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Daisy had the Zuni ladies study traditional Zuni designs which many of them, including Josephine, starting using in their own work. Josephine was married to Nat Nahohai (her second husband) and they had two sons, Milford and Randy (1956-2017). Both sons became accomplished potters as well. Now, Jaycee Nahohai, son of Randy and Rowena Him, is also an award winning potter.
We have had this cornmeal bowl in our possession since we purchased it online via ebay in 1998. It has been offering cornmeal and crushed turquoise in our fetish cabinet since that time. We recognized it as a treasure created by talented Zuni hands with the most modest of ingredients, but ingredients harvested with reverence and a prayer. Josephine passed away in 2007 at the age of 95.
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ZUNI SPIRITS - FINE ZUNI FETISHES DIRECTLY FROM ZUNI PUEBLO, NM | ||
Josephine Nahohai was born in Zuni, New Mexico in 1912. Her mother, Lawatsa, sister of Lonkeena, was a potter as well as a weaver and made water jars that Josephine, as a young girl, used to carry well water back to their house near the north side of the river in Zuni. Josephine remembered gathering clay near Brother and Sister Rock at Dowa Yalanne (Corn Mountain), the great mesa just east of Zuni, where her people had lived from the Pueblo Revolt in 1680 until Spanish reconquest in 1696. She had watched her mother soak the clay they brought home, work the material, and make jars.
In the late 1950s, she turned to making pottery, advised to do so by her aunt Myra Eriacho, who derived some income from making owls and ves�sels for sale With limited memory of her mother�s methods, Josephine sought help and a friend taught her how to prepare Rocky Mountain beeweed as a binder and gave her a polishing stone to work the surface of her pottery. She also studied under Hopi potter, Daisy Hooee Nampeyo who was married to a Zuni jeweler, Leo Poblano.
This corn meal offer bowl is of a traditional stepped design. It is made from locally gathered clay and painted with white kaolin slip (also local). The black pigment is probably a combination of crushed hematite and boiled mountain bee plant (Indian spinach). Josephine fired her works outside in a traditional Pueblo manner, without a permanent kiln, after keeping the work dry in her wood-fired cooking oven. On a morning when the wind was calm and the ground was dry and not too cold, she would place cedar kindling and a food offering on the ground behind the Nahohai house. Then she set the unfired pottery on large potsherds or a grate balanced on a pedestal of stone or cans and covered it with more pieces of broken pottery and sometimes bits of metal. Earlier she had collected dried sheep dung, which she then cleaved into slices about the size of bricks, building an outer wall of dung around the sherds or metal while being careful to keep the fuel from touching the pottery. She arranged the pieces of dung over the covering like a roof. She set fire to the kindling on the sides, and she and other family members watched the fire for about three hours, adding fuel as needed. When all the dung had turned to ash, she and the others used a pitchfork, rake, or kitchen tongs to pick up the pots and owls, put them on a tray to bring inside, and placed the tray on the stove so the pieces would cool down slowly.
