Hopi Pottery: Concerning Health and Wellbeing

Chapters on Wellness
Food
Holistic Healing
Hopi Pottery
Dancing for Healing
Curanderismo

Introduction

Most societies are guided by cultural concepts of health and wellbeing that derive from belief systems defining proper relationships among beings in the world, both animate and inanimate. These sophisticated ideas about balanced relationships among humans, other-than-humans, and natural and spiritual elements are often manifested in, even embodied by, complex art forms. Yet those ideas are often inaccessible to people who do not share these concepts. Using the example of Hopi pottery, a widely celebrated Native American art form, master Hopi potter Karen Charley and Maxwell Curator of Ethnology Lea McChesney explore the ways in which Hopi pottery manifests an ideal of Hopi wellbeing: emotional health, physical strength, a melodious voice, and the capability to act purposefully in the world, in harmony with other elements of the human, natural, and spiritual realms, to nurture robust relationships. In fact, pots and other art forms are considered to be animate social beings, not inanimate objects.

The westernmost of Puebloan populations, Hopi people inhabited the four corners area of the U.S. southwest for millennia, being confined to a reservation in northeastern Arizona since 1882. Hopis express key concepts of health and wellbeing in a tradition that, through their dedicated efforts, has endured within a complex of permanent architecture, maize farming, and elaborate art forms including painted murals, colorful textiles, complex ritual performances, and polychrome pottery. The yellow ware pottery produced by Hopis and their ancestors is distinct in the Southwest, dating from the fourteenth century to the present.

Hopi Ontology and a Hopi Pot

This large contemporary jar by renowned Hopi potter Karen Kahe Charley expresses key features of Hopi ontology, or the specific properties and relations among their vital concepts and categories. Importantly, these properties are aesthetic, experiential, and multisensory. The beauty of Hopi pottery is not accessed by sight alone, but more importantly through touch, taste, sound, smell, and social interaction.

A potter assesses her work through the entire process of pottery making: as she collects her clay, and as she forms, polishes, paints, and finally fires her pot. Yet the true test of its beauty and integrity comes after the pot has cooled enough to be retrieved from a fire fueled by sheep dung that burns for 4-6 hours. Here we highlight four Hopi aesthetic concepts that also define the ideal of health and wellbeing for Hopi social beings: a sonorous voice, physical strength, emotional health, and capacities to both circulate autonomously in the world and to engender and strengthen warm social relations, the foundation of any collective action.

Additional Pot Information

Made in spring 2018, this jar is inspired by a pot made by the famous Hopi-Tewa potter Nampeyo that is featured in the Hopi Pottery Workbook, vol. I, April 2017, of the Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. The volume was issued for the First Intergenerational Hopi Pottery Festival, held at the Third Mesa Veterans’ Memorial Center, Kykotsmovi, AZ on April 29, 2017 and funded in part by the Ortiz Center for Intercultural Study, University New Mexico.

Pottery Aesthetics as Indicators of Health and Wellbeing

Karen and all Hopi potters greet their pots as they emerge from the fire, querying the pot’s integrity with a sharp ding or finger snap to its exterior. In reply, the pot’s resonance with a clear, bell-like sound emanating from its inner chamber articulates that it is intact or physically strong. The call and response interaction manifests that the pot fired whole and has no cracks, which would cause it to make a dull sound. This voiced interaction thus demonstrates the strength and social viability of the pot. In the early 20th century, anthropologist Ruth Bunzel recorded a potter commenting that a pot that is pretty but not strong is worthless.

Next, Karen’s visual assessment addresses the blush, or range of color variation from deep red to rose to cream resulting from both the type of clay used (a gray clay that, when fired, produces a range of color according to the proximity of the pot to the heat source) and the outdoor firing that permits air circulation around the pot, drawing heat from the burning fuel towards it in varying intensities. The deep color in particular is called blush, but the range of color overall is highly valued. This term, of course, refers to a human emotional response that draws blood to the face causing it to turn red. That emotional response is not controlled by the person experiencing it, nor is the blush of the pot controlled by the potter. While the human emotional response is fleeting, the blush of a pot is permanent and permeates its body. Blush manifests that the potter worked in concert with the clay, which is itself animate, during production, and did not control the firing other than to fire at the appropriate time of day, use the appropriate materials and place them properly, and offer a prayer when the fire was left to burn on its own. A pot’s blush manifests that the potter’s intentions were in consonance with other elements in the natural and spiritual worlds: the life of the clay she shaped, the gathered resources she properly prepared to make red and black pigments that flow smoothly and adhere well to the surface, and the climatic conditions and spiritual forces brought to bear in her firing to create an auspicious context for the birth of the pot.

