Nampeyo of Hano was born around 1859 in the First Mesa village of Hano. Her mother was White Corn of the Tewa Corn Clan. Her father was Quootsva of the Walpi Snake Clan. According to tradition, she was raised in the Tewa Corn Clan at Hano. She and her brothers, Kano and Patuntupi never went to school. On the other hand, her brother, Tom Polacca, did go to school and learned to speak English.

The Hopi language in those days was not yet a written language and Nampeyo never learned to speak, read or write English. She grew up speaking Tewa and Hopi. She learned the basics of the Hopi art of pottery making from her father's mother and gathered pointers from other experienced Hopi-Tewa and Walpi potters.

By 1881 she'd already earned a reputation as one of Hopi's finest potters. Up until then most of her pottery was based on the styles and designs of Walpi. Then she began the change to doing her painting directly on the highly polished surface of her Jeddito yellow clay, just as the potters of ancient Sikyátki and Awat'ovi had done. She was encouraged to do this by Thomas Varker Keam, the proprietor of the Keams Canyon Trading Post, and his assistant, Alexander Stephen. Between 1875 and 1892 almost the entire pottery output of Nampeyo was purchased, en masse, by Keam. In 1892 Keam sold his entire collection of modern and ancient Hopi pottery to the Essex-Peabody Museum of Harvard College and it was transferred there.

Nampeyo married Lesou, her second husband, in 1878. Annie, their first daughter, was born in 1884, William Lesso in 1893, Nellie in 1896, Wesley in 1899 and Fannie in 1900.

There is an oft-repeated story that Lesou was employed by J. Walter Fewkes during his excavation of the ruins of Sikyátki in 1895 and it was there that the ancient Sikyátki designs and pottery styles were found. However, Sikyátki styles and designs had been on the market for ten to fifteen years and were already becoming known as "revival" pottery. Other research has shown that Lesou never worked for Fewkes. About 1880 anthropologist Alexander Stephen came to Keams Canyon and began to investigate the area. He and trader Thomas Keam began encouraging the potters of Walpi and Hano to make pottery with designs found among the ruins of Awatovi and Sikyátki, where the ground was profusely littered with ancient potsherds. Nampeyo copied those designs on paper and later incorporated many of them into her catalog of decorations. She also figured out the style of pottery that each of those designs had been painted on and by the late 1890s she'd become quite famous for her work. She also studied the intricacies of the ancient potsherds and searched out the various clays used to produce and decorate them. She worked out the firing techniques used by the ancients to produce the high-fired sherds that she was finding all over the ground.

Nampeyo and her family traveled to Chicago in 1898 and showed her pottery to the world. Between 1905 and 1907 she was the Fred Harvey "Artist in Residence" at the Grand Canyon Lodge. She returned to Chicago in 1910 to exhibit her work at the United States Land and Irrigation Exposition.

In the end it's not that Nampeyo invented pottery or that she was self-taught, it's that she was the right person in the right place at the right time to revive the ancient shapes and designs. She deviated slightly from the especially isolated and conservative Hopi norm in her assimilation and adaptation of these ancient styles and designs. Nampeyo might not have begun the movement now known as Sikyátki Revival but she became its most famous practitioner and almost single-handedly ignited the renaissance of Hopi pottery making at the turn of the 20th century.

Nampeyo was diagnosed with trachoma in her early years and was essentially blind for the last 20 years of her life. However, she was so adept at making her pots that blindness didn't slow her down much and didn't hurt the quality of her pots in any way. She did have other members of her family do the painting for her, especially her youngest daughter Fannie. In her last few days, she left the Corn Clan house in Hano and moved down to her son Wesley's home in Polacca. It was in Wesley and Cecilia's bed that she died in 1942, leaving behind more than 40 direct descendants to carry on the tradition she pioneered.

Photo of Nampeyo is in the Public Domain of the United States.

The Hopi People

Walpi, as seen by Ansel Adams in 1941

The Hopi People and Their Pottery

Looking across Tewa Village to First Mesa

Pottery was being made in the area of the Hopi mesas before generational migrants from the area of central Mexico began to arrive in the 600's. Those migrants brought a much better ceramic technology with them. They also brought a whole new design vocabulary, architectural advancements, more defined rituals and better seeds, along with other agricultural advancements. They spread out across the Southwest between the Colorado River and the Rio Grande, from the Chihuahua and Sonora deserts north to the Great Salt Lake, and they multiplied. The weather of this countryside was very fickle, though, and they had to discover new ways to store their food and keep it good for years. The best tool for preserving things was pottery. Then they began decorating their pottery with their prayers for the seed within, and for the survival of their people.

