Rina Swentzell

Rina Naranjo Swentzell (1939 – 2015) was a Tewa Santa Clara Puebloan author, potter, historian and architect.

Swentzell's home of the Santa Clara Pueblo, and the tradition of Puebloan pottery passed down through the generations would leave a strong impression on her future studies and career.

She would go on to work as a consultant to the Institute of American Indian Arts and the Smithsonian and serve as a visiting lecturer to Yale and Oxford universities.

[4][5] Her academic writing explored the conflicts between culture and landscape within the Santa Clara pueblo and the relationship between how architecture, land and space reflected the belief systems of the Tewa people who lived there.

[6][7][8] In 1993, she wrote Children of Clay: A Family of Pueblo Potters (We Are Still Here) and in 1996 co-authored To Touch the Past: The Painted Pottery of the Mimbres People with J.J.

In 2010, she published Younger-Older Ones: Tieu-Paadeh Ing, a novel about moving to the modern day Santa Clara Pueblo.

Plan of the Santa Clara Pueblo, where Swentzell was born and where she would focus her studies