The Matriarch in Native Ceramics

*Originally written May 6, 2024

Since the latter half of the twentieth century, efforts to decolonize Western art history and its institutions have been underway to include Indigenous voices and histories, after five centuries of denial. Historically, Indigenous peoples and their cultural objects have been subjected to a strictly anthropological perspective, creating the myth of the ‘Other’ in dichotomy with the ‘Man,’ the evolved, intellectual, Euro-American individual. In the development of these taxonomies, art history has overlooked Native artists, particularly women, due to the deeply ingrained Eurocentric assumption that these women were and are "untrained" in a canonical sense, working within a static tradition of "ancient craft" with little individual artistic ingenuity. The materials and technologies used by women have been assigned to the lower categories of "craft," "applied," and "decorative" art and dismissed as unsuited to the expression of important spiritual, intellectual, moral, and aesthetic principles. A consequence of the anthropological stance on Indigenous artwork was that one Native artist's work was often considered broadly representative of an entire culture. Therefore, there was no need to identify the artist, particularly women artists. This practice of anonymity, stripping out individual identities, took hold in the field of anthropology and influenced art history, as these artists are often absent from history books and the American consciousness.

Despite the lack of recognition by the mainstream art world, women artists are celebrated, admired, and respected in their own communities. Beadwork, basket weaving, textiles, and pottery are practices cultivated by intergenerational knowledge, passed from mother to daughter. As heather ahtone (Chickasaw) claimed, “we are connected through the sequence of belly buttons and birth cords, woven together across time, through which we bring our stories into the present.” This paper will focus on how clay reveals the presence and authority of women within Indigenous communities across Turtle Island by examining three themes: matrilineal practices of making, representations of women in ceramics, and activism.

Artists included in this discussion are Roxanne Swentzell, Rose B. Simpson, Rose Powhatan, Anita Fields, and Raven Halfmoon. They address themes of Indigenous rights, ancestral myths, cultural loss, and the impact of colonization on contemporary identities. Additionally, they embody the role that many Native female artists play in their communities by providing material and spiritual protection, transmitting knowledge, and enhancing financial stability. Through their work, they establish and sustain Native visual languages that illuminate identities and histories, ensuring their continuity. Lastly, there is an emphasis on interconnectedness and reciprocity, with works perceived as living entities that engage with viewers and communities over time.

Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico has an incredibly rich history of ceramics and has, in recent years, gained traction in the mainstream art world. Mother-daughter duo Roxanne Swentzell and Rose B. Simpson continue the generational craft that can be traced to their ancestor, or matriarch, Gia-Khun (Mother Corn). Gia-Khun was born in 1867 and passed down Tewa Pueblo teachings to her eight biological children and her seven ‘adopted’ children. According to Tessie Naranjo, Swentzell’s aunt, present-day Naranjo women are proud descendants of this strong woman, their great-grandmother. Memories of Gia-Khun formed by her children recall her telling stories while cooking or making pottery. Pottery was a way for her children and grandchildren to embody a strong work ethic, as a volatile craft, that takes time and patience to create the final vessel. The steps in creating pottery begin with digging into the earth to extract material, then mixing clay with ash, shaping, drying, smoothing, applying rock slip, and finally firing the vessel. Each step is imbued with ancestral knowledge and intent.

Roxanne Swentzell states that her role as a mother and grandmother feeds into her artistic practice and lifestyle, cherishing "family, place, culture, community, being thoughtful, and living according to Pueblo values." Swentzell’s work of clay sculpture depicting the lives of her community members is heavily influenced by her grandmother Gia (Tewa for mother). Her figures, along with their expressive features and prominent hands and feet, reflect the range of human emotions from laughter to tears, showing the beauty of humanity and engaging with the audience. The exaggerated scale of the hands and feet conveys to the spectator that these parts of the body retain information; they are the tools we are born with to create and survive.

