Navasie, Loretta

Born into the Hopi-Tewa world in 1948, Loretta Navasie is the daughter of Joy Navasie and granddaughter of Paqua Naha. She learned how to make pottery through watching and working with her mother and grandmother. Her children, John Biggs, Charles Navasie, Christopher Perry, Lana Yvonne David and Wayne Joseph Koshiway, learned similarly, but Charles is probably the best known of them.

Loretta carries on the family tradition of making whiteware: painting red and black designs on the white bodies of pottery. To make the clay white and smooth enough, several coats of white slip need to be applied and each one polished before the next. Then the painting has to be perfect, if there’s a mistake the entire piece needs to be stripped down to the base clay and the process begun again. The firing has to be done very carefully, too. Whiteware is probably the hardest form of Hopi pottery to make.