Early Life
Her grandmother first introduced her to pottery making at the age of three. Maria Martinez’s sister gave her the name “Blue Corn” during the naming ceremony, which is the Native American tradition of naming a child.
Blue Corn attended school at the pueblo in her early years. She then went to Santa Fe Indian School, which was 24 miles (39 km) from home. While attending school in Santa Fe, her mother and father died, and she was sent to live with relatives in southern California. Here she worked as a maid for a short time in Beverly Hills.
At the age of 20, she married Santiago “Sandy” Calabaza, a silversmith from Santo Domingo Pueblo. Together they settled at San Ildefonso, where she bore and raised 10 children. During World War II, Blue Corn worked as a housecleaner in Los Alamos for the physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer.
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Famous quotes related to early life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)