For Christmas every year, Beverly Cox comes to Santa Fe with her husband Gordon. Beverly holds a Grande Diploma from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and has written ten cookbooks, including Spirit of the Harvest: North American Indian Cooking, winner of a James Beard award. We worked together at Native Peoples magazine and I am honored to have her as a friend. She has an elegant kitchen on their remote ranch on the Colorado/Wyoming border that comfortably embraces her international gourmet training.
Beverly and Gordon didn’t make it last year because of the pandemic, but the year before she arrived with two small boxes. In one was a dragonfly that she had chased down and she was excited to share it with me, having saved it since summer. It is always a special moment when someone brings me a dragonfly. So often the excitement of discovery is still palpable. We have visited the ranch which is remotely near Laramie, Wyoming and enjoyed their world class hospitality. I could picture her out on the grassy range in hot pursuit of this darner, probably near a water source for the cattle.
The other box had a piece of jewelry from her mother’s estate and she wondered if I could help her with its provenance. It was a dragonfly pin/pendant made of silver, coral and spiny oyster. Her mother had passed a few years ago and she knew only that it was Native American. I photographed it before returning it to her at La Fonda Hotel and promised to keep an eye out for any clues as to who might have made it. The next spring, up at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, I noticed a pendant that was very similar. It was by Ray Adakai, a Navajo jeweler. Mystery solved!
But not so fast….
I contacted Maddie Adakai, Ray’s sister, just to confirm. She asked me to send a photo of the back of Beverly’s pin (above left) which I did. Maddie is also a jeweler. Then, she updated me with this message:
“So this weekend I made a trip to see my family in NM and my brother Ray took a better look at the photos. He states that the first one is definitely not one of his designs (photo with the red background).
“If you take a closer look at both pins the first one is only a pin and not a pendant combo the series made by Ray were both pendant and pin combos. The dragonfly tail on the first is stamped and not made of soldered silver beads, and the eye design is totally different. The first pin also has rough edges on the soldered points for the pin. Most of Ray’s work is not rough. One of the other design differences is the cutout in the wingspan, Rays work does not have those cutouts… “
Maddie refered me to a gallery in Gallup to further pursue this mystery. So stay tuned!