Roxanne Swentzell, Sitting on my Mother’s Back, 2014, ceramic, 25 x 13 x 22 in., Hood Museum, Hanover, NH

Beyond human relationships based on matrilineal values, the relationship with the land, or Mother Earth, is intertwined in many indigenous nations through respect and care for her resources. Swentzell’s work, Sitting on My Mother's Back humanizes this connectivity with Mother Earth, as two figures emerge from the upper back of Earth, depicted as a seated woman with her head down. The more miniature figures look away, pulling at her hair as if it were their own – visualizing how humans often deny their intrinsic relationship with the environment. Swentzell conveys the Pueblo viewpoint and knowledge system, passed down from her ancestors, which recognizes the spiritual and physical relationships we have with everything around us and within us. These relationships are aligned with "kincentricity,” the understanding that our being is tied to all other types of life forms: “animals, plants, seasons, the winds, the rain, and the Holy Ones, and that we are collectively the children of the earth mother.”

Roxanne Swentzell and Rose B. Simpson, Timeline Necklace, 2019, ceramic, leather, wood, string, mud, and wire, 24 x 256 x 9 in., Hood Museum, Hanover, NH

Swentzell collaborated with her daughter, Rose B. Simpson (named after her great-grandmother Rose Naranjo), on Timeline Necklace, created for the Hood Museum’s 2021 exhibition, "Form and Relation." The work consists of a string of beads, small clay figurative sculptures, and pieces of pottery, representing two separate generations: a mother and daughter experiencing different phases of life but fundamentally tied together. The work confronts us with notions of connectedness, both past and future. Swentzell stresses, “Clay was handed down to me, and I handed it to my kids. That passing of the clay is the connection, forward and backward.”Simpson reiterates this cycle: “The world that I come from is earth, it's clay, it's my mom. She built the vessel of our home. She grows food in the earth. We eat from the bowls she makes. Her sculptures created the financial income to support our family, so it was every single part of our life.” Both artists emphasize the process of pottery rather than the end result. Their collaborative work allows them to continuously learn, from the clay and from each other, strengthening their kincentric bond. Both Sitting on My Mother’s Back and Timeline Necklace are products of matrilinear practices, passed from mother to child, but also from Mother Earth to her children, as each piece ties life and the future to our relationality with our families, with one another, and with Earth.

Another critical theme that emerges in the field of Indigenous ceramics is the strength and leadership of women. In Native worldviews, the ability to create life holds sacred power, reflected in the roles women in their communities hold, whether spiritual, social, or political. Native women carry personal power through values of honour, grace, and balance. They evoke these values through a symbiotic relationship, or kincentricity, with those around them, keeping respect and care in mind. These values are at the heart of women's power within Native communities and are found throughout Native women's art. Power is also a physical characteristic achieved through craft, as it takes muscle to cut down trees for splints, skin and tan hides, shear sheep, and dig clay. Political power, for Native women, is not a novel concept. Paula Allen Gunn (Laguna Pueblo) argues in her book, The Sacred Hoop, that pre-contact Indigenous nations were structured in a gynocratic system, where women, due to their sacred, life-giving abilities, held positions of leadership in respected communities, while men strove to achieve such a status in their lifetime. Rose Powhatan (Pamunkey and Tauxenent) celebrates her paternal ancestor, Kezhiah Powhatan, who was the werowansqua (female chief) of the Tauxenents during colonial times. Her piece, Fire Warrior Woman, made of locally sourced organic materials, pays respect to her ancestor and all Indigenous women who fought for the freedom and ownership of their homeland. Keziah Powhatan is particularly remarkable for leading her warriors in the destruction of the first courthouse in Fairfax County, Virginia, in 1752, built on the unceded land of the Tauxenents. The inherent authority Native women held and the careful balance of male and female responsibilities were scrapped by Western patriarchal and patrilineal systems during the colonial era. By bringing the past into the present, Rose Powhatan revises history and restores autonomy to her matriarchs.