For hundreds of years those designs were repetitive geometrics, in black-on-white or black-on-gray-white bisques, most matte but more and more polished as time went on. In the 900's, from the south again, figures in black-on-white were introduced. Then came figures and designs in red-and-black-on-white. Then came figures and designs in various combinations of red, black and white on various backgrounds. Each step in the development of decorative and color schemes is reflective of experiential religious developments within one clan or another, one pueblo or another. A lot of what flowered into what we know now as "Sikyátki style and design" was developed in bits and pieces along the rim of Antelope Mesa. It took the experience of Sikyátki to put it all together. Just as the design palette of Sikyátki reached its peak, the village's chief determined they had strayed too far from the traditionally conservative Hopi path and they needed to be put to death for it. He arranged with the elders of Walpi and other villages to have the deed done and sometime in 1625 it was completed. Everyone in the village was killed except for a few ritual specialists who were saved for their spiritual value.

A mural from Awatovi

The styles and designs of Sikyátki lived on on some Awatovi pottery for a few years but the entire design palette changed after the Spanish arrived in force in 1629. San Bernardo Polychrome came into production almost immediately with the reduction in labor force as so many of the Awatovis were forced to serve the priests and build a mission. The design palette changed, too, when all the kachina designs were forced out by the Franciscan priests. Almost everything changed again with the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. There was a general return to themes prevalent before the Spanish arrived across the entire Southwest, except by then most potters were firing their pots using sheep, cow or horse manure. Around the Hopi mesas, a merging of designs and supernaturals with the layouts from the San Bernardo and Sikyatki phases happened. Some archaeologists have termed the pottery that was produced for 100 years after the Pueblo Revolt as "Payupki phase." It faded out around 1780, about the same time the last of the Tiwas and Keresans returned to the Rio Grande Valley from the village of Payupki on Second Mesa. After that came the phases of Polacca Polychrome, including the white-slipped years after the times of drought and disease in the 1800s that were spent at Zuni.

By the mid-1800s, the Hopi pottery tradition had been almost completely abandoned, its utilitarian purposes taken over by cheap enamelware brought in by Anglo traders. Hopi pottery production sputtered along until the 1880's when one woman, Nampeyo of Hano, almost single-handedly revived it. Nampeyo lived in Hano on First Mesa and was inspired by pot sherds found among the nearby ruins of the ancient village of Sikyátki. Like every other potter around First Mesa at the time, Nampeyo was producing jars, bowls and canteens, often with one surface slipped white and decorated with designs in black-and/or-red. At the urging of Anglo traders' Alexander Stephen and Thomas Varker Keam, she began experimenting with polishing the surface of pieces coiled entirely of Jeddito yellow clay and then painting her designs directly on that. Today, credit is given to Nampeyo for fully reviving the Sikyátki style. She was so good that Jesse Walter Fewkes, the first archaeologist to formally excavate Sikyátki, was concerned that her creations would shortly become confused with those made hundreds of years previously.

Sikyátki pottery shapes are very distinctive: flattened jars with wide shoulders; low, open serving bowls decorated inside; seed jars with small openings and flat tops; painting methods of splattering and stippling and very distinctive designs. The Sikyátki style seems to have evolved as various Zuni-, Keres- and Towa-speaking potters came together with Water Clan potters from the Hohokam areas of southern Arizona and northern Mexico, and they began working with clays found in the nearby Jeddito valley area. Over the years, other clans came to the area and made their own contributions to what we now refer to as "Sikyátki Polychrome." According to Jesse Walter Fewkes, that merging of styles, techniques and designs created some of the finest ceramics ever produced in prehistoric North America.

Today's Hopi Pottery

Most Hopi pottery is unmistakable in its shapes, colors and designs. The Hopis are blessed with multiple excellent clay sources, each offering a different deep color after polishing and firing. Most Hopi pottery uses a buff, red, white or yellow clay body. Some kachina carvers make pottery and sometimes carve and etch their surfaces. Most Hopi potters, though, form their pieces and paint their decorations using colors derived from boiled-down plants, watered-down clay and from crushed minerals.

Much of the symbology painted on Hopi pottery is themed with "bird elements:" eagle and parrot tails, feathers, beaks and wings, and with katsinam (images of their gods) and permutations of migration patterns. Many Hopi, Hopi-Tewa and Tewa potters are members of the Corn Clan and their annual religious cycle revolves around the seasons of corn. The vast majority of today's Hopi pottery shapes and the designs painted on them are obvious descendants of the work of potters who existed 200-and-more years ago.

The above paragraph applies mostly to potters from the vicinity of First Mesa. The few potters from Second and Third Mesas seem to derive their design palettes from farther back in time, to the geometric designs, patterns and figures of the rock art prevalent before the advent of the katsinam, and the emergence of the Medicine, Sacred Clown and Warrior societies 800 years ago.

The view south from near Old Oraibi

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