Healing, Juanita
Juanita Healing (1916-2006) was the wife of Dewey Healing, who was the son of Annie Healing and grandson of Nampeyo of Hano. She was born around 1910 in the village of Sichomovi on Hopi First Mesa. Patricia Honie was her sister.
Dewey was involved in the administration of the Hopi Reservation. He was the man who finally got the US government to declare District 6 of the Indian Reservation set aside in 1888 to be the official Hopi Reservation (the 1888 reservation had been partitioned into grazing districts by the federal government, District 6 included most of the Hopi mesas but not much else – there has been close to one million acres added to the Hopi Reservation since). For many years Dewey oversaw a lot of things on the reservation.
The Hopi countryside is literally littered with prehistoric pueblos. They are everywhere. Some big, most small, hardly any have been excavated. Because of Hopi religious beliefs, most may never be excavated. Past excavations found that just a few inches deep in the trash pile one may find perfectly good pottery made hundreds of years ago. There’s no telling what absolute gems may still be hidden in the dirt and rocks. The Hopi themselves can wander around and look at essentially anything as long as they are saying the appropriate prayers as they go.
The Hopi Tribal Police has several officers and an office dedicated to stopping the looting of ancient ruins on Hopi land. However, they lack the equipment and support they need to do the job properly. Modern pot hunters locate ruins using Google Maps and Google Earth, then they fly in in helicopters, do the nasty and fly back out in a couple hours. Despite all the laws passed to stop the illegal trade in antiquities, there’s still a market, a way to get stuff to that market and a way to get money out of it. But the Hopi Police are aware of everything they can be, all the time.
When Dewey got notice of a construction project about to happen somewhere, he was able to steer Juanita into that neighborhood to see if there were any good designs showing among the potsherds littering the ground. Nampeyo and Lesou had done the same 50 years before, that’s how she found many of her design elements.
Juanita developed some of her own designs from what she’d found and was making Sikyátki-Revival shapes and forms to paint them on. She was beginning to grow a following when around 1960, her mother-in-law, Annie Healing, had a stroke and was paralyzed on one side of her body. Annie was bed-ridden the rest of her life and Juanita was her caretaker. After Annie passed on, Juanita got back to making pottery. She was still making pottery in her late 70s.