Clay kin: a transhistorical study of Pueblo pottery and third gender identities

Abstract

This dissertation considers the significant role that Indigenous gender identities play in the work of potters from Zuni, Hopi, Laguna, and Cochiti Pueblos in Arizona and New Mexico. Roughly half of the dissertation discusses turn-of-the-twentieth-century case studies of lhamana and kikwimu potters, including We’Wha (Zuni, 1849-1896) and her approximate contemporaries Wa-Ki (Acoma) and Lillian Hill (Laguna) before turning to the question of those artists’ legacies in the work of contemporary artists Timothy Edaakie (Zuni, 1977-2020), Bobby Silas (Hopi, b. 1987), and Virgil Ortiz (Cochiti, b.1969). This cross-temporal approach allows me to trace the links from historic resistance to assimilation policy through to contemporary calls for political, artistic, and cultural sovereignty within the ongoing settler colonial United States. Drawing on scholarship by Indigenous Pueblo thinkers, I take seriously Pueblo ideas of object agency, considering the pottery as an active agent in relationship with artists and agents of assimilation and complicating questions of influence and acculturation. I extend queer studies methodologies to Indigenous thinking about kinship, considering how both historic and contemporary Pueblo individuals used their artworks to express gendered identity.