Stories from the edges of the earth

6/01/09 Stories from the edges of the earth


After a family wedding on New Year’s Eve, I took my grand daughters back to the hotel at about 10 o’clock, although they had been hoping to stay up to see in the New Year. Tired as they were, they insisted that they still needed a story or two, and I can’t imagine any grandmother ever refusing to take part in a story telling session.

Cassi started telling us one of her mouth stories, a very complicated story about (naturally) a princess who had lots of beautiful dresses. She ‘got in love’ with a prince and had a very busy social life. It was a long story, and she had another one waiting, but Pia was already asleep, no doubt dreaming of horses.

We all love listening to stories and find many different ways to tell them. My cousin Jill has made a handwritten and decorated journals filled with family stories for each of her grandchildren. Cassi and Pia’s other grandmother, a teacher and wonderful story teller, is well versed in Native American story traditions. To listen to her is to be transported in a magical world of talking animals.

Sitting on the shelf in my study I have a pottery figure called a storyteller made by a Native American potter. I found it in a gallery in Santa Monica when I was on my way home from the wedding of Cassia and Pia’s parents.

Before it even begins to tell other stories, the storyteller comes with a wonderful story of its own. Helen Cordero, a Cochiti Pueblo woman began making pottery nearly fifty years ago now. She took up making figurines because her bowls and jars ‘were crooked and didn’t look right’. In doing so, she was reviving the long standing but moribund Cochiti tradition of figurative pottery. As Helen made her ‘figures, she was representing and recreating images of family life, and of Pueblo ritual and mythology, she also reshaped her own life. At the time she had been trying to earn a little extra money by selling beads and she found that most of the profit went back to buying materials. Then her husband’s aunt suggested that she should try pottery. ‘You don’t have to buy anything. Mother Earth gives it all to you’ said the aunt.

Helen created the first figure for the International Museum of Folk Art in
New Mexico, in 1964, and from then on her reputation as an artist grew, bringing with it financial security for her family. But, ‘they are not just pretty things I make for money’ she said, ‘In an interview with Barbara Babcock, who wrote an essay on storytellers, Helen said, ‘All my potteries


The second storyteller you see here is a squat grandmotherly figure, about 12 cms high, was made by Martha Aquero, one of a group of less then 200 potters throughout the Rio Grande pueblos also making the figurines.

The earth is full of stories and task of the potter is to help the storyteller bring the story directly out of the earth. The figures are sometimes humans and sometimes other animals; they always have open mouths and they are always surrounded by children. They say that if you listen carefully, you will hear a story coming from the story teller’s mouth. If at first you only hear silence, you should listen again.

- and my friend, artist Judy Morecroft, made me the first storyteller.
She sits in the garden where I go with my morning coffee. The stories she tells me are always very powerful and full of earthly wisdom


While the children slept, I watched the fireworks from the sixth storey window of our hotel room and thought about getting home to the Range with all its stories – the underground streams, the intertwined life-cycles of microbes and mosses, even the enigmatic tracks made by grubs wriggling their way under the bark of trees. Hints of stories in bleached bones, the shivers sent down the spine by a gust of wind or an invisible creature scurrying through the undergrowth. The strange sounds of a still night. Stories dreamt up walking along the network of tracks, winding around fallen logs and rocks. There are the stories laid down with each footfall or reptilian slither These are the stories we try to catch in the webs of words, light and thread.

For all the pueblo peoples, clay is a living substance, and their pottery transforms the natural world into commodities of cultural value, and therefore represents the way we all become part of the continuing story.

*The information about Helen Cordero comes from Barbara A. Babcock’s essay, Modeled Selves: Helen Cordero’s “Little People” in The Anthropology of Experience edited by Victor W. Turner and Edward M. Bruner, University of Illinois Press 1986.

and if you're wondering why the storytellers are at the beginning of the post, it's because I still have a lot to learn about integrating images into their right places! my apologies. I aim to improve.