"I used to talk to the mermaids at Cochiti Lake. They would come out around midnight. I'm the only one who knows where they are."

Ivan Lewis was the son of Acoma Pueblo potter Lucy M. Lewis. He grew up in a home surrounded by some of the finest potters of Acoma Pueblo but he was never interested. He didn't really stick his hands in the clay until after he'd married Rita Banada from Cochiti Pueblo. First though, he served in the military in World War II. He and Rita were married while he was on leave in 1944 and after his honorable discharge in 1946, he moved to her home at Cochiti Pueblo.

From the beginning, Rita's mother, Ascencion Banada, kept urging Ivan to learn how to make pottery and slowly Rita started teaching him. Around 1965 he got a regular job working on the construction of Cochiti Dam and Reservoir. That took 12 years, during which time the construction crew destroyed the main source of the white and red clays used by Cochiti potters. New clay pits had to be found and the new clays had to be learned how to work with.

In 1977, Ivan and Rita finally became full-time potters. Ivan specialized in making figures. Among his favorites were mermaids and cowboys, although he enjoyed making deer, sheep, pigs and drummers.

In 1984, Ivan won the First, Second and Third Place ribbons in the Figures category at Santa Fe Indian Market. In 1990 he won the First and Third Place ribbons for Figures again. Sometimes he and Rita collaborated on their pieces but usually they didn't. She actually won more ribbons than he did.

Cochiti Pueblo

View west across Cochiti Pueblo

Cochiti Pueblo lies fifteen miles south of Santa Fe along the west bank of the Rio Grande. Frijoles Canyon in what is now Bandelier National Monument is the site of the pueblo's most recent ancestral home. The Eastern Keresans may have relocated to the Bandelier area from the Four Corners region around 1300.

Cochiti legend says that Clay Old Woman and Clay Old Man came to visit the Cochitis. While all the people watched, Clay Old Woman shaped a pot. Clay Old Man danced too close and kicked the pot. He rolled the clay from the broken pot into a ball, gave a piece to all the women in the village and told them never to forget to make pottery.

At Bandelier National Monument

In prehistoric times, human effigy pots, animals, duck canteens and bird shaped pitchers with beaks as spouts were common productions of the Cochiti potters. Many of these were condemned as idols and destroyed by the Franciscan priests. That problem stopped when the Spanish left in 1820 but the fantastic array of figurines created by Cochiti potters was essentially dormant until the railroad arrived. Then Cochiti potters were among the first to enter the tourist market and they produced many whimsical figures into the early 1900s. Then production followed the market into more conventional shapes.

Legend has it that a Ringling Brothers Circus train broke down near Cochiti Pueblo in the 1920s. Supposedly, the tribe's contact with the ringmaster, trapeze artists, opera singers, sideshow "freaks" and exotic animals paved the way for a variety of new figural subjects. However, shortly after the railroad passed through, a delegation of Cochiti men got on the train and traveled to Washington DC. There they were introduced to the President, spoke to Congress, and were taken on a tour of the "highlights" of American civilization in Washington and in New York City, incuding the Metropolitan Opera, the Bronx Zoo and a performance of the Ringling Brothers Circus. As none of the men could read or write, nor draw, what they brought back to Cochiti was what they remembered of things they had never seen before. As their stories spread arond the village, elements of the stories grew and deformed. An astute observer will find angels, nativities, cowboys, tourist caricatures, snakes, dinosaurs, turtles, goats, two-headed opera singers, clowns, tattooed strongmen, Moorish nuns and even mermaids in the Cochiti pottery pantheon, many produced only since the early 1960s and based on characters described in Cochiti's oral history.

A few modern potters make traditional styled pots with black and red flowers, animals, clouds, lightning and geometric designs but most Cochiti pottery artists now create figurines. Most notable is the storyteller, a grandfather or grandmother figure with "babies" perched on it. Helen Cordero is credited with creating the first storyteller in 1964 to honor her grandfather. The storyteller style was quickly picked up by other pueblos and each modified the form to match their local situation (ie: clay colors and tribal and religious traditions). In some pueblos, storytellers are also now made as drummers and as a large variety of animals.

Today, Cochiti potters face the challenge of acquiring the clay for the white slip. Construction of Cochiti Dam in the 1960s destroyed their primary source of their trademark white slip and gray clay. Now the white slip comes from one dwindling source at Santo Domingo, Cochiti Pueblo's neighbor to the south.

Most outsiders who visit Cochiti Pueblo these days do so on the way to or from either the recreation area on Cochiti Lake or Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument.