Lost and Found: Anna Belle Mitchell, Jane Osti, and the “Revival” of Cherokee Pottery in Oklahoma
Roxanne Beason
Citation: Beason, Roxanne. “Lost and Found: Anna Belle Mitchell, Jane Osti, and the ‘Revival’ of Cherokee Pottery in Oklahoma.” The Coalition of Master’s Scholars on Material Culture, May 20, 2022.
Abstract: The tradition of Cherokee pottery is often denoted as a ‘lost’ art. Most documentation and scholarship about Cherokee potters problematize them as the last artists of their craft, and primarily focus on potters from the Southeast. Most of these scholarly viewpoints were from an anthropological or archeological perspective. Despite these narratives, Cherokee ceramicists in the Southeast have continued the allegedly lost tradition of pottery for generations. These misdirected narratives exclude how Cherokee pottery was indeed lost after the Cherokee removal and the Trail of Tears in the early 19th century for those displaced and sent to Indian Territory. Not until the mid-1950s was Cherokee pottery revived in Oklahoma when Anna Belle Mitchell traveled to South Carolina and sought this traditional knowledge. Since her passing in 2012, Mitchell’s legacy and the continued art form of Cherokee pottery lives on in her pupil, Jane Osti. Osti has established a successful art career by utilizing and teaching Cherokee pottery techniques in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Explaining the significance of carrying on the Cherokee pottery tradition, Osti has stated, “Pottery is one of the greatest historians… I know that oral traditions are wonderful, but pottery can tell us the story of our people.” Preservation and practice of Cherokee pottery in Oklahoma by artists like Mitchell and Osti’s shows that the art form is resilient and ongoing rather than a revival or stagnant. This paper opens a discourse about the continuous misrepresentative pedagogy and specific wording, such as ‘lost’ or ‘revival’, that codes stasis narratives about Native American art in contemporary scholarship.
Keywords: Cherokee pottery, Native American art, craft, preservation,
Cherokee Potters like Anna Belle Sixkiller Mitchell and Jane Osti and their efforts to bring the practice of Cherokee-made pottery in Oklahoma post-removal foreground the need to reform a historical and rhetorical approach to contextualizing Cherokee Pottery and other Indigenous art forms. Mitchell, who sought out knowledge from archaeologists and Eastern Band Cherokee potters in the late twentieth century, is credited by the Oklahoma-based Cherokee Nation for reviving Cherokee pottery traditions in Oklahoma after Cherokee Removal and forced assimilation. Under Mitchell’s tutelage, Jane Osti was inspired by the traditional Cherokee techniques and built her career as a renowned potter and instructor for the Cherokee tribe in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, since the early 1990s. By examining how Mitchell and students like Osti uncovered and put these techniques into practice, it becomes evident that the tradition of Cherokee pottery and contemporary scholars should acknowledge their continuity.
Little scholarship from any discipline exists about Cherokee Pottery, though there are a few archeological surveys by the mid-twentieth century archaeologists M.R. Harrington, Vladimir K. Fewkes, William H. Sears, and Joseph R. Caldwell. However, their work problematizes Cherokee Pottery under a larger multicultural umbrella with little distinction from other tribes’ pottery and primitivizes the art form. These archaeological sources often label Cherokee Pottery and Indigenous art as “lost,” “vanishing,” or “revivalist.”[1] This paper analyzes the available historiography dating from the archaic period to the present, arguing that it marginalizes the art of Cherokee Pottery as a vanishing tradition when in actuality it is a continued practice that exists beyond the narratives and terminology placed upon it. By focusing on the Cherokee potters Anna Belle Sixkiller Mitchell and Jane Osti, who have continued the pottery’s practice in post-Removal Indian Territory (Oklahoma), this article counters historiographical records, demonstrating the resilience of Cherokee potters and pottery.
