My Soil, My Soul
Roxanne Swentzel at Flowering Tree
By Linda Mason Hunter
© 2002, Linda Mason Hunter. May not be reprinted without written permission from the author.

“Man’s heart away from nature becomes hard.”
---Chief Standing Bear



Roxanne Swentzell is a female Gepetto, her jet black hair in a bouncy new bob and her bare feet covered with dust. A slow, radiant smile lights up her face, spilling over into her eyes, windows to a playful soul. Her energy is pure delight.

There is no doubt Roxanne has genius—an uncanny clarity of perception coupled with unfailing technique in the sureness of her hands. She comes by her gift naturally. Her mother, Rina Naranjo Swentzell, a distinguished activist, scholar, and architect, is one of the eight gifted Naranjo siblings of Santa Clara Pueblo. Her aunts are acclaimed potters, as is a cousin. Her uncle, Michael Naranjo, is perhaps the most famous. Blinded in the Vietnam War, he is now a ceramist known for his sculptures of the human form.

For almost 20 years Roxanne (now nearing 40) has lived down an unpaved, unnamed country road in Santa Clara Pueblo, old family ground near the houses of her brother, her aunt, her grandmother. Here she built her own house, reared and home schooled two children, transformed half a desert acre into a jungle of sustenance, and created the clay sculptures that have made her one of the most sought-after contemporary ceramists in the United States. Her studio is crammed full of her various works-in-progress and materials which she uses to form her creations. If it was any other working environment, the space would be in dire need of office clearance, yet Roxanne's cluttered studio seems to be hive of inspiration for her work.

Her two-foot-tall earthen people, which she coils with love and the magic of her fingertips, silently comment on our consumer culture and human frailties. Over the years they have grown wittier, more opinionated, more satirical and sophisticated as Roxanne herself has grown in awareness. If you look closely they almost breath, gripping your imagination, eliciting a smile, and (if you’re lucky) offering a glimmer of insight.

Roxanne is a master of many trades. She’s a carpenter, building and maintaining her property, Flowering Tree, along with her 1,700-square-foot solar homestead.

She’s a gardener, at one time raising all her family’s food organically, coaxing the seeds to sprout in the dry desert, then drying, freezing, salting, and canning the produce.

She’s a farmer, baling hay and raising livestock for food, fertilizer, and feathers.
She’s a mother. A much-loved daughter. A cherished aunt.

And she’s an internationally-recognized sculptor who bashfully refuses to acknowledge that her talent has made her famous.
“I am a lucky person. Art came easy to me,” she says with a grin, settling into a hardback chair at her dining table. She speaks thoughtfully, absent of conflicting desires to conceal and reveal, slipping easily into the clipped English of someone hovering between two languages, every now and then gliding into a more comfortable indigenous dialect with its long vowels and lyrical melody.


Just Rox
Born in Taos Pueblo, the third of four children, Roxanne spent her early years traveling the 70-mile stretch along the Rio Grande River between Taos, Santa Clara Pueblo, and Santa Fe where her Anglo father worked at St. John’s College. Later, when the family moved to the outskirts of Santa Fe, she joined in building the homestead her parents designed, a process taking six years to complete. Though only eight years when construction started, Roxanne laid up a great deal of the adobe brick. Her younger sister Poem carried the mud for mortar. Athena, the oldest, put up the ceiling and did the plumbing and electrical work. By the time Rox was a teenager the house was finished.

As a little girl Roxanne learned to work clay by watching her mother throw pots on the wheel, helping her dig clay and rummage through the desert searching for natural pigments. She learned the traditional Pueblo method of hand-coiling clay, which she uses to make her sculptures, from her aunts and uncle.

Little Rox struggled in school, especially in the beginning when a severe speech impediment made it impossible for anyone to understand what she was saying. “I just couldn’t hear it,” she says matter-of-factly. So she lost whole days fashioning “little worm people” to express what she was feeling. She remembers the compounded hurt of a particular day when she was six years old, trying to tell her mother about a painful incident that occurred at school. Frustrated, she constructed a clay figure of a little girl, her head buried in her arms, face down on her desk, crying. “It worked,” she recalls, flashing a brilliant smile. “That little clay figure communicated what I felt more accurately than any words!”

