INSIDE NMAI


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“Caddo Head Pot,” 2005, ceramic and pigments, 7.3" x 8.3" x 7.8", NMAI purchase, 2005. 26/5161


“Intertwining Scrolls,” 2005, ceramic, pigments, 8" x 6.9", NMAI purchase, 2005. 26/5160


JERI REDCORN Jeri Redcorn (Caddo/Potawatomi) of Norman, Oklahoma, first saw Caddo pottery in a museum in 1991. As no living Caddo elders were creating their pottery at that time, she set out to revive this lost art by teaching herself through trying to replicate their processes. Like her ancestors, Redcorn gathers clay and makes her pottery by hand and then fires it in wood-fueled fire pits rather than kilns. Though her artworks are contemporary, many of her designs and forms, such as bottles and pots shaped like human heads (above), draw inspiration from those her ancestors used hundreds of years ago in Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma. In the NMAI book "Born of Clay: Ceramics from the National Museum of the American Indian,” she says, “I started making pots to concentrate on the past, to feel the ancestors, and it was like a healing process. Now when I make a pot, I can see the lives of my ancestors, what they suffered losing their land, their children, and their language.” Redcorn has been passing on what she has learned from her research and elders by teaching other potters to carry on this tradition.


38 AMERICAN INDIAN WINTER 2019


© ALLEN RUSSELL


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