At Thunderbird Supply Company’s midtown Albuquerque warehouse, you’ll find hanks of glass beads, turquoise and malachite stones by the pound. Behind a sales counter sits the company’s bread and butter: Sheets, loops and wire spools of silver, ready for artists to craft into bracelets, belt buckles, and squash blossom necklaces.
“They come in and they buy this kind of stuff and then when they show you what’s made out of it you’re just like, ‘Wow, how do you even do that?’” said Mike Chavez, the store’s manager. “It’s like magic.”
Chavez said most of Thunderbird’s customers are Indigenous: Navajo, Pueblo and Apache artists who sometimes drive hundreds of miles to buy silver here…