When we first visit the American Southwest, we bring with us lifetimes of expectation. We've heard about the miracle of American Indian people still living close to their homelands. We've seen a thousand photos of the stunning traditional crafts of Pueblo artists displayed on sun-warmed adobe walls.

Then we arrive in New Mexico or Arizona. And we indeed find these expectations fulfilled -- along with disconcerting casinos at the edge of every reservation. Along with more young Indian people attending Santa Fe's prestigious Institute of American Indian Arts than working in cornfields or herding sheep. Along with native artists who own high-status galleries, manage sophisticated websites and create designer fashions along with their hand-coiled jars.

Today's 21st century Pueblo Indian potters help us to bridge these surprises. They connect our warm respect for what we think of as tradition with the reality of our travels in modern America -- for Indian Country exists within contemporary culture.

Pueblo Indians still live in their 20 ancient home villages in a crescent of reservations scattered from Taos, N.M., to northern Arizona, but they also live in Southwestern cities. They still make their signature art form -- hand-coiled pottery fired outside in a simple wood- or dung-fired kiln -- but they also experiment with new techniques.

Travelers can find no better window into the dynamic spirit of contemporary Southwestern Indian people than to seek out Pueblo pots and their makers.

In the grandmothers' generation, a Pueblo woman incorporated pottery-making as part of her cultural identity. On First Mesa at the Hopi Pueblos in Arizona, or at the New Mexico pueblos of Santa Clara and San Ildefonso, nearly every woman learned to coil, shape, paint and fire pottery.

CULTURAL CHOICE

Today pottery-making is a choice, no longer a cultural fundamental. Only those Pueblo people who consciously make art from clay, whose primary joy comes from creating, become potters now.

They may be men or women, from a heavily marketed family or not, young or old, reservation-based or city- based, dedicated to their grandmother's techniques or open to electric kilns and all the tools available today.

These are the new Pueblo potters -- ''transmitters,'' as Santa Clara sculptor Roxanne Swentzell puts it -- grumpy about the narrow categories used by judges at markets and Indian fairs and eager to defy these constraints, yet proud of their heritage.

Caroline Carpio gleefully entered her first bronze casting of one of her Isleta pots at the Heard Museum Indian Fair, Arizona's largest and most prestigious competition, drawing more than 800 artists to Phoenix each March.

''Does pottery always have to be clay? I wanted to test the meaning,'' she says.

More and more, the Pueblo potter stands alone as an individual rather than as, first and foremost, a community member. Each Pueblo artist must personally define ``culture.''

Nothing is a given in a world where ''Pueblo people have embraced self-determination in their personal life,'' in Santo Domingo potter William Pacheco's words. He demonstrates that freedom in his pots, decorated with his uniquely personal design choice, dinosaurs.

CORE OF IDENTITY

Contemporary pottery balances these tensions and communicates to travelers the core issues of American Indian identity in the 21st century.

Suburban Indians still return to their pueblos to dance in plazas on feast days, to listen to elders, to stay in touch with ever-extending families.

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