Without knowing it Roxanne stumbled upon a universal language: Emotion. Her clay people emoted pure feeling unadulterated by speech with its fuzzy meanings and obscure connotations. After a while she used clay to communicate what she saw as well as what she felt. “Like my dad, for instance,” she explains. “He would be reading a lot. So, I would make this man sitting there lost in a book.”

Soon communicating through clay became part of her everyday life. When she showed her clay figures to people, “they got it right away,” she grins, clicking her fingers. “It was something they understood immediately. So I found a language that passed all barriers. Growing up in New Mexico and seeing the different cultures fighting with each other, it became very important for me to find something that could reach any culture. Emotions do that.”

Rox’s struggles with traditional learning continued in the largely Hispanic Santa Fe school system. “I just didn’t learn in the traditional way,” she recalls. But she showed remarkable facility working with clay. Art became her lifeline. She consumed books on European masters her father brought home from the college, staring for hours at Michelangelo’s statues. At school her art teachers recognized her talent and guided her studies. By the eighth grade she had exhausted every art opportunity at Santa Fe High, so the Institute of American Indian Arts opened its doors (and its state-of-the-art studios) to her. “I got to go to college while still in high school. That was a great opportunity for me,” she says solemnly.

When she was sixteen Roxanne had her first one-person show, an exhibit of sculptures and paintings alongside cups, bowls, and pots she threw on the wheel. She figured she could sell her cups and bowls for two or three dollars each, but she never thought anyone would want her sculptures. “It never dawned on me, to tell the truth. I never even priced anything because I didn’t think that way. I was just so thrilled to show my stuff.” When a couple from Niagara Falls offered to buy the entire show and ship it out East, she deferred to her mother.

“Mother told them no. Money wasn’t the reason I did the show, she said. She didn’t think I needed to go down that road yet. At the time I was sort of shocked, thinking ‘Mom! Somebody actually wants to buy something!’”

Her mother reasoned Roxanne needed to establish herself before putting a monetary value on her clay people. “She wanted to make sure I did it for the right reasons, the reasons I wanted to do it for, not for dollar signs. Especially in the Southwest here, there are so many people doing art because they know it brings in money. It’s ‘ding, ding’ dollar signs. I was naïve about it all.”

At 17, Roxanne packed up her bags and headed for Oregon where she planned to attend the Portland Museum Art School because of its emphasis on the human form. The curriculum and art community stimulated her, but she soon grew weary of the school’s singular focus on art. Worst of all, she became desperately homesick, unable to grasp the logic of homeless people walking the cold, lonely streets instead of heading for the hills, and digging under bushes looking for red adobe dirt, the kind she was used to working in her hands.

After a year she returned to Santa Clara Pueblo, pregnant, a boyfriend in tow. He didn’t acclimate to the high desert climate, but she remained. “This is where I belong,” she says with finality. She set to work making pots and figures to support herself, and she started selling a few pieces. Gradually her business grew. She sold her first $1,000 sculpture before her twentieth birthday. She remembers thinking, “Oh my god! People will pay that much money for it!”

Today Rox’s little people sell for $4,500 to $6,000 a piece, though she could command more. She makes 20 to 30 pieces a year, a prolific amount considering each sculpture is made by hand, coiled and scraped, and she inevitably loses some in the firing process. Each piece sells quickly, some before they even leave her studio.


Her Art
Before beginning a sculpture Roxanne gets a good idea what she wants it to look like. Because her pieces are coiled and hollow inside, she needs to know the basic form before she begins because she can’t go back and change it.

She also gets a good idea what she wants to say. “First I feel something that I want to show. I feel how this feeling or thought would best be shown in a human body. This may happen very suddenly in the middle of something I am doing or when I am drifting off to sleep. Usually it has something to do with where I am in my life.”

She delights in visual puns; her sculpture called “Tired,” for example, depicts a plump nude with a spare tire around her middle. She weaves the magical with the mundane; a figure imprisoned in her own braid is a comment on cultural stereotyping. And she makes ironic sociological statements; women struggling with self-image is a frequent theme, as is the loss of cultural identity.

The actual figure-making process involves the right tools and tireless effort. “I don’t think of it as a visual thing. It’s a feeling,” she reiterates. She’s a master at capturing subtle physical nuances, a fine delicacy with a simple turn of the head or placement of hands. “Say I’m doing a hand, the way the fingers are moving have a feeling to it. I’ll move the fingers around until they hit, ‘Ding!’ That’s the feeling I’m after. And the same thing with the expression on the face.”

