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My Hopi Friend

By Jane Sinauer, Horizons To Go

Last year, in my various travels as Director of Horizons To Go, I spent some time in the American Southwest and another month in Thailand and Vietnam. When we left Vietnam, my husband became totally teary eyed as he embraced our guide, a wonderful young man in his mid-twenties, to say goodbye. The experience of travel has become my passion, I think, because each trip is an education. Each travel experience blesses me with new friends who are people with entirely different histories, from different cultures, with unique geographies and cuisines. Yet we have a commonality of spirit, soul and interests that is powerful. I believe this is what so moved my husband. 

When you go back to visit the friends you’ve made, you are often invited into a different world. In the Southwest, I have a friend named Jean Sahme who is a terrific and spirited woman. She is a Hopi potter who lives on First Mesa near the town of Polacca in Arizona. Jean’s kitchen is the source of much of her creativity – she’s a fabulous cook and her kitchen is also her pottery studio. The huge pot she’s holding in the photo here was not done with a wheel; it was all laboriously built from coils of clay and then decoratively glazed with a brush that has the merest thread of a bristle, which Jean makes from a yucca plant. She fires her pots in her back yard, using sheep dung and wood for fuel in the traditional Hopi way, and they are glorious. (Incidentally, she also digs raw clay straight from the surrounding hills.) 

In fact, Jean comes from a long pottery tradition – working with clay is part of her heritage, as well as an integral part of her persona and worldview.  Her great-great-grandmother was the famous Hopi potter, Nampeyo. Nampeyo’s legacy and the Hopi culture continue to be passed down, mother to daughter and son, each generation responsible to the past and for the future. Having been a potter before I started Horizons over two decades ago, I love Jean’s unveiling of the new pieces she’s working on each time I am lucky enough to visit and to see her again. 

Jean is just one of a myriad of distinguished Native American artists who live and work in the expansive landscape of the Four Corners area of our high Southwest. This powerfully beautiful region has for generations been home to the vibrant creative spirit of Pueblo, Hopi and Navajo potters, jewelers, basket makers, weavers, kachina makers and wood carvers. Though many of them are relatively unknown, they are some of our nation’s pre-eminent artists. This is a region that, untouched in many places by tourism, is a privilege and true education to visit and savor.