Richard Zane Smith, Wyandotte Feast Pot, 2020 (First Americans Museum, Oklahoma City)
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:04] We’re in the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City, standing in front of this large, beautiful Wyandotte feast bowl. It was produced in 2020 by Richard Zane Smith.
Dr. Heather Ahtone: [0:17] Richard Zane Smith is one of the most prominent Native American ceramicists in the United States. His pots are incredibly high value.
Dr. Zucker: [0:26] Unlike so much of Richard Zane Smith’s well-known work, this is drawing on traditional forms.
Dr. Ahtone: [0:33] He’s known for doing these contemporary forms for the market. It’s the market by which he feeds his family and takes care of his animals. He uses traditional construction techniques, building it by coil. He harvests the clay by hand. There’s a lot of ancestral knowledge even within his contemporary forms. In the pot that we have, he’s replicated traditional forms.
[0:57] The Wyandotte people who are related to the Huron in Canada, their original name for themselves is Wendat.
[1:04] For many of us as Indigenous people, while we have been relocated as a product of a lot of different policies or economic situations, we are now in many ways in an incredible diaspora across the Americas and across the world, our Indigenous communities still hold sacred our ancestral knowledge and our relationships to the sites upon which we were gifted a place to live and be human by the Creator.
[1:31] Richard makes these historic Wyandotte forms for their community to actually use. They’re quite large because they’re using them to make soup for their ceremonies and to feed their community.
[1:42] He offered me one of the forms that he had made for this purpose. It was used a couple years ago to cook corn soup for their spring renewal ceremonies.
[1:51] In addition, he had hand-carved a ladle out of oak that’s quite large. It’s a feast ladle. On the helm of the handle, it has a person. The way that he made the ladle handle bend at the top, it sits on the rim of the pot.
[2:09] The way that it’s presented in the museum is how he wanted it presented. It’s beautifully a part of our case full of objects that are vessels by which our communities have carried our cultures into the contemporary era. And we’ll carry them into the future.
[2:23] He’s used a historic form that has a prow, much like one might see on a boat. In fact, it does resemble the Wyandotte canoe prows. It is carefully balanced. It’s very circular. It has a narrow base that broadens on the shoulders, up around the sides, and then narrows back in to create that uplift that one might see off of a canoe just burgeoning at the top of the river surface.
[2:48] His mastery of the technique is most evident in how consistent the width of the walls of the form are. You can see how cleaned out it is on the interior. The case that it’s in is circular. And one of the things that’s fantastic is because his form is so perfectly circular inside of a circular case that you get this reticulated shadow on the interior of the pot.
Dr. Steven Zucker: [3:11] That thinness of the wall of the pot seems to me miraculous given the almost horizontal turn over the shoulder.
Dr. Ahtone: [3:19] Yes.
Dr. Zucker: [3:20] And the weight of the neck that is being supported and that has not sunk down.
Dr. Ahtone: [3:25] The marks around the collar of the pot have historical references. Richard is a brilliant potter. He is also a scholar of Wendat forms and techniques.
[3:34] The reason that so many of our communities hold on to techniques or materials or forms that are customary is that as long as we’re able to hold on to those things that connect us to the past, we’re creating a path forward, because in the same way that he is producing this pot out of knowledge he’s gained from looking at his ancestors’ handiwork as it’s kept in materials, future generations are going to learn from his work.
[4:01] Holding on to those techniques, it doesn’t restrict him as an artist. He can make anything he wants and he does. Richard is becoming a good ancestor by creating the forms that are going to teach Wyandotte culture into the future.
[4:13] [music]
