From Acoma Pueblo Dolores Lewis came to the Bernalillo Indian Arts Festival to give a pottery demonstration. Her niece, Claudia Mitchell, also a potter, came too.
The clay they brought was too wet too sticky. It needed to be drier, not something you’d say
July 2021 about anything else in New Mexico.
Dolores Lewis pinches pulls the ball of clay one palm cups the other covers.
Her hands the vessel.
Clay won’t work.
She coils a story.
Drought. No rainwater. But someone just called. Report: rain on the mesa cisterns full.
She said I’m going to get some when I get back. Tap water not so great.
She pats the too sticky lump.
She said we hike for everything.
white slip yellow sandstone shale orange creekbed clay
Could take a month to dry.
She said My father was the only one who knew where to get the rocks for mineral paint.
Once when he was old and before he died she asked her father where the place was. He said
Far
Cow dung fire the best fire traditional fire. Because of drought we need tribal permission for dung fire. We don’t get it.
She said They think we don’t know how to control it.
We do.
She wraps the too wet clay pushes it aside. She said I make my own tools
shards
4-6-8 from unsatisfactory or broken pots mixed into clay of a new pot to bind
shapers
cedar sticks pieces of board a ping pong paddle metal lids
a gift: a shaper given to her mother Acoma potter Lucy Lewis by
San Idelfonso potter Maria Martinez and passed on
for smoothing
rocks
wet ones (no machine tumbled stones)
gourds
for smoothing
narrow-leaf yucca
for painting
Spelling her aunt, Claudia Mitchell takes over chews yucca leaf until fibers separate the way she likes her brushes sets it aside to dry and tells us collectors and gallery owners influence how pots are made depending on their taste
(uninformed)
and what customers
(uninformed)
want
Dolores Lewis
mushes clay with the heel of her hand
picks up a finished seed pot
She said
I leave gourd lines to show the pot is handmade
Handmade pots scored by
fingernails
fingerprints evident
the clay too wet
demonstration ends
water on the mesa waiting
Photo by Jane Hammons
—
Jane Hammons taught writing at UC Berkeley for many years before returning home to New Mexico. Her writing appears in a variety of magazines and journals: Alaska Quarterly Review, Columbia Journalism Review, Southwestern American Literature, San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, and The Yellow Medicine Review. She has work forthcoming in EastOver Press Anthology of Rural Writers. She is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation.
