Gomez, Cordelia
Born in 1929, Cordi Gomez (1929-2017) was only 3 when her family was one of the first to return to the lands of Pojoaque Pueblo in 1932. Her family had left the area in 1908 and headed north to Colorado in search of work. The Pojoaque cacique (holy man) had just died from smallpox and everyone on the pueblo was leaving. They had also had enough of the ongoing drought and the continual encroachment by the expanding population of Anglo and Hispanic settlers. Then in 1932, the Bureau of Indian Affairs published an ad in the Santa Fe and Espanola newspapers saying that if tribal members did not return, they would risk losing their lands under the Indian Re-Organization Act.
So in 1932, Cordi and her family made the journey back to Pojoaque in mule-drawn wagons and re-occupied their former homes. More than a dozen tribal members returned that first year and received land grants. The Pueblo was finally formally recognized in 1936 with a population of 263 members.
They returned to a village with no indoor plumbing, no running water, no electricity, no natural gas. The Manhattan Project hadn’t been dreamed up yet, Los Alamos was still just a summer camp. It took them about two weeks to make the journey, coming from Colorado by wagon with all their bedding, food, clothes, chickens, goats and a little pig.
Cordi’s parents were introduced by her grandfather. Her father was was Hopi and Spanish, speaking no English. Her mother, Feliciana Tapia Viarrial, was Pojoaque, Navajo and Isleta, and spoke English but no Spanish. It didn’t matter, they learned from each other as they raised eleven children on the pueblo.
Cordi attended St. Catherine Indian School and married Ralph Gomez of Taos Pueblo in 1948. She moved to his home at Taos and lived there for many years, bringing four sons and two daughters into the world there. Then in 1975, they moved back to Pojoaque Pueblo.
Cordi first became interested in making pottery after meeting Rose Naranjo in 1956. Rose told her that if she worked with clay, there would always be food on the table. She almost immediately began learning to work with red and micaceous clay. Her son, Glenn, was also very interested and they often went looking for, and dug, new clay together. Then they returned home, processed their clay, and made pottery, working side-by-side in Cordi’s kitchen.
A bowl she made with a fluted rim in the late 1970s was purchased by the Indian Arts and Crafts Board and is now in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian. The king of Spain received another of her pots as a gift. Cordi made her last piece when she was 85 years old.
She loved children, working as the Head Start leader on the Pueblo for 13 years. Later on she served as a day care instructor. Throughout her later years, Cordi entertained a lot of people who just dropped by to talk and listen to how things used to be.
Cordi never learned how to drive. She enjoyed visits and loved telling dirty jokes, in proper company, of course. She also loved doing crossword and jigsaw puzzles and playing bingo at the casino. Along with her son, she served on the Arts and Crafts Committee for the Eight Northern Indian Pueblos Council, which honored her with a lifetime achievement award.