Rose Powhatan, Fire Warrior Woman, 2007, wood, vine, clay, feathers, 72 x 19 in., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Anita Fields, Elements of Being, 1997, earthenware with terra sigillata slip, 72 × 60 in., Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR

Anita Fields (Osage/Muscogee) is an established artist living in Oklahoma near her community of the Osage Nation. Like the other artists mentioned thus far, Fields cites her relatives, specifically her grandmother, as shaping her into the Osage woman she is today. Her work honours Indigenous women as culture bearers, and her work is personal and culturally connected. Her close connection to and involvement in her Osage community are reflected in her artwork. Prominently working with ceramics, Fields also sews traditional ribbonwork and cooks Osage dishes for communal feasts. Her work, Elements of Being, recalls an Osage prayer, which ends with the instruction to "take care of the elements of being." The elements are visualized as three monumental female earthenware figures, standing more than seven feet high. The figures, made visually apparent as their black forms with speckles of white stand out against the red-orange backdrops. According to Mindy N. Besaw, the lower bodies planted into the gray-colored earth signify strength, determination, and power. The mask-like faces are not meant to represent specific women but rather the strength and female spirit more broadly. In front of the figures stand three platforms, each with a black and white fabric bundle. These bundles are a part of the Osage tradition of offering gifts wrapped in fabric during ceremonies to honour one another and to share material belongings. Fields refers to these bundles as universal, enabling women to carry their belongings throughout their life's journey, more specifically, their spiritual quest for truth. To achieve diverse hues and textures in her sculptures, Fields delicately applies tinted terra sigillata, a fine clay slip, onto her pieces prior to their drying phase. This sigillata can be either stone-polished to produce a sheen or left untouched to maintain its matte finish, characteristic of fired clay.

Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday coined the term “blood memory” as ancestral knowledge tied to the body, providing Indigenous-centered ways of experiencing one’s history. In these cases, clay holds blood memories, connecting these artists to the past, present, and future. The memories of female ancestors, mothers, sisters, and daughters are held in every step; through the process of extracting and shaping the clay, to evoking femininity in form and representation of these works.

Indigenous art today is inherently politicized, as many artists use their practice to reflect on pressing issues that impact their identity, livelihood, environment, and turbulent conditions of their communities. As this paper began with acknowledging the mission to decolonize art spaces, these next two artists discussed, continue the work that was being done by organizations made up of activists, writers, and artists pushing for inclusivity and the rights of Indigenous women in the United States beginning in the 1970s. During the second wave of feminism during this time, women of color often found themselves alienated from the prominent white middle-class, cis, straight concerns in the fight for meaningful justice in the West. These activists were a part of Third World feminism, women who were either native to the land or immigrants with African, Asian, or Hispanic roots, and understood their struggles of reproductive rights, poverty, sexual violence, and police violence stemmed not only from patriarchy but specifically a white, imperialist patriarchy. American Indian Movement and Women of All Red Nations aligned their fight for Indigenous sovereignty with women’s rights. In 1999, Lucy Lippard wrote about the feminist critics in the art world that “most white feminists seem totally unaware…of the diversity and complexity of Native women’s experience in all their varied cultures and geographical circumstances of contact and conquest.” By the late 1970s in New York, a number of Native American cultural spaces had emerged, and these proved crucial for the promotion of Native female artists, including “Women of Sweetgrass, Cedar, and Sage” at American Indian Community House in SoHo in 1985 organized by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and Harmony Hammond. The show traveled to nine museums across the United States, and in the introduction of the catalogue, the curators stated the show was “born out of a spirit of exchange and networking.” This connectivity across pseudo-borders fosters resilience and visibility of Native female artists and their experiences, which is ongoing today.

Cannupa Hanska Luger, Every One (#MMIWQT Bead Project), 2018, hand-painted 2-in clay beads, 144 x 168 x 2 in., Hood Museum, Hanover, NH

