’s no sense of time. There’s no hunger. There’s no thirst. There’s just you and that piece.”
That hard work is reflected in each handcrafted, intricate pair of earrings or pendant necklace sold in a gallery or on Hendren’s website. The influences of ranches, the reservation, and cowboys live on through Hendren’s art. Those aspects will never fade, but inspiration can be altered.
In 2020, Hendren’s second wife, Rayne, died at age forty-one. A few weeks later, his son Cody, at twenty-eight, was killed in a ranching accident. Two weeks later, the COVID-19 pandemic locked the country down. After this series of tragedies, he started a new collection: Even In Darkness There Is Beauty. For this black metal collection, he used more skulls and dark imagery—typically taboo in Navajo culture.
Following the deportation and ethnic cleansing of the Navajo on their forced march to Bosque Redondo in the nineteenth century, death wasn’t talked about. To talk about death was to invite it into your life.
But Hendren explains that he strives to seek Hózhó, a Navajo word that loosely translates to balance and harmony.
“Everything we do is supposed to be around seeking [Hózhó] and attaining it,” he said. “Death is the other side of life, so if we’re seeking balance and harmony, we must acknowledge it.”
To produce this imagery in his pieces, Hendren recycled scrap metal through a technique called tufa casting, in which a design is hand-carved into tufa stone, creating a negative space in which molten metal is poured.
“My work became a way for me to work through my mourning,” he said.
In 2011, Hendren’s son nearly died in another ranching incident, bringing Hendren to realize that one day, he himself would be gone. He also understood that he had been given nine bonus years with his son, for which he would always be grateful.
Through these deep periods of grief, he saw that the only physical things he would leave behind after death were those he had made. That is how he would be remembered. His jewelry would be his forest of a legacy, grown from lots of tiny seeds. He would only produce work he was truly proud of—work that could become heirlooms for the people who bought them.
“I want their children and their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren to look and say, “That was my dad’s buckle.’”
He wants to share pieces with the world that would fit into his mental picture of the buckaroo back in that barn in Nevada: a quirt held loosely in hand, a cigarette dangling from his lip… and a Shane R. Hendren buckle on his belt.
Soraya Keiser is a writing intern at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and a recent graduate of Bethel University, where she studied journalism and international relations. She is a current Fulbright Scholar to Bulgaria, serving as an English Teaching Assistant.
Shane Hendren is a member of GALACTIC, a collaborative project between Navajo Technical University, Indiana University, Ohio State University, and the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.
