PARSONS] orai'bi, the laguna colony 351 



Isletan usage. My informants make use of four terms for senior 

 collateral kinswomen, ky'uu, kerchu, aiya and ia. Possibly the last 

 two tenns may be derived from the Keresan terms for mother and 

 amit, naiya, yiya, yaya, iya.^^ 



The Lagima women are or were skillful pottei"s; the Isletan were not. 

 Until they began to learn more of the craft from the Lagima immi- 

 gi-ants, Isletan women made only undecorated ware (as at Taos), 

 bowls for cluli and for cooldng beans. The best kno\vn Isletan potter 

 to-day is Maria Chi\\i\\d,^^ a woman of 50, who told me she would 

 watch her Laguna neighbor, Benina Yuwai ^* (List II, 16), who died 

 in 1925, and so learned the craft. It was Benina who told her not 

 to use a stick covered with wool as a paint brush, as she had been 

 doing, but to make a brush from yucca fiber chewed fine. And it was 

 Benina who taught her how to ask the clay mother for clay. With 

 her "cousin," the wife of the present Laguna governor, Maria drives 

 in a wagon to the river bank, she asldng the Mother on one trip, her 

 cousin, on the next. 



Maria Chimwi makes pottery only for the American trade. 

 Ware copied from Laguna is used also in the pueblo. I have been told 

 that there are about 10 Isletan potters of Laguna ware, of whom 

 Lupi Anselmo is the most skillful, and about 10 potters of the old 

 Isletan ware. Curiously enough, it was not the potters of the old 

 ware who took to malcing the new ware. In making the old ware 

 you have only to "build" and polish, for the new ware you "build," 

 smooth, poUsh, paint, and burn. Maria Chiwiwi, for one, had never 

 made the old ware nor does she make it now. When she needs old 

 ware pots to give away at the pinitu dance she buys them. Maria 

 Chiwiwi took up pottery makmg about seven years ago after her 

 husband's death, and in general the new art seems to have been 

 learned by other Isletans onlj^ within a decade. They still buy their 

 paints from the Laguna colonists. \^Tiite and red pigments come 

 from places near old Laguna, and the black mineral pigment from the 

 Rio Puerco. 



Pottery making aside, it is not in the economic life, which was prob- 

 ably in general very little differentiated, nor in language, but in the 

 social, including the ceremonial, organization that acculturation 

 between the two groups has taken place. Here the original out- 

 standing differentiations were in the matters of clanship and of 

 moiety. Among the Keres what moiety system there is is entirely 

 ceremonial, associated with their two kiva system, and more or less 

 indirectly with their phallic clown societies, the kashare and kurena. 

 Laguna, like Acoma, may have had even slighter moiety traits than 



" Parsons 12: 201, 202. On Ilie other hand, ia is the Taos term for father's sister. 

 " She was married to the son of Lorenzo Correo, the Laguna immigrant. So intolerant of Americanism 

 was her husband that he would not allow a word of English in his house, nor a picture on his walls, 

 " Juaua Torres is also a good potter. 