Cannupa Hanska Luger’s (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara) work Every One speaks to the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and queer and trans community members. Made from over four thousand clay beads, each bead represents a person lost to the MMIWQT crisis, with clay representing the corporal absence of the missing and murdered. The final form of the work is strung on cord and hung as a ceramic screen, with the clay beads varying in shades of white, black, and gray. The screen reveals a portrait of a woman, based on the photograph Sister (2018) by Kaska Dena artist Kali Spitzer. The ordered columns and rows evoke both Plains beadwork and wampum, animating traditions of making and its power to generate community and healing. The work was collaborative, as Luger posted a call-to-action video on social media, and within months, accumulated thousands of hand-shaped, two-inch clay beads created by hundreds of individuals and communities affected by the crisis across the United States and Canada. Luger emphasizes the value of art as a verb, not a noun, by allowing participants to fully engage, exchange, learn, and heal in the process of making. The unique fingerprints on each bead left by its maker become less visible when put together; this is not to say that they are unimportant, but rather that each bead and its unique characteristics inform and contribute in significant ways to the larger work.

Raven Halfmoon (Caddo Nation) is a sculptor and painter who combines Caddo pottery traditions with contemporary motifs to create large-scale sculptures. Her work is informed by the passing of knowledge, specifically learning how to pull clay and coil pots, as well as the stories and history of clay, by observing and working with her Elders. She blends popular culture with Caddoan iconography, expressing the notion of change and adaptation that has allowed for the survivance of Indigenous art and culture. By mimicking the large-scale monuments often dedicated to men, her work honours the powerful women who have raised her and the generations before her. Halfmoon refers to her practice as holistic; by not representing a particular woman, she extends her worldview, allowing the audience to connect with it. Like Luger, Halfmoon acknowledges the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movement as a part of her conversations with those around her, as it directly impacts her family and friends. She states that her choice in colours – black, white, red – is tied to the Missing and Murdered, particularly the red handprints seen on Flagbearer.

Raven Halfmoon, Flagbearer, 2022, Stoneware, glaze, steel armature, 153 x 59 x 48 in. Ross + Kramer Gallery, New York, NY

Though this paper is structured to analyze the themes of matrilinear practices, representations of women and power, and activism, these artists work across these themes. They all share the strength of intergenerational community, drawing on the knowledge and practices of their ancestors, communities, and the land around them to create space to exist in this world. Art, as illustrated throughout this paper, is inseparable from our lives and experiences, with family always centered as inspiration. These artists reinforce the Native worldview of kincentricity, that we have a collective responsibility to take care of one another. Once we all practice basic empathy, care arises, and we become invested in issues faced by our neighbours, from environmental racism to the well-being of marginalized women and queer communities. Clay is a poignant material for expressing these virtues, as it has been a continuous and connected tradition among many Indigenous nations, evoking land, knowledge, gender, and agency. As Native women make things, they work from memories of the past; they work to remember their relationship to place and to one another, and they work to remember the history they are. These artists working in the contemporary field showcase the ability to change, adapt, and reimagine while holding onto their cultural philosophies and aesthetics, which is a form of resilience against the ongoing colonial destruction that began five hundred years ago. By keeping their traditions of their ancestors, both their art and indigeneity are living, breathing processes.

Sources:

Ahlberg Yohe, Jill, Teri Greeves, and Kaywin Feldman. Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists. Edited by Laura Silver. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Minneapolis Institute of Art in association with the University of Washington Press, 2019.

Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.

Chaudhuri, Nupur, and Cheryl Johnson-Odim. “Introduction.” NWSA Journal 8, no. 1 (1996): 1–7.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/4316420.

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Art for a New Understanding : Native Voices, 1950s to Now. Fayetteville: University of

Arkansas Press, 2018.

Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art. Native Art Now! : Developments in Contemporary Native American Art Since

1992. Indianapolis: Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, 2017.

Kauanui, J. Kēhaulani. “‘Clay. . . Lets You Leave Your Mark Exactly How You Put It down’: An Interview with Raven Halfmoon.” Forge

Project, September 30, 2023. https://forgeproject.com/forging/raven-halfmoon-interview.

Lukavic, John, and Jami C. Powell. Each/Other: Marie Watt and Cannupa Hanska Luger. Interview by Namita Gupta Wiggers. Denver, CO: Denver Art Museum, 2021.

Powell, Jami C., ed. Form & Relation: Contemporary Native Ceramics. Hanover, New Hampshire: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth, 2020.