When she finishes a form she stands back and looks at it. “Sometimes I have to go get a friend to come see it and tell me what they think. Sometimes I don’t like what I see and then I will feel very tired and walk away. But other times it makes me happy, like I reached the top of a mountain after a long hard climb. It feels real good. I say, ‘Hello there,’ to my sculpture and it feels like it says ‘Hello,’ back.”

Indeed, she so accurately captures emotion her little people appear to possess a humanity all their own. “In a way I feel they are real,” she muses. “I don’t take total credit for them. I’m almost like a translator. I feel they have their own thing going. In a funny way I’m standing outside myself watching them take shape. They’re like my kids.”

As soon as she’s finished a sculpture she sends it out into the world, often without even photographing it. Is it difficult letting them go? “Sometimes, if I’m especially fond of one, I think it would be nice to just have it around and look at it for a while. But I’m glad people want to have them. I think I’m still in shock people want them at all!” she laughs heartily.

To what does she owe her inspiration, her joy, and her contagious sense of humor? “I love my life,” she told Southwest Art magazine. “I love my kids so much. I love a pretty day. I can see myself as an old person with a big smile on my face. If I lose that, I’m empty. If I have that, I have life and love to give. My sculpture comes from that place.”


Her Philosophy
Living close to the land is important to Roxanne. Indeed, she wouldn’t be happier anywhere else. Life on her desert half-acre, adjacent to the houses of her cousin, her brother, her aunt, is as good as it gets. She describes her ideal mental state as balance—being careful and thoughtful in all things—an ancient philosophy with strong roots in native Pueblo culture.

“My mother used to always talk about being careful. There’s a balance to the world you have to be careful not to disrupt. How you walk through the world matters. When it feels right you know you are in balance. Pueblo people have a word for it: poe-wa-ha, meaning the movement of water, wind, breath—the breath of life.

“It’s like you’re taking in the breath of life and breathing it back out so it’s running through you, the pattern lines of the world are going through you. If you’re conscious of it maybe then you move differently. Every breath you take matters. It’s part of the flow of life.”

Consequently, Roxanne tries to move through the world in a manner that is not against the grain, that goes along with the earth’s natural rhythms. “I believe the earth has patterns, or lines of energy, and as much as you can live with that, the happier and healthier you will be; the less of a harmful thing you are to this planet. That’s a concept human beings have a really hard time with. I don’t know why, out of all the animals on this earth, we have not gotten that very easily.”

Nature offers the perfect model. It has spontaneous balance. “It’s hard to find a bad tree,” she explains. “Even if the top or side gets chopped off, somehow in a few years it manages to make itself beautiful again. There’s even something beautiful about erosion. That beauty is because it’s in balance. Human beings are strange because they tend to go off balance. Our struggle is to try to stay in balance.”

Pueblo people believe the whole point to life is how you behave on your earthly journey. We’re put on this planet to learn how to be like it. So you have remain balanced.

In her life Roxanne strives to create a home that exists in harmony with the natural world. She tries not to buy or use environmentally poisonous products. When gardening she is keenly aware of insects, birds, and wild plants that move in as soon as soil is created and water available. “In a state of imbalance we call these ‘pests’ and ‘weeds,” she acknowledges, “but in my belief pests and weeds are only annoying because they are symptoms of imbalance within the system.” For example, lots of grasshoppers in the area tells her there is some problem in the bird population. Instead of spraying pesticides to get rid of the grasshoppers, she’d make better nesting places to attract more birds to feast on her grasshoppers and other so called pests.

Roxanne subscribes to the traditional Native American belief that what matters is not what you’ve accomplished but in what manner you went about your life. “So whether I’m building my house, gardening, sculpting, washing clothes, cooking, or laying down to rest, I try to soak in as much information about my natural environment as I can, so I have the knowledge to move through whatever it is I am doing in a manner that does not harm my Mother, my Ultimate Teacher: Nature.”

Rox learned the importance of nature from her mother, who she describes as, “the most traditional woman I know.” Rina Swentzell instilled in her children the importance of honoring the earth as our home, the supporter of life. “Nature is like love,” Rina explains. “It’s in the heart. You must not talk about it too much or you diminish what you try to describe.”


