Snowflake Flower

The daughter of Eluterio and Berina Cordero, Estephanita Snowflake Flower Cordero was born into Cochiti Pueblo in December 1931. Her grandmother was Cochiti potter Estephanita Herrera. Mary Martin is her cousin, Ada Suina her sister.

Snowflake Flower grew up watching her mother and grandmother making pottery but she never got involved herself until after her kids were grown and out of the house. Then she went to the University of New Mexico and enrolled in a bilingual education program. She studied Native American art forms, excelled in painting and made her first storyteller figure. She didn’t like it: she’d used commercial materials and a kiln to make it and it didn’t feel right. So she earned her BS in Education at UNM, then she went back home and learned how to make pottery using traditional clays, paints and firing methods.

Snowflake Flower made storytellers, nativities, jars, bowls and owls but her favorite figures to make were coyotes, prairie dogs, bears and turtles.

Snowflake Flower participated in events like the Santa Fe Indian Market, the New Mexico State Fair, the Southwest Indian Art Show, the Santo Domingo Arts & Crafts Show and the Albuquerque Indian Market for years, winning multiple awards at each.

In 1963, her daughter, Patricia Ann Loretto, was in an accident and went into a coma. At that point, Snowflake Flower began putting at least one feather on everything she made, as “feathers carry our prayers to Heaven.” It was her feeling that the more feathers she painted and the more her pottery spread around, the more the payers would multiply. Finally, in 1999, she got a call from the hospital and they put her daughter on the phone. She’d just woken up after 16 years. Apparently she was hungry for strawberries.

Snowflake Flower said that since then, “I pray for my health, so I can continue to live with her. I am thankful for all who bought my pottery over the years, carrying the prayers for my daughter to their homes.”