Helen Cordero, Judith Thurman, storytellers & accidental (auto)biographers

“My own perennial insecurity about who I am and what I’m worth has proved to be an asset in writing about the mysterious, often tortured process by which my subjects became who they were." —J. Thurman

Scholar and folklorist Barbara A. Babcock first “screwed up her courage” to drive from Santa Fe to Cochiti Pueblo to meet potter Helen Cordero in June 1978. For over an hour, the two women sat beneath a cottonwood tree as Helen answered questions about her pottery, patrons, and family. Finally, Helen asked why Barbara was peppering her with all these questions. Barbara said she would like to write an article on Helen’s Storyteller dolls, the ceramic figurines Helen had created and made famous.

“There are three books about Maria [Martinez, potter of San Ildefonso] and none about me,” Helen responded.

They’d have to do something about that.

For eight years, Helen and Barbara worked together on a book. Barbara wrote many articles about Helen, and Helen is the central figure of The Pueblo Storyteller, a book co-authored by Barbara. Though she is the subject of a “Closer Look Activity Book” for children, there is still no book on Helen Cordero alone, nothing like what’s been written about Maria. Where was Barbara’s book on Helen?

The two had trouble “gathering all these words and pictures together,” as Helen put it, and in the process, Barbara’s understanding of her role as a feminist, folklorist, and writer of women’s lives began to unravel. Barbara’s questions from the late ‘80s and ‘90s feel as relevant today. What does it mean to write another woman’s life?

For Barbara, Helen’s life had revised her own:

“Betwixt and between Cochiti Pueblo, museum archives, and the world of dealers and collectors who traffic in Indian art, I have been forced to rethink and revise many assumptions about women’s art and creativity, about feminism and cross-cultural inquiry, about biography, autobiography and life history, and about the meaning of things.”

“See, I just don’t know,” Helen said about the popularity and imitators of her Storytellers. “I guess I really started something.”