Historiography
Euro-American archaeologists have manned the helm of Cherokee Pottery scholarship since the early twentieth century and have been the main source of problematic narratives about the art practice. While scholarship and published works on Cherokee pottery are limited, there are traces of both credit and erasure. In 1909, archeologist and ethnographer Mark Raymond Harrington described Cherokee Pottery as a “dying” art even though he only consulted one elder Cherokee potter, Iwi Katalsta.[2] However, Harrington did responsibly relate his found sherds— broken pieces of potter/ceramic wares—to the processes and techniques of Katalsta, concluding the art had been practiced for centuries.[3] In 1944, archeologist Vladimir J. Fewkes also published surveys about his findings at mound sites in the Mississippi Valley with heavy consultation with local Cherokee and Catawba potters to understand and explain how the vessels were made. Fewkes firmly established Cherokee Pottery as, “…[an] aboriginal technique, still being retained,” which validates the survival of the practice and that it is still a continued, living tradition.[4]
The distinct tradition of Cherokee Pottery consists of hand-building pots made from flattening coils of clay with a wooden paddle “stamp” until the pot vessel has reached the desired shape. Some of the wooden paddles are wrapped in rope or have engraved designs that leave an incised pattern impression on the surface of the clay. Once the pot is formed, it is dried and then fired solid. The tradition of firing Cherokee vessels is in a style known to the ceramics community as open-pit firing, where the potter places a dried vessel into a blazing outdoor fire, which is then smothered with dirt to insulate the heat. Aside from Fewkes’ keen observations, most mid-century archeologists researching “Mississippian” or “Southeastern” pottery were more interested in the formal making of the excavated ancient vessels and sherds than they were on the broader cultural associations and implications. In 1952, William H. Sears, a proclaimed “Southeasternist” archeologist focused most of his work on the techniques and patterning of the pottery. Sears hypothesized that the paddle stamping technique was not just for design application, but also for pigment application. However, he did not attribute these techniques to any contemporary Indigenous potters, he only expressed that they were “Mississippian”—a Euro-centric name given to the region and an umbrella term used for all of the associated cultures.[5] Joseph R. Caldwell, another archeologist who, like Sears, published work in 1952, excavated sherds at the Summerour Mound site in Georgia and directly associated a checkered design motif on the fragments to contemporarily-made Cherokee pottery. However, the main issue with these twentieth-century scholars is that they largely used living Cherokee potters as a lens for looking at ancient pottery and history instead of letting Cherokee potters contextualize their own history through their own perspectives and traditions.
Into the twenty-first century, there are still threads of “lost and found” revivalist narratives inappropriately placed on Cherokee Pottery. In Danna Benner’s 2003 biographical account of the Cherokee potter Joel Queen, entitled, The Return of Cherokee Pottery, Benner states that the entire practice of Cherokee pottery had been “lost” in the fifteenth century— an unsubstantiated claim in her essay. Queen ironically seems to place himself under the revivalist narrative, even though the article proudly presents him as a seventh-generation Cherokee potter. While previous scholars had grouped Catawba and Cherokee pottery together, or erased them entirely under the term “Mississippian,” at least Benner is establishing Cherokee Pottery as a separate entity. Though there are shared constructional characteristics of hand-built coiling and aesthetic paddle stamping impressions between Cherokee, Catawba, and other tribes throughout the Mississippian and Appalachian regions, these authors are firmly establishing that Cherokee Pottery is distinct in that it was made by Cherokee artists’ hands
An incredibly significant compilation of Cherokee potters is M. Anna Fariello’s book, Cherokee Pottery: From the Hands of our Elders, in which Fariello highlights the families of practicing Cherokee Pottery from the late nineteenth century into the twentieth century. Fariello’s research and documentation of this rich tradition is an invaluable piece of historiography and biographical account of pottery families of Eastern Band Cherokee Nation.
The True Meaning of Revivalism
What scholarship of Cherokee Pottery has ignored thus far is the impact of the Indian Removal Act, and how it disrupted the tradition of pottery-making for Cherokee people forced to leave their ancestral homelands. Passed in 1830 by President Andrew Jackson, “The Five Civilized Tribes,”[6] which included the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole tribes, were forced to abandon their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern region of the United States to make room for white settlers.[7] Some Cherokee people stayed and fought, others retreated deeper into the remote areas of the Appalachian mountains, but most were harshly relocated to what was known as “Indian Territory” in present-day Oklahoma. In addition to the upheaval of removal, Indigenous children were taken from their families and placed in boarding schools in an effort to assimilate them to white culture. The 1887 Dawes Allotment Act forced Indigenous people in Oklahoma to become an enrolled member of their tribe to receive 160-acre land allotments, separating entire communities.[8] The traumas that were inflicted on the Cherokee people during the nineteenth century attributed to an enormous loss of cultural knowledge, including traditional Cherokee Pottery. It was not until an Oklahoma Cherokee woman named Anna Belle Sixkiller Mitchell was the tradition of Cherokee Pottery brought back and revived in Oklahoma.
Figure 1: Anna Belle (Sixkiller) Mitchell, Cherokee Pot, ca. 1967. Courtesy of Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, the University of Oklahoma, Norman; Gift of Rennard Stickland, 2008.
In the late 1960s, Mitchell and her husband travelled to North Carolina to learn more about their Cherokee heritage. It was