Pueblo Crafts

Palmer Lake, Colorado: The Filter Press, 1979. First Edition . Trade Paperback. Very Good. 5 1/2" x 8. 139 Pages. Penciled price erased on front endpaper. No other defects noted to this tight book with no marks or stamps. Originally published in 1944 by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. The author imagines an exhibition of pueblo crafts. On one table is a yucca ring basket made practically as it would have been a thousand years ago. On the next is a glossy black plate by Maria Martinez, one of the most famous examples of pueblo craft. Its technique was developed within the last twenty years. On the third is on embroidered manta from Acoma. Its diamond weave was used in the thirteenth century but the wool of its fabric was brought by the Spaniards in the seventeenth. The embroidery may have been learned then too but the red yarn, which accents its splendid dignity, was not plentiful until the railroads brought it from American cities. Pueblo craft contains elements from all the ages and so do the pueblos themselves. A trip through these Indian villages of Arizona and New Mexico might lead us to Santo Clara on the Rio Grande with its electric lights and water hydrants. There we might see cars beside some houses and through modern glass windows we would glimpse well furnished kitchens and bed- rooms. Yet the pottery sold in the market place would be in the ancient pueblo tradition and the church in the style of old Spain. A drive of less than a hundred miles would bring us to Taos, with terraced buildings out of the fourteenth century. If it were a feast day, we could see some village official in buckskins, which show that the pueblos once had much traffic with the buffalo Indians of the plains. Next we might jog across a desert to see the Hopi villages perched atop the once almost inaccessible Arizona mesas. On their rocky paths we could meet men in modern American dress, riding donkeys or burros introduced from Spain. They go to the corn fields which streak the valleys and where they cultivate varieties of maize which may date from 700 A.D. This book, a study of pueblo crafts, necessarily takes account of the influences which have played on these ancient villages, since their known history began in 300 A.D. It is never possible to isolate one product as in true pueblo style, uninfluenced by whites or by other Indians. The crafts are living arts, developed to fill practical needs. In the course of their history, different phases of each have reached a peak, and there they have paused or dwindled until new materials, new tools, new ideas, or all three, produced a revival. Major changes usually came from the arrival of a different people. The relics show how the pueblos learned first from the south, then from the Spaniards, from the Navajo, Paiute, and Walapai, from the Plains Indians, and from White Americans. The result was no mere copying, nor is it today. Each new resource is adjusted to the needs of pueblo life. Contents: Pueblo Background, Basketry, Weaving, Pottery Still a Living Art, Stone Tools and What They Made, Music and Painting, The Crafts Today, and Further Reading On Pueblo Crafts.