Nampeyo of Hano
Nampeyo of Hano was born around 1856 in the First Mesa Hopi-Tewa village of Hano. Hano was a village originally founded around 1600 but abandoned about 1650. The Tewa were granted possession of the village structures in 1700 in the aftermath of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt. One story says the Hopi had sent recruiters to the Rio Grande Pueblos to recruit Tewa warriors willing to move to Hopi (away from the hated Spanish) with their families. Another story says the Southern Tewa were already headed for Hopi to escape the Spanish. Either way, after winning a major battle with Ute raiders around 1698, the abandoned pueblo of Hano was granted as a place for those Southern Tewa families to live at the foot of the trail ascending First Mesa.
Nampeyo’s 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 House at Hano (White Corn was the Corn Clan matriarch, which position Nampeyo inherited when White Corn died and which then passed to Fannie when Nampeyo died). Nampeyo and her brothers, Kano and Patuntupi never attended a formal school. Her brother, Tom Polacca, did go to a formal school, for only a few years but it was enough to cause him problems later in life.
The Hopi language in those days was not yet a written language. Never going to a formal school, Nampeyo never learned to read or write English or Spanish. She learned the basics of the Hopi art of making pottery from her father’s mother and gathered pointers from other experienced Hano 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 prevalent in nearby Walpi.
She 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. It was there that Fewkes found the ancient Sikyátki pottery styles and designs that he exposed to the world (claiming that he also exposed them to Nampeyo first). However, Sikyátki styles and designs had been on the commercial market for ten to fifteen years and were already becoming known as “Sikyátki-Revival” pottery. Other research has determined that Lesou was never employed by Fewkes either.
Around 1880 anthropologist Alexander Stephen came to Keams Canyon and began to explore and investigate the area. He and trader Thomas Keam began encouraging the potters of Walpi and Hano to make pottery in the shapes and decorated with the designs found among the ruins of Awatovi, Kawaika’a and Sikyátki, where the ground was profusely littered with potsherds.
Nampeyo walked through those ruins, collecting ancient potsherds. Later she incorporated many of the designs found on them into her design vocabulary. She also figured out the shapes and forms of the pottery that each of those designs had been painted on. By the late 1890s she had it down and was becoming famous for her creations.
She studied the intricacies of the ancient potsherds and searched out the various clays used to produce and decorate them. She also worked out the firing techniques used by the ancients to produce the high-fired sherds that she was finding all over the ground.
Over time, Nampeyo gathered designs from other ruins scattered around Antelope Mesa and the three primary mesas of Hopi country. Some of her designs have also been traced to the ancient potters of Kayenta, Tusayan, Payupki and even the Fourmile Ranch area (near today’s Snowflake, AZ).
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 originated the shapes and forms of her pottery or that her designs were self-created. 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 untreatable trachoma early in life 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 to have other members of her family do the painting for her.
In the beginning, the work was spread around among Annie, Nellie and Fannie. Then as the older ones married and got busy raising families, Fannie, and her great-niece, Daisy, split the work. But then Daisy got involved with cataloguing the finds of yet another nearby archaeological dig and Fannie took over doing all the painting.
In those years, if Nampeyo made the piece and Fannie painted it, it was signed: “Nampeyo Fannie”. If a piece was made and painted by Fannie alone, the signature was: “Fannie Nampeyo”.
There are some of her pots around signed “Daisy Nampeyo” on the bottom. It’s hard to determine who made those as Nampeyo and Daisy were both master potters (as was Fannie). Daisy’s knowledge of the design vocabulary was very similar to Nampeyo’s but, because of her advanced Western education in such things, Daisy used different elements in her designs to create tension. There were essentially 6 design strategies to Nampeyo’s design process and Daisy employed most of them, in slightly different ways. Fannie, on the other hand, only employed a couple of her mother’s strategies: the vast majority of Fannie’s work is decorated with variations on the migration pattern. Nampeyo and Daisy both were masters of imbalanced design, using 3-panel, 5-panel, 7-panel and 9-panel designs often. Fannie and most Nampeyo potters since have stayed with more simple 2-, 4- and 8-panel designs. Nampeyo and Nellie would also use “Quadrant Direction Marks” on the rims of their pieces while no one else did. Those marks were relatively common on Jeddito and Homol’ovi pottery from the 1200s, possibly brought to those places by potters migrating from the Mimbres River area in southern New Mexico or further south.
In early 1922 Nampeyo was commissioned by the owner of the Quapaw Bath House at Hot Springs, AR, to create 4 effigies similar to Tesuque Pueblo’s Muna figures. They were seated with their arms held in front of them but none were holding anything, unlike munas holding their pots in their laps. The figures were delivered to Quapaw in April that year and they varied between 8 3/8 inches and 9 5/8 inches in height. Nampeyo was already completely blind by then so they were most likely painted by one of her daughters. Clearly, they were not meant for the tourist trade. The size of them and the quality of the work showed that. When the Quapaw Baths opened to the public later that year, the effigies were on display in the halls and drew a lot of attention. A few years later, the effigies were “donated” to either the Department of the Interior or the National Park Service. Those organizations took possession of the property in the early years of the Great Depression and made it a centerpiece of Hot Springs National Park. At that point the effigies disappeared and haven’t been seen since. They appear to have been the only effigies Nampeyo made.
Nampeyo passed on in 1942. She had been living by herself in the Corn clan house and wasn’t feeling well for days. She was blind but still able to get around so she went down the hill to Wesley and Cecilia’s home in Polacca. She passed away while sleeping in their bed a couple days later. She left behind more than 40 well-trained direct descendants to carry on the tradition she began.
The photo: Four generations of the family. Annie on the left with Rachel in her lap, White Corn in the middle, Nampeyo on the right. Photo was taken outside the Corn clan house in Hano by Adam Vroman in 1903, public domain now.