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Traditional potter Rose Williams exhibited her work and her technique last week at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe, N.M.AP Photo/Courtesy of Case Trading Post

At 94, Navajo Potter Not Ready to Retire

By Deborah Baker of the Associated Press

SANTA FE, N.M. (AP)—Rose Williams can't understand why her family keeps telling her to slow down, take a break, get the rest that her 94-year-old body has earned.

So every morning, the Navajo matriarch gets up and goes about the business of melding earth, fire and water into beautifully burnished, collectible pots.

"It's neither work nor play for her. That's just what she knows," said her great-nephew, Ron Martinez, who accompanied her on a recent visit to the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian.

Williams sat at a table in the museum's Case Trading Post, next to a plastic bag full of clay dug from a seam near her home in the Shonto area of the Navajo reservation in northeastern Arizona.

Her tools were assembled in front of her: a dried corn cob, an old plastic pill bottle — perfect for smoothing the inside of a pot — and small rocks, for polishing.

"Sometimes you'll find her outside looking for pebbles. She always finds one in this parking lot," Martinez said.

Handful of Clay

Williams' bent fingers grabbed a handful of the clay and deftly worked it, rolling it between her palms into a long coil, then slowly pinching the coil into place atop a bowl-shaped chunk of clay that she had just fashioned to serve as the pot's foundation.

Rows of coils smoothed by the corn cob would form the pot, which would then be fired in an open pit and swabbed with warm, melted pitch from pinon trees.

Williams didn't know quite what shape this vessel would take.

"I'm going to take my time making this pot, and I'm not sure what it's going to be," she said in Navajo, with Martinez interpreting.

Williams' pots range in size from about 6 inches — the traditional size in which to boil herbs for ceremonies — to one that is nearly 2 feet tall, took two months to make and is for sale at the Case Trading Post for $1,800.

It's a drum jar, which would be filled with water and have deer skin stretched over the top to form the drumming surface for ceremonies.

The Art of Making Navajo Pottery

Navajo women have been making pottery for centuries for use at home and in ceremonies, although production fell off once trading posts made metal and plastic cookware available.

Traders rejected the traditional dark brown Navajo pottery as "mud pots," according to Susan Peterson of Scottsdale, Ariz., a ceramics artist who wrote "Pottery by American Indian Women: The Legacy of Generations." The book was the exhibition catalog for a 1997 show Peterson curated at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, in Washington.

Navajo blankets and jewelry were more profitable in the tourist market, Peterson wrote. But then museum curators began to take notice of traditional Navajo potters, and Williams was the first to break into museum markets and fairs, in the 1950s, according to Peterson.

Close to 40 when her husband died, Williams turned to selling pottery — an art she had learned as a girl from her grandmother — to help feed her family. She bore 15 children, of whom 10 survive. Three of her four daughters are full-time potters. Williams has taught or influenced many other Navajo potters.

Williams also has a small flock of sheep, a tradition that some of her neighbors have abandoned.

"What essentially is Navajo is to keep working ... and to have a flock of sheep," Martinez said.

Deborah Baker is an Associated Press writer.