Pottery is such an integral part of our family.

And things like where to dig for clay and \ the polishing method, how to fire pieces, those traditions have been in our family every single generation for the last thousand years.

I knew it was important when I went on a field trip to a museum and my mom's pot was in there and her mom's pot and my great grandmother's pot and my teacher was like, oh my goodness, that's your family?

Sergio and Joseph are brothers.

They come from Santa Clara Pueblo.

Each pueblo has a different style of pottery that they traditionally make and it really is based on the type of clay that is in the surrounding area.

New Mexico has so much variety and types of clay.

What is that?

Oh, that's cool.

Yeah.

So, this is really pigmented stone.

So, this we would pulverize to make slip.

And we'll find different color ones, and that's why you get variations of different types of reds.

I've been working with clay since I was about three.

I was told by everybody, you're gonna be making pottery.

It's, it's kind of, it's expected.

When we build the pots, we use what we call a puki, and it's basically just a premade bowl.

It's all coil built.

And a lot of the process is dependent on the weather.

You don't want it to be humid, because if your piece is too wet, it will collapse.

It won't be strong enough to hold its own weight.

But if a piece dries out too much, the coil will crack.

A lot of it is just feel and knowing from experience.

Joseph Lugo, his pieces are thoughtful.

And he really thinks about pueblo culture, Santa Clara culture in particular, as the foundation for the pieces that he makes.

Unlike pretty much every other tribe, we make our pieces very thick.

So we are able to carve very, very deep and create a lot of dimension.

I had my first show when I was seven years old.

It wasn't something I really wanted to do.

And I took a break for a very long time.

And one day, I just, I fell in love with it again.

It's really cool to show people what you can create with your hands.

Sergio Lugo is part of this younger generation that take traditional aspects of the work and make it part of their contemporary world.

The avanyu, or the water serpent, is a protector of water.

I created my own water serpent.

I wanted to make it more modern.

I've always thought that polishing is the most technically difficult part.

We're using just basic materials, a mixture of clay and water to make slip and polishing stones.

No glaze at all.

Everything's traditional method.

We all use in the family our grandmother's, grandmother's, grandmother's stone.

And just knowing that it's passed so many hands, it gives me a lot of confidence to do the same thing that they did.

At Santa Clara Pueblo, the people were farmers.

So, typically the women made pottery.

Men might paint or design pieces, but they didn't necessarily make pottery.

Pottery was meant for utility and for ceremony.

But in the late 1800s, when the railroads were developed, they would stop at every pueblo, and there would be people selling pottery.

About 50 years ago, the men began to make pottery as well.

Generational knowledge is passing information from person to person.

One person that did a lot of that was my great, great grandmother, Serafina Tafoya.

She had different types of impressed pieces, painted pieces.

Then she was a massive influence to the next generation after her, especially my great grandmother, Margaret Tafoya.

Margaret Tafoya is one of the most important pueblo potters of the past century.

She's one of the few potters that won best of show twice in Santa Fe Indian Market, two years in a row when she was already in her 80s.

So they come from a lineage of extraordinary potters.

Joseph and Sergio's mother, Nancy Youngblood, is also one of the leading potters working today.

We still ask her for input, all three of us, my brothers.

She's taught us to make everything handmade, hand carved, hand polished, traditionally fired.

It is a cultural science that is about pueblo life, pueblo art.

And it's all learned knowledge.

That's something that we're starting to understand is a really important part of science today that 50 years ago we didn't even think was scientific.

There's so much time and effort you put into a piece of pottery that you don't want to lose it to the wind or a major temperature change.

My mom created this shed to control all of that.

Each pot is red before the firing.

And the firing dictates if the pot is black or red.

When we started the fire, the pieces were getting sooty.

Once we put the boards on, the fire gets really hot and all of that soot starts to burn off.

You have to look in and see exactly when the soot is burning off the piece.

Yeah, still sooty on Joe's.

If it gets over fired, the piece will dull out.

It's starting to burn off here too.

Oh yeah.

When it reaches that perfect temperature, the finish is very shiny.

Yeah, my pot's done.

Once it kind of reaches that molten stage, that's when we cover it with manure.

This shredded manure keeps all of the smoke inside.

Beautiful.

That's how the color change is happening.

It's a chemical reaction of the manure and all of the smoke.

We've covered the fire now, cutting off the oxygen.

If you didn't cut off the oxygen, the pieces turn brown.

And they're just sitting in like a cloud of smoke right now.

Let's get it nice and packed.

Just making sure that temperature goes down slowly is the key to a successful piece.

We don't know the scientific detail of it, but we know what happens when you do certain things, and we know it works.

Wipe it a little bit.

It's a whole lot of work, but when it comes together, it, it's magical.

After everything's clean, we got to sign the wall.

You know, I look around and I see dates and history and relatives.

I can add my name to that.

And keep it going.

I think that 500 years ago they would have had no idea that we would still be doing this.

But it is because of the resilience that they had that we have continued to pass it through every generation.