Montoya, Eudora

“I like the mud, to work it, and I missed doing it.”

Eudora Montoya was born into Santa Ana Pueblo in 1905. At the time there were only about 225 residents of the pueblo. She recalled learning how to make pottery from her mother in the 1920s. She also remembered her mother saying she had learned how from her mother, too.

In those days, like so many other Pueblo children, Eudora was sent away to an Indian boarding school, returning home only in the summers. Every summer she’d work with her mother making bean pots (mostly) and watching as her mother would stir the paint in her black pot and paint traditional Santa Ana designs on those bean pots.

In 1946 Eudora decided to make pottery full time and recalled there were still a few ladies making old-style pots. She explained “I like the mud, to work it, and I missed doing it.” As time went on, though, she and the other women got older until finally, Eudora was the only active potter in Santa Ana Pueblo.

In 1972, at the urging of Nancy Winslow (a Anglo woman from Albuquerque), Eudora started teaching a pottery class on the pueblo. In her first year she had 17 students working with her in a revival project to preserve Santa Ana-style pottery.

She kept making pottery and kept teaching others until in 1988, Indian Market Magazine honored her in a featured artist’s profile saying “Eudora Montoya is a small, self-effacing woman, but as a bearer of Pueblo Indian culture her contribution has been larger than life. Through her efforts and the knowledge she safeguarded the centuries-old tradition of Santa Ana-style pottery, once in danger of extinction, remains vitally alive.”

Eudora earned several ribbons for her pottery at the Santa Fe Indian Market. She passed on in 1995.