Flowering Tree
Roxanne’s patch of land is an idyllic island set amid the poverty and worn care of Rio Arriba county. A couple of horses, a few sheep, turkeys, and chickens contentedly roam their pens within distant views of the snow-capped Sangre de Cristo mountains. There’s growth everywhere—peaches, apricots, herbs, asparagus, purple grapes hanging heavily from lush vines. Clay faces peek out from surprising places—broken, melted figures stare up at you from the bushes behind the chicken coop, shy Indian faces peer out from kitchen cabinet doors. Here Roxanne lives a simple life, limiting her wants to a few basic necessities, raising her own food, baking bread and pies from scratch, and making as many of her own supplies as possible.

“I’ve always liked to grow things,” she says, “and I’ve always had animals around me. They are my friends. I love to watch things grow. Now I live in this jungle,” gesturing sweepingly at her out-of-control surroundings and laughing. “I need to cut down some trees so I can get some sunlight. If I’m going to live in a solar house, I need to keep the sunlight coming in!”

When she first moved to her desert half acre with two little children in 1986 she set up housekeeping in an old shed, determined to get used to the rhythms and idiosyncracies of her land before building a permanent dwelling. One morning, still in pajamas, she walked out of the shed to a chosen patch of earth and drew an outline on the ground with a stick. Then she started digging a foundation with a shovel. She knew the house she wanted. She had given it a lot of thought. It had to be adobe and it had to be solar. It doesn’t make sense in the Southwest to not have solar, she insists. She wanted a pitched roof and two second story dormers large enough to walk in, like her uncle’s house in Mora, a favorite childhood hangout . And she wanted a big kitchen with access outdoors.

Roxanne built the house mostly by herself, with help now and then from her friends and family. After a year she moved in.

Around this time she met and married Joel Glanzberg, an itinerate gardener with a passion for permaculture, an Australian concept developed in the 1950s literally meaning “permanent culture,” the concept of living sustainably off the land without destroying it. With Joel’s help Roxanne turned her attention to the land. It needed a lot of work.

They built up the soil with manure, straw, anything they could get ahold of. Roaming turkeys and chickens helped fertilize the yard. They laid out trails so other parts of the land could heal and regenerate. Around the trails they planted bushes, trees, herbs. In 1989 they built a cold-frame so they could grow greens year around. When they needed to make micro-climates where various kinds of plants could thrive (cool wet areas, areas with rich soil, others with sandy soil), they built an adobe wall and set about transforming the inner courtyard into a garden.

The fact they transformed one-half of a desert acre into what is now a jungle oasis is truly remarkable. Add to that the fact that the family of four lived completely off the grid—no electricity—growing their own food and raising organic vegetables and meats is almost a miracle. That was back in the heyday of the Flowering Tree Permaculture Institute, the late 1980s when, as a nonprofit organization, the property was known internationally as a successful experiment in sustainable living systems. During the glory days of the Institute Roxanne and Joel experimented with different ways of raising and storing food. They killed pigs, turkeys, sheep, chickens, and ducks with their own hands, then butchered, dried, smoked, or froze the meat.

“We did the whole works. From the sheep we got milk, cheese, and butter. From the chickens, eggs and meat. We raised bees, made candles, gathered honey; grew wheat and ground it in a mill. We dried all the fruit we could, and turned grapes into vinegar. We did everything. Plus, we were having to learn it all. There wasn’t someone to teach us. We lived as completely off the land as we could,” Rox says.

She home schooled her children at the time, so they grew up making gardens and herding turkeys. “To me they are the true permaculturists because they were brought up with it,” she laughs. “They must see the world different from other people. They see it all connected.”

What with classes, workshops, and a steady stream of visitors, having a private life became difficult. There came a time when Rox wanted out of the goldfish bowl. Consequently, today Flowering Tree doesn’t have a community of people working on it. Roxanne, single now, lives quietly. “I can’t do everything so I’ve had to compromise,” she sighs. She brought electricity back to the property. And she’s not growing all her own food anymore.

“It’s getting so shady in my yard, it’s hard to find a good area to grow things,” she laughs. Then more seriously, “You get tired of killing animals. I fall in love with my animals, so it’s hard to shoot ‘em or chop off their heads. Just the prospect makes you think, ‘Ugh! I don’t think I want to do that.’ I know what it’s like to kill your own food. I did that for years and years. I’m tired of killing. Now it’s just, ‘Ah, let ‘em live,” she laughs infectiously, brown eyes sparkling.

