Imagine a village surrounded by black rock cliffs and sloping green hills, dotted with apricot trees and playing children. Sunlight filters through the leaves of the towering Big Tree, an ancient cottonwood positioned like a sentinel along the northern end of the community’s central plaza. Notice a woman and a man sitting in the shade of the Big Tree. She is polishing a pot, filling the air with steady whish-whish-whishing sounds that will last until the vessel’s surface is as smooth as the skin of an unbroken lake. The man is working even more quietly, painting feathers and serpents and thunderheads onto the polished pots with a brush he dips in milky red clay slip.
Seventeen-year-old Maria Martinez (1887-1980) was already a sought-after potter when she married husband Julian (1879–1943) in 1904. It was a heady time for the San Ildefonso natives: Within a decade or so of the railroad’s arrival in Northern New Mexico in 1880, archaeologists came here to dig up burial grounds belonging to prehistoric Mimbres people. These sites brimmed with remarkably well-preserved bowls, their bone-white bellies painted with geometric designs and fantastic creatures. Seeing the Mimbres pottery up close, either at dig sites or in Santa Fe curio shops, electrified Maria and Julian, says their great-grandson, the potter Marvin Martinez.
I’ve been invited to the Martinez home to see firing techniques pioneered by Maria and Julian and rigorously adhered to by their descendants. When I pull up, Marvin and his son Manuel are lining an outdoor pit with cedar before topping it with a rack of red clay pots destined for the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts’ 102nd Indian Market later this month. I ask about the ring of feathers circling many of the pots.
“They’re eagle feathers,” Marvin tells me as we watch plumes of gray smoke rise from the fire pit. “Eagles can fly two miles high, so we say they can carry messages from us all the way up to heaven.”
Marvin’s wife Frances, who grew up on neighboring Santa Clara Pueblo, appears from the house with cold bottled water. Like her husband, she was taught to thank the earth when removing hunks of it for clay, to measure earth with coffee cans, and to watch a fire closely.
“People always want to know how long the firing takes, and I’m like, ‘I don’t know, an hour? Two hours?’” Frances says with a laugh. “We go by how the way things feel, not by minutes and hours.”
Smoke from the fire pit has become darker and thicker and, emboldened by gusty wind, it stings the nostrils and eyes. It’s time to smother the fire, Marvin tells Manuel, and they shovel horse manure onto the smoldering pit, starving the fire of oxygen and trapping the scorching smoke within, turning red pots into black ones.
I move indoors, where Frances is making fresh clay. She shakes sifted earth onto a tarp covering the kitchen floor, shaping it into a shallow crater. Today is special, because two of her grandkids, Autumn, 9, and Nathaniel, 4, are here to help. Nathaniel solemnly nods his head in agreement whenever grandma talks, underscoring her words by murmuring, “yeah, yeah.” I am charmed by his earnestness, his need to make sure people listen to his grandmother as keenly as he does.
“I don’t have a plan when I start making a pot,” Frances notes while gently pouring water into the crater that’s becoming clay. “You have to let the clay tell you what it wants to be.”
“Yeah!” Nathaniel shouts, and we laugh.
Marvin and Frances were both raised by their grandparents, and they place a premium on the knowledge imparted to them by their elders.
“A lot of kids don’t want to hang around older people,” Marvin says. “But I was always right behind Adam and Santana. They taught me that the work we do is important.”
Every wall in the Martinez home is hung with family photographs of Maria, she and Julian’s oldest son Adam (1904-2000) and his wife Santana (1909-2002).
“Our family trusted us to continue their work,” Frances continues. “We love to see them and remember them.”
Outside, Manuel is gingerly lifting the rack of pots off the fire pit, where they have safely passed through firing. As I prepare to leave, Frances gets wistful. When she was young, she says, all the kids played “rezball” in the arroyos until dark.
“They don’t do that anymore,” she says.
I follow her gaze to State Road 30, the main road for Santa Clara and San Ildefonso communities. This road has become a thoroughfare for northbound Los Alamos commuters trying to avoid Highway 284. The traffic, Frances tells me, moves too fast or else inches along at a snail’s pace, periodically erupting with horns, loud music and, occasionally, tossed trash. It’s pleasantly quiet today, though—a gift for a happy family whose pitch-black pots carry messages on eagle wings or via winding serpents as conjured and cared for by new generations of San Ildefonso ancestors.
SWAIA Indian Market: 8 am-5 pm Saturday, Aug. 17 and Sunday, Aug. 18. Free. Santa Fe Plaza, 63 Lincoln Ave., swaia.org