Erik Fender was born in 1970. His mother is Martha Appleleaf, his grandmother Carmelita Dunlap. Johnnie Tse-Pe was his uncle.
As a boy, Erik learned about working with clay by watching his mother, his grandmother and his uncle, Carlos Sunrise Dunlap, making pottery. He couldn't keep his hands out of the clay and learned quickly. He was earning blue ribbons for his painting and for his pottery before he was 18. Sometimes his mother had him paint pots for her.
Erik developed an innovative black-on-red style where he separates bands of painted design with bands of low-relief sgraffito design. He also makes green-on-black and polychrome pots.
Erik told us he's inspired by historic pieces of San Ildefonso pottery. He feels the spirit in it and wants to keep that spirit alive in his pueblo. So in addition to creating San Ildefonso Revival styles of his own, he teaches classes in making pottery and jewelry at the Poeh Cultural Center at Pojoaque Pueblo. That's where he gets his fun: hanging out with his students and sharing insights about Tewa culture and history.
Erik says he's drawn from designs of the past to help create his own. His pots speak for themselves, and that's the kind of legacy he wants. He signs most of his pieces Than Tsideh, meaning: Sunbird.
San Ildefonso Pueblo is located about twenty miles northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, west of Pojoaque, south of Santa Clara and straddling the Rio Grande. Although their ancestry has been traced to prehistoric pueblos in the Greater Mesa Verde area, the prehistoric pueblo at Tsankawi, in a non-contiguous parcel of Bandelier National Monument, is their most recent ancestral home. Tsankawi abuts the reservation on its northwest side.
Franciscan monks named the village after San Ildefonso and in 1617, forced the tribe to build a mission church on top of the village's main kiva. Before that the village was known as Powhoge, "where the water cuts through" (in Tewa). Today's pueblo was established as long ago as the 1300s. When the Spanish arrived in 1540, they estimated the village population at about 2,000.
That mission was destroyed during the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and when Don Diego de Vargas returned to reclaim San Ildefonso in 1694, he found virtually all the Tewa people camped out on top of nearby Black Mesa. After an extended siege the two sides negotiated a treaty and the people returned to their villages. However, the next 250 years were not so good for them.
The swine flu pandemic of 1918 reduced the pueblo's population to about 90. Their population has grown to more than 600 since but the only economic activity available on the pueblo itself involves creating art in one form or another. The only other work is off-pueblo. San Ildefonso's population is small compared to neighboring Santa Clara Pueblo, but the pueblo maintains its own religious traditions and ceremonial feast days.
San Ildefonso is most known for being the home of the most famous Pueblo Indian potter, Maria Martinez. Many other excellent potters from this pueblo have produced quality pottery, too, among them: Blue Corn, Tonita and Juan Roybal, Dora Tse Pe and Rose Gonzales. Of course, the descendants of Maria Martinez are still important pillars of San Ildefonso's pottery tradition. Maria's influence reached far and wide, so far and wide that even Juan Quezada of the Mata Ortiz pottery renaissance in Chihuahua, Mexico, came to San Ildefonso to learn from her.
Disclaimer: This "family tree" is a best effort on our part to determine who the potters are in this family and arrange them in a generational order. The general information available is questionable so we have tried to show each of these diagrams to living members of each family to get their input and approval, too. This diagram is subject to change should we get better info.
Some of the above info is drawn from Pueblo Indian Pottery, 750 Artist Biographies, by Gregory Schaaf, © 2000, Center for Indigenous Arts & Studies
Other info is derived from personal contacts with family members and through interminable searches of the Internet.