 |
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
 |
|||||||||
 |
|
|
Activities: Context Activities Singing Mothers and Storytelling Grandfathers: The Art and Meaning of Pueblo Pottery  Back to Context Activities
Pottery is an important Native American art form that dates back thousands of years. As Simon J. Ortiz notes, "[Pottery making] has more to do with a sense of touching than with seeing because fingers have to know the texture of clay and how the pottery is formed from lines of shale, strata and earth movements." Pueblo pottery is considered some of the most beautiful, and it has deep ties to storytelling traditions. Pueblo cultures, along with those of the Navajo and Apache, constitute the dominant native traditions in the American Southwest. Pottery dates back over fifteen hundred years to the Anasazi period, but in the past few decades there has been a tremendous revival in pottery-making among the Pueblo people, led in part by the Cochiti Pueblo potter Helen Cordero and her Storyteller dolls. Cordero's pottery challenged the appropriation of Native American art by white art collectors. Native works of art and craft have a troubled history in mainstream American culture. Like so much of native culture, objects such as bowls and dolls were at least potentially sacred: if used in certain ritual contexts, they acted as embodied prayers to ancestors or gods. The kachinas in the archive are good examples of this: they are dolls, but they embody a ritual significance as well [8110, 8209]. As such, they were not to be handled and scrutinized by curious Europeans, even investigative anthropologists. Nevertheless, soon after the introduction of railroads into the Southwest, Indians (many of whom found themselves desperately poor after having their traditional ways of life disrupted) began producing pottery and other artifacts for European commercial consumption. This trade, which began in the 1880s, allowed a modest income for many Pueblo and other native peoples. In most cases, the objects differed in subtle but profoundly significant ways from the ones intended for tribal use, and so did not directly endanger the tribe's traditions: this practice continues to be a concern for some native writers who incorporate traditional material in their work. Commercial production had the effect of making native-made objects into either mysterious oddities or "artworks" whose consumers had no sense of their sacred origin. Hence, for much of the twentieth century, many Indians felt invaded and exploited by the dissemination of their artifacts into white America. As anthropologist Barbara Babcock and photographers Guy Monthan and Doris Monthan detail in their book The Pueblo Storyteller, in the late 1950s Helen Cordero began producing pottery that recaptured and transformed the traditional Pueblo ways of art. Cordero turned to the traditional construction of objects that possessed deep cultural significance: these are called fetishes (if used in ceremony), figurines, or effigies. Traditionally, clay for the Pueblo was a living substance with its own spirit, so that anything constructed from clay acquires, as Babcock writes, "a kind of personal and conscious existence as it [is] being made." All Pueblo ceremonies used clay objects, which are closely associated with the original creation of life in every known Pueblo creation story. Some of these objects were vessels and some were human figures—for example, those known as "kachina dolls." The dolls stand for kachinas, masked supernatural spirits who are said to enter into the bodies of Pueblo dancers during ceremonies and act as conduits between the world of humans and the world of spirits or gods. Another such figure was the "Singing Mother" found among the Cochiti. These figures, which may not have been ceremonial but certainly partook of the Pueblo assumptions that made ceremonies possible, are the ones that Cordero's Storyteller dolls echo and revise. The figures of a mother singing to her child evoke fertility; as Babcock writes, they make "the connection between human reproduction and other, life-giving forms of generation." As such, childbirth and child raising are linked to the passing down of stories and songs across the generations, emphasizing the interlinking of all creation, including the inextricability of human culture and the natural world. Between 1900 and 1960, Pueblo artifacts made for trade were weak in quality and few in number. But Cordero first created a figure that evoked the Singing Mother on commission for a white folk art collector, and in the process managed to transform the old tradition into a living art form for the present. As always in native traditions, she emphasized the local and the specific: she changed the mother figure to a male, modeled on her grandfather whom she remembers as a powerful storyteller, and she added multiple children to the figures (there are as many as thirty on some pieces). None of her hundreds of figures are identical, nor are the many figures created by Pueblo potters inspired by her work. They are images of the passing down of tradition that are themselves the evolution of tradition. For potters like Cordero, the importance of the clay and its relationship to the stories of the oral tradition help keep the art traditions alive. Questions
[5890] Henry Peabody, Pottery in the Interior of an Acoma Dwelling, New Mexico (c. 1900), courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Pottery is an important part of Pueblo culture. Even clay is believed to be endowed with a "spirit" of its own. Here we see the inside of a traditional Pueblo home in which one family's roof was another's floor. [6756] Anonymous, Frontispiece from The Land of the Pueblos (1891), courtesy of J. B. Alden, New York. Although Pueblo pottery has long been considered sacred and used in rituals, many pots today are made for the tourist trade and for non-Pueblo collectors. Potter Helen Cordero, however, rejects the Western sense of "art" as ornamental or merely entertaining. [7312] Anonymous, Video of corn dancers (c. 1940), courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration. The people of Acoma have been making pottery for centuries, both for everyday use and for rituals such as the Corn Dance. The Corn Dance is held annually at a tribal site near Albuquerque, New Mexico. The dance was given by the supernatural Mother, who wanted her people to have a public dance which all could enjoy. Prayer sticks are used in the dance to bring legendary hero Koshari. Sacred clowns painted in black and white join the dance. [8113] Huron Tribe, Pair of dolls (1830-50), courtesy of the Portland Art Museum, gift of Elizabeth Cole Butler [88.43.6-7]. Dolls like these, made by the Huron Tribe in the mid-nineteenth century, played a number of roles in traditional Native American culture, including being used to teach children their people's history. The dolls were made from wood, wool, and cotton cloth and were adorned with metal and glass beads, leather, and real hair. [8116] Acoma and Santo Domingo, Jars (c. 1900, 1920), courtesy of the Portland Art Museum, Elizabeth Cole Butler Collection. Soon after the introduction of railroads into the Southwest, Indians (many of whom became desperately poor after having their traditional ways of life disrupted) began producing pottery and other artifacts for sale. [8122] Santo Domingo Tribe, Jar (n.d.), courtesy of the Portland Art Museum, gift of Elizabeth Cole Butler [1481]. Native American pottery, traditionally sacred or utilitarian, began to be produced in its contemporary "decorative" form in the late nineteenth century. In the 1920s and 1930s, dealers, archaeologists, and tribal members formed the Indian Arts Fund to collect traditional Pueblo pottery and encourage its production. |
|
 This tool builds multimedia presentations for classrooms or assignments.   An online collection of 3000 artifacts for classroom use.   Download the Instructor Guide PDF for this Unit. |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|