Divine Creation: The Singing Cochiti Pueblo Mother ...

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Pottery is an important Native American art form that dates back many thousands

of years or or more. As Simon J. Ortiz notes, "[Pottery making] has more to do

with a sense of touching than with seeing. Fingers 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.

This pottery dates back thousands years in the Anasazi period, and 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, most objects such as bowls and dolls

were sacred. When used in certain ritual contexts, they were embodied prayers

to ancestors and spirit beings. The kachinas known to the western world 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.

 

After the introduction of railroads into the Southwest, surviving Native

Americans 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 indigenous Turtle Islanders. 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 aboriginal 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. Thus, for much of the twentieth

century, most Amer-Indians felt further 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 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 enter into the bodies of Pueblo dancers during

ceremonies and act as conduits between the world of humans and the world of the

great spirits.

 

Another such figure was the "Singing Mother" found among the Cochiti. These

sacred ceremonial figures are the ones that Cordero's Storyteller dolls echo

and revise. Her figures of a mother singing to her child ...

 

 

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forwarded by Millennium Twain

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