This is a traditional bowl by Ida Sahmie.  It has the Night Chant Dance with seven male Yei-bi-chi dancers on the jar.  There are also the two people standing before the dancers who are there for the healing ceremony.  The background area is fully painted with bee-weed (a plant) to make it black and there are stars in the sky.  Each figure is also painted with various clay colors and incised in the white areas.  There is an amazing amount of work on her pieces and it is all done BEFORE the piece is fired!  Check out as well the shadows at the bottom and how she even did the feathers.  Ida said of this design:

“The night and day dancers do about the same dance.  It takes me so much time to etch the designs. I etch each figure before the jar is fired.  The skirt on each of the figures has a different design.  After they are etched then I use the slips to create the colors. After all the painting is done, then I fire it outside.”

Ida is a daughter-in-law of Priscilla Nampeyo and she has won numerous awards for her pottery at events such as Santa Fe Indian Market.  She is the only Navajo potter creating this unique style of ethnographic imagery on her pottery using these materials.  It is signed on the bottom in the clay, “Ida Sahmie.