ARTS FEATURE
OF THE LAND
Exhibit spotlights Catawba Indian Nation’s enduring clay pottery practices
Pg. 10 MAR 23 - APR 5, 2022 - QCNERVE.COM
BY PAT MORAN
The Charlotte region’s oldest cultural tradition predates practically everything we’ve learned about our city’s heritage. Thomas Spratt settling near what is now Elizabeth, the fabled (and likely fabulist) Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, and British General Cornwallis calling The Queen City “a hornets’ nest” of rebellion as he fled the area — all are just recent blips on the radar screen, pebbles crushed by the rolling wheel of time compared to this curio of Charlotte’s real heritage. The irony is that all who live in the Carolinas today can appreciate this millennia-old tradition because it has been maintained under adversity by a people who have been oppressed, dismissed and ignored for centuries. Perhaps this historic treasure trove has also been overlooked because it began with utilitarian intent; it is distinctive blue-graycolored pottery, including jars and jugs, used to gather water from the Catawba River by members of the Catawba Indian Nation for thousands of years. “This is our oldest unbroken tradition,” says DeLesslin “Roo” George-Warren, an artist, educator and member of the Catawba Indian Nation, one of the indigenous Indian tribes that settled the Carolina Piedmont over 10,000 years ago. “We’ve never stopped making pottery. We never stopped teaching the next generation how to make pottery, even when it was literally just a handful of people still doing it.” Though the Catawba Nation’s lands are today centered near Rock Hill, their people once spread across the region, says Angel Johnston, adult education specialist at Charlotte Museum of History. “Thousands of years ago, the Catawba Nation settled here and chose to make this the center of their trade,” she adds. “It’s not a piece of history that is in the far-off past. It’s something that affects our lives here today.” Johnston helped organize the museum’s current traveling exhibit, The Language of Clay: Catawba Indian Pottery & Oral Traditions, on loan from the USC Lancaster Native American Studies Center (NASC). The exhibit features 41 clay pottery pieces from the 19th century to the present that boast Catawba Pottery’s distinctive blue-gray color, which comes
from clay dug from the flood plains of the Catawba River, thereby connecting the Catawba people to the land they have inhabited for thousands of years. On March 26, museum visitors can take a deeper dive into Catawba pottery when the history museum offers free guided tours of the exhibit led by Stephen Criswell, director of the NASC. The two tours will bookend a live-streamed program about the art and history of Catawba pottery, hosted by George-Warren. Now 30, George-Warren was born in Atlanta, where his mother attended law school. When he was 3, his family moved back to their hometown of Rock Hill, where George-Warren grew up right outside the reservation. His grandfather, Buck George, was assistant chief for 30 years. His aunt, Dr. Wenonah Haire, has been running the Catawba Cultural Center, located on the Catawba Nation reservation near Rock Hill, for more than three decades. In 2017, George-Warren received a small grant from the organization Running Strong for American Indian Youth to begin working on the Catawba Nation’s language project. He worked at the Cultural Center before becoming an independent consultant for the tribe, a position he still holds today. George-Warren says he expects most attendees of the virtual presentation will be non-native Carolinians, eager to learn more about the Nation and its most famous craft. “My goal … when talking to non-native folks is almost always to try and unsettle them,” GeorgeWarren says. “One of the greatest struggles we have as a tribal nation is that people don’t know anything about us, because it’s not taught in schools in anything approaching an adequate way.” He feels his mission when hosting talks and presentations is to foster understanding that the Catawba have a complicated history that is interconnected with the United States’ history. “[If you are] living in Rock Hill, Fort Mill, Charlotte [or in] the Piedmont in North Carolina and South Carolina — you are living on treaty land. You are in a legal obligation with the Catawba nation,” he offers. That said, the presentation won’t be heavyhanded. George-Warren, a performance artist who studied music at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, will teach participants Catawba songs and share traditional and historical stories about his people.
The good earth
Methods for making pottery have remained consistent for the Catawba for thousands of years. In fact, production methods have changed little since the Woodland (1000 B.C.E.–600 C.E.) and Mississippian (600–1600 C.E.) periods. First, raw
PIECES FROM THE LANGUAGE OF CLAY EXHIBIT AT CHARLOTTE MUSEUM OF HISTORY. PHOTO COURTESY OF CMOH
materials are “harvested” from clay pits that can stay in the possession of families for generations. The location of each clay pit, and how the pit connects the families back to the land, is an important component for understanding Catawba pottery, Johnston says. It would be a mistake, however, to simplify that bond as “sacred” from a spiritual sense, says George-Warren, though the people who mine it do want to protect it. He notes that his family, which has been making pottery for generations, guards the location of their clay pit closely. “The clay hole that I’m thinking of is one that my aunt made me dig mud out of,” George-Warren says. “It’s been used for 500 years and the vein has not gone dry. That would not be the case if we told everybody where the clay hole was.” The pit needed to be kept secret from people who didn’t know proper practices — like how much clay to take out of the hole at any given time. “There are ways of doing it so you’re not screwing over all the other potters that need clay,” GeorgeWarren maintains. In effect, sacredness is a way of designating that something is important and shouldn’t be treated as just a resource. Once impurities are removed from the clay, Catawba pottery is made by hand with traditional coiling techniques. Handles and legs are pushed
through a hole punched into the pottery, rather than by applying them directly to the surface of the vessel. This means features like handles do not break off easily. Once the pot is air-dried, its surface is scraped even with a piece of bone or antler. Next it is rubbed with a smooth river stone to burnish the pot. Designs are then cut into the surface. There is an array of design motifs. The figure of a turtle is a recurring motif. It ties in with the Catawba’s creation story, Johnston says, where the world rests on the turtle’s back. “You’ll see turtles in the pottery in the exhibit — and in general,” she says. Recurring designs are not just a way to connect back to the land, they also create a kind of place marker that ties into the Catawba people’s culture, folklore and oral histories. “I think of [motifs] as a little bit like the icons in the Eastern Orthodox church,” George-Warren says. “They’re there to teach and [to help us] remember stories.” Images of snakes, often the black snake or the king snake, proliferate on the pottery. They symbolize protection, George-Warren says, and not just spiritual protection. Snakes are also ecological protectors for the Catawba people, keeping mice away from grain or seed jars adorned with images of the animal. Humans are rarely depicted. When they are,