With its deep, inherent color, a pot with blush embodies a social being with emotional health that is capable of both expressing its beauty and engendering warm social relations with others with whom it comes in contact. In this way, the pot reproduces the same emotionally close relationship of the clay with the potter in the formative stages of the pot’s creation, and the close, trusting relationships of the pot, potter, and elements of the natural and spiritual worlds that transformed the pot from a vulnerable to a viable social being through the firing.

The creation of a physically strong and emotionally healthy pot emanates from the original relationship Karen establishes first with her clay when selecting it, choosing sweet tasting clay with which she can work with ease to mold her pot, then working closely, through talking and tender touch, to breathe life into the pot as she forms it. The close emotional and social relationships that are formed in this art form are the same that are required for the successful realization of any larger collective effort. These aesthetic dimensions then provide the foundation for the health and well being of Hopi society at large, just as pots are exchanged in Hopi communities as well as in markets to create flourishing social networks.

A pot that is properly molded, polished, painted and fired, and emerges intact with a sonorous voice has the capacity to circulate autonomously in the world. It can leave the actual and metaphorical home of the Hopi Reservation and Hopi world, creating new social relations as it travels to new homes far distant from Hopiland. The same warm, glowing feelings that produced the pot are regenerated in these new social contexts, provided that those who encounter the pot know that it has this capacity.  In this way, Hopi pots carry the capacity both to physical and emotionally express their own health, as well as to foster the wellbeing of others. The exchange and circulation of pottery not only strengthens warm social relations that already exist but also engenders new social relations grounded in these aesthetics wherever pots find a new home. All the while, Hopi concepts of health and wellbeing are reproduced throughout the world.

Authors: Karen Charley and Lea McChesney, PhD

Karen Kahe Charley, from Sitsom’ovi Village (Flower Hill Place) in the First Mesa community, is a member of the Butterfly-Badger clan, known locally for its pottery. Trained by master potter Marcella Kahe (1916-2008), her mother and an Arizona Living Treasure, she has won numerous awards since 1991 at prestigious markets such as the Museum of Northern Arizona’s Hopi Marketplace, the Heard Museum Fair, and Santa Fe’s Indian Market. Her work is held in museum and private collectors. 

Lea S. McChesney, Maxwell Museum Curator of Ethnology and Alfonso Ortiz Center Director at UNM, is a cultural and museum anthropologist specializing in comparative perspectives on material, visual, and expressive culture; representation and inscription; indigeneity, gender, and identity; and the cultural heritage legacy of historic museum collections for Indigenous communities.
Karen and Lea have been collaborating in research, publication, and public presentations for over twenty years.

Additional resources about the Hopi community:

Hopi Tribe
Contact
Hopi Cultural Preservation Office

Additional resources to see Hopi pottery and artistic traditions:

Hopi Iconography Project, Museum of Northern Arizona

Hopi Heritage Festival, Museum of Northern Arizona, Flagstaff, AZ

“HOME: Native People in the Southwest,” Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ (permanent exhibit that features the work of Karen Kahe Charley and her mother, Marcella Kahe)

Andrea Fisher Fine Pottery, Santa Fe, NM

Fourth Intergenerational Hopi Pottery Festival
Date TBD, First Mesa villages, Hopi Reservation

Additional resources about Hopi pottery:

Charley, Karen K. and Lea S. McChesney, 2007, “Form and Meaning in Indigenous Aesthetics: A Hopi Pottery Perspective.” American Indian Art Magazine 32(4):84-91.

McChesney, Lea S. and Karen K. Charley, 2011, “Body Talk: New Language for Hopi Pottery through Cultural Heritage Collaboration.” Practicing Anthropology 33(2):21-27.

Hopi Pottery Oral History Project, Recovering Voices Program
Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History