
Cordelia Cordi Gomez
1929-2017
Pojoaque
Born in 1929, Cordi Gomez was only 3 when her family was one of the first to return to the lands of Pojoaque Pueblo in 1932. Her family had left the area in 1908 and headed north to Colorado in search of work. The Pojoaque cacique (holy man) had just died from smallpox and everyone on the pueblo was leaving. They had also had enough of the ongoing drought and the continual encroachment by the expanding population of settlers. Then in 1932, the Bureau of Indian Affairds published an ad in the Santa Fe and Espanola newspapers saying that if tribal members did not return they would risk losing their lands under the Indian Re-Organization Act.
So in 1932, Cordi and her family made the journey back to Pojoaque in mule-drawn wagons and re-occupied their homes. More than a dozen tribal members returned that first year and received land grants. The Pueblo was finally formally recognized in 1936 with a population of 263 members.
They returned to a village with no indoor plumbing, no running water, no electricity, no natural gas. The Manhattan Project hadn't been dreamed up yet, Los Alamos was still just a summer camp. They made the journey in about two weeks, coming from Colorado by wagon with all their bedding, food, clothes, some chickens, goats and a little pig.
Cordi's parents were introduced by her grandfather. Her father was was Hopi and Spanish, speaking no English. Her mother, Feliciana Tapia Viarrial, was Pojoaque, Navajo and Isleta, and spoke English but no Spanish. It didn't matter, they learned from each other as they raised eleven children on the pueblo.
Cordi attended St. Catherine Indian School and married Ralph Gomez of Taos Pueblo in 1948. She moved to his home at Taos and lived there for many years, bringing four sones and two daughters into the world there. Then in 1975, they moved back to Pojoaque Pueblo.
Cordi first became interested in making pottery after meeting Rose Naranjo in 1956. Rose told her that if she worked with clay, there would always be food on the table. She almost immediately began learning to work with red and micaceous clay. Her son Glenn was also very interested and they often went looking for and digging new clay together. Then they returned home, processed their clay, and made pottery, working side-by-side in Cordi's kitchen.
A bowl she made with a fluted rim in the late 1970s was purchased by the Indian Arts and Crafts Board and is now in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian. The king of Spain received another of her pots as a gift.
Cordi made her last piece when she was 85 years old. She loved children, working as the Head Start leader on the Pueblo for 13 years. Later on she served as a day care instructor. Throughout her later years, Cordi entertained a lot of people who just dropped by to talk and listen to how things used to be.
Cordi never learned how to drive, She enjoyed visits and loved telling dirty jokes, in proper company, of course. She also loved doing crossword and jigsaw puzzles and playing bingo at the casino. Along with her son, she served on the Arts and Crafts Committee for the Eight Northern Indian Pueblos Council, which honored her with a lifetime achievement award.
100 West San Francisco Street, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501
(505) 986-1234 - www.andreafisherpottery.com - All Rights Reserved

Pojoaque Pueblo

Poeh Culture Center at Pojoaque
The Pojoaque Pueblo area seems to have been first settled by pithouse-dwelling Tanoans around 500 CE. A couple hundred years later and the first signs of pottery appeared. Another couple hundred years and the people were beginning to build their structures aboveground. The Tewa flooded down into the valley of the Rio Grande starting in the 1300s, and the population grew until it peaked in the late 1500s. That peak was around the same time the first Spanish arrived. After that, local populations nose-dived as European diseases and Franciscan monks wreaked collossal damage, to the point of actual genocide in some cases (none of the Piro pueblos survived after the 1680 Pueblo Revolt and none of the Tompiro pueblos survived the mid-1700s).
The first Franciscan mission was built at Pojoaque in the early 1600s but the people were already hurting under the impact of Spanish taxes, forced labor and continuous efforts to force conversion to Christianity. That all added up to Pojoaque being in the forefront of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Immediately following the revolt, Pojoaque was abandoned and wasn't resettled until about 1706 when many Pojoaque's trickled back from the Cuartelejo area on the plains of eastern Colorado and western Kansas. By then the major Spanish retributions had died down and it was relatively safe to return, surrender and pledge allegiance anew. Franciscans were also being replaced with Jesuits and the religious fervor receded a bit from the heights reached during the Inquisition.
The population of the reestablished pueblo grew slowly but they saw increasing problems from non-Indian encroachment until President Abraham Lincoln recognized the pueblo as an official tribe. Some documents say he awarded the tribe with an official land grant in 1864 and gave a silver cane to the tribe's governor. Other documents say the tribe was given a quit-claim deed... However it worked out, the tribe did gain some legal standing and was able to reestablish its presence until 1900 when a severe smallpox epidemic caused the pueblo to be abandoned again (the Cacique (the tribe's religious leader) died and Governor Jose Antonio Tapia left the reservation to find work).
In 1934 the Commissioner of Indian Affairs placed newspaper ads around the area calling for all Pojoaque tribal members to come back and reoccupy the pueblo lands or tribal ownership would be dissolved under the Indian Re-Organization Act. Shortly, 14 members of the Villareal, Tapia, Romero and Gutierrez/Montoya families were awarded land grants from the Pueblo land base. By 1936 tribal enrollment reached 263 members and Pojoaque became a Federally recognized Indian Reservation.
During the time of abandonment, many Pojoaque tribe members moved to nearby Santa Clara and San Juan Pueblos. Those Pojoaque who were making pottery at the time learned new things from their neighbors and when they later returned to Pojoaque, traditional pottery making changed with all the cross-pollination of styles and designs. Some potters, though, returned to making only traditional Pojoaque styles and designs. Today there is hardly any pottery being made at Pojoaque as so many tribal members are employed in one or another of the tribe's many commercial enterprises.
100 West San Francisco Street, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501
(505) 986-1234 - www.andreafisherpottery.com - All Rights Reserved