While the art of Indian-crafted silver has flourished in the 20th century, all Indian jewelers can trace their art to a Navajo named Atsidi Saani, who learned blacksmithing at Fort Defiance, Arizona, in the 1850s. (It is generally believed that the Spanish colonizers of the Southwest purposely kept the techniques of metalworking from the region's native peoples.)

When Navajo people returned to their beloved mesas and canyons in 1868, following the four-year internment at Bosque Redondo, their new, more settled way of living led to many changes. Among other things, as they were no longer nomadic, they had greater opportunity to learn from each other. The People had long admired and used metal ornaments and horse equipment. They had used brass and copper wire to create bracelets and coins to fashion buttons. Atsidi Saani applied his metal working techniques, as appropriate, to silver, and he began to teach others.

Tools were crude. Smiths improvised and created their own crucibles, bellows, and emery paper. A smith may have only had a hammer and a piece of scrap railroad track for an anvil. Silver coins were melted or annealed into use. The Mexican peso soon gained new favor among smiths because it had a higher silver content than American coins.

By the 1890s, traders took advantage of the new market with silversmiths and began selling tools and silver slugs.

Silver jewelry also served as barter on the Reservation where money was practically non-existent. Traders took silver and turquoise jewelry as collateral, without giving a specific value to the piece, and the customer's purchase debt was secured by the jewelry. Any pawn unclaimed after the agreed period of not less than six months was considered "dead" and the trader could sell it.

After 1950, the use of pawn as collateral was prohibited on the Reservation; however, it continues to exist today on the borders of the Reservation. Older Indian jewelry (1880-1900) may appear crude by today's standards. Collectors of these pieces look for raised designs created with files and chisels and not repoussé.

(Repoussage is the art of working the back of the metal, usually with a hammer or stamp, producing raised surfaces such as the rounded concha). As the smiths acquired better tools, they produced more elaborately decorated pieces.