A small red spoutless canteen decorated on top with a sgraffito pueblo dancer, feather and geometric design made by TsePe of San Ildefonso
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TsePe, San Ildefonso, A small red spoutless canteen decorated on top with a sgraffito pueblo dancer, feather and geometric design
TsePe
San Ildefonso
$ 495
dksi5d102
A small red spoutless canteen decorated on top with a sgraffito pueblo dancer, feather and geometric design
3.5 in L by 3.5 in W by 2.25 in H
Condition: Very good
Signature: TP



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TsePe

1940-2000

San Ildefonso

Black jar with a sienna rim, sgraffito avanyu and geometric design and an inlaid stone

TsePe was born into San Ildefonso Pueblo in 1940. His parents, Robert and Rose Gonzales, first named him John but he changed that just after he finished high school. TsePe learned how to make pottery while watching his mother as he grew up. She was from San Juan Pueblo and deep-carved her pieces while TsePe learned to prefer sgraffito and low relief carving.

When he was 19, TsePe married Dora Gachupin of Zia Pueblo. Contrary to Pueblo tradition, she moved to his home at San Ildefonso. She had learned the Zia way of making pottery as she grew up. At San Ildefonso she learned the San Ildefonso way of making pottery from her mother-in-law. Together, TsePe and Dora were exposed to the works of Popovi and Tony Da from San Ildefonso and Joseph Lonewolf, Camilio Tafoya and Grace Medicine Flower from Santa Clara. They all worked to push the quality of sgraffito work higher and higher. TsePe also added turquoise and heishe bead inlays and micaceous and green clays to his pottery, styles adopted and developed further by Russell Sanchez.

TsePe and Dora divorced around 1979 and Dora went on to an award-winning career on her own. TsePe met and married Jennifer Sisneros of Santa Clara soon after the divorce. TsePe passed on in 2000 and Jennifer moved back to Santa Clara, reassumed her maiden name and later married Alfred Naranjo. TsePe did influence her pottery-making style in that she added green and micaceous slips to her repertoire. TsePe always credited his mother with inspiring him to be a potter. His daughters, Andrea, Candace, Gerri, Irene and Jennifer, credit both TsePe and Dora with inspiring them.

Some Awards TsePe Won

  • 1976 - Second Place ribbon with Dora, incised bowl, Santa Fe Indian Market
  • 1978 - Second Place ribbon with Dora, carved black jar, Santa Fe Indian Market
  • 1978 - Second Place ribbon with Dora, carved black jar with avanyu design, Santa Fe Indian Market

San Ildefonso Pueblo

Sacred Black Mesa at San Ildefonso Pueblo
Black Mesa at San Ildefonso Pueblo

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.

Map showing the location of San Ildefonso Pueblo

For more info:
at Wikipedia
official website
Pueblos of the Rio Grande, by Daniel Gibson
Photo is in the public domain

Canteens

Acoma, Laguna, Hopi, Zuni, Santa Clara, Cochiti, Santo Domingo
Ohkay Owingeh, San Ildefonso, Tesuque, Mata Ortiz and Casas Grandes

A polychrome canteen with a flared opening, a geometric design, and a braided horsehair handle

Luis Lopez
Mata Ortiz and Casas Grandes
A large black on red round canteen with handles and decorated with a rainbow, cloud, plant and geometric design

Unknown
San Ildefonso
A large black on white canteen with handles and decorated with a crane and fish medallion surrounded by a spiral mesa geometric design

Grace Chino
Acoma



Travel across the Southwest landscape required that travelers carry their drinking water with them. Pottery canteens fulfilled that function for them. Archaeologists have found the oldest canteens in abandoned pueblos in Chaco Canyon and among the abandoned Mogollon pueblos in the Tularosa Valley, dated back more than 1,000 years. If they were decorated, it was usually with geometric designs in black on a grey-to-white background. They also had some sort of handles on the sides. The spout was small and easily used for drinking from. Easily plugged with a piece of corn cob, too. The handles were sturdy enough that a strap could be passed through them (or tied around them) to carry the canteen across the body like a sling. They were also round. Flat-back canteens arrived with the Spanish.

A miniature black canteen with handles and carved with an avanyu design on the front and rear

Shirley Tafoya
Santa Clara
A polychrome canteen with 1 child sitting on the spout, 2 lizard appliques, handles and a plant and geometric design

Seferina Ortiz
Cochiti
A black-on-red marbleized clay canteen decorated with a fine line and geometric design and a leather strap detail

Calvin Analla Jr.
Laguna

Gonzales Family Tree

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.

    Ramona Sanchez Gonzales (1885-), second wife of Juan Gonzales (painter)
    • Blue Corn (Crucita Gonzales Calabaza)(1921-1999)(step-daughter of Ramona) & Santiago Calabaza (Santo Domingo) (d. 1972)
      • Joseph Calabaza (Tha Mo Thay)
      • Diane Calabaza-Jenkins (Heishi Flower) (1955-)
      • Elliot Calabaza
    • Oqwa Pi (Abel Sanchez)(1899-1971) & Tomasena Cata Sanchez (1903-1985)
      • Skipped generation
        • Russell Sanchez (1966-)
    • Rose (Cata) Gonzales (daughter-in-law) (1900-1989) & Robert Gonzales (1900-1935)
      • (Johnnie) Tse-Pe (Gonzales)(1940-2000) & Dora Tse-Pe (Gachupin, first wife, Zia, 1939-2022)
        • Andrea Tse Pe (1975-)
        • Candace Tse-Pe (1968-)
        • Gerri Tse-Pe (1963-)
        • Irene Tse-Pe (1961-)
        • Jennifer Tse-Pe (1960-1977)
      • (Johnnie) Tse-Pe (1940-2000) & Jennifer Tse Pe (Sisneros - second wife, Santa Clara)
    • Rose' students:
      • Juanita Gonzales (1909-1988) & Louis "Wo-Peen" Gonzales (brother of Rose Gonzales husband)(1905-1992)
        • Adelphia Martinez (1935-2022)
      • Lorenzo Gonzales (1922-1995)(adopted by Louis & Juanita Gonzales) & Delores Naquayoma (Hopi/Winnebago)
        • Jeanne M. Gonzales (1959-)
        • John Gonzales (1955-)
        • Laurencita Gonzales
        • Linda Gonzales
        • Marie Ann Gonzales
        • Raymond Gonzales
        • Robert Gonzales

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.

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