So she’s back on the grid and has pared her flock to a few chickens, sheep, and turkeys. She raises her chickens for eggs, her turkeys for ceremonial feathers for dances, and her Charro sheep (a distinctive Navajo kind) for their wool. Her children, now in their twenties, have moved to a nearby Pueblo and, though she misses them terribly, she is serene.

As thunder rumbles over the distant mountains friendly voices outside, young and old, call for her to hurry. Roxanne excuses herself apologetically. Her neighbors have cut hay and it’s waiting in the field to be baled and hauled away. She must move quickly or she’ll lose the crop to mold. In dusty jeans, frayed t-shirts, and brilliant smiles (bearing a distinct family resemblance), the crew crowds into a picaresque pea-green 1950s pickup truck, waves goodbye, and heads up the hill, full of energy and uncommon joy in simply living.



Respect Water
Without water life does not exist. Indeed, without it we would not have oxygen in the air to breathe. For the Pueblo Indians water is sacred—poe-wa-ha—wind, water, breathe. In their thinking water is the blood of the earth. They consider it a religious obligation to act as guardians of the land and its water. It makes sense then to respect water and not just mindlessly take it for granted.

A good place to begin “water awareness” is to study the different kinds of water and what it does when it comes into contact with organic matter. Repeated bathing with hard, hot water in a cold, dry climate, for example, can cause dry, itchy skin. Soft water, on the other hand, makes skin feel silky and hair naturally shiny, fluffy, and conditioned.

If, like most Americans, your household water comes from a public system, it is treated with chemicals to make it safe for consumption. It doesn’t make sense, then, to use this “expensive,” treated water on gardens and in yards. This is where water catchment and “greywater” systems enter the picture. Greywater is washwater, excluding toilet wastes and water containing garbage and grinder residue (which is classified as “black water.”) Greywater contains less nitrogen and fewer pathogens than blackwater, plus it decomposes much faster, making it a valuable resource for horticultural and agricultural purposes.

The most widely used water catchment system is a barrel or tub placed directly under a downspout for catching rainwater as it pours off the roof. Use this water for watering household plants and gardens, and try it for hairwashing, as our ancestors did when water wasn’t so readily available at the tap.

If you have a large garden or live in a climate where you can’t count on rainwater to supply adequate moisture for landscaping, consider other forms of water catchment, as Roxanne and Joel did at Flowering Tree. Because her high desert half-acre receives less than twelve inches annual rainfall, she stores runoff from rooftops in large metal tanks surrounded by trees so shade keeps the water from evaporating. An shaded open tank provides water for a small plant nursery, and makes a good swimming hole. Two small ponds nearby lined with cement support fish and water plants. “All kinds of animals like the ponds,” Rox says.

Drinking water from the tribal well was too precious to waste on gardens, so they captured greywater wherever they could, rigging up a system to use bathtub water for irrigation, contouring shallow ditches (swales) into the ground, then lining them with rock to catch water flowing downhill and hold it until it seeps into the ground. This helps hold water around plants and keeps dirt from washing away. Once this was done, Rox noticed these places became full of life, like magic. Ditch water runs through the ponds on weekends helping clean and aerate them so fish can breathe, then the water runs into a corn and bean field, carrying fertilizer from fish to plants

As a final water experiment, Rox made “flowforms” out of cement, placing them one above the other so water runs from a swale into the top basin, where it pools before it flows through an opening and splashes and spins into the basin immediately beneath it, where it pools before it flows into the next basin, and the next. By the time the water flows through the last form, reaching a swale where it is carried to a plant area, it is aerated, energized, and clean, thus helping plants to grow. This happens in natural streams and arroyos all the time, she says. You can see it in nature, in sandstone canyons in the Southwest, for example, where water is falling or cutting through rock.
Once again, paying attention to nature offers clues to how to live in balance and harmony with your surroundings instead of harming the environment simply to suit your own needs.


Old Tewa Prayer
We gather here
That we may be loved and liked,
That we may catch up with that for which we are always yearning,
That we may achieve the good life,
That we live in Beauty and in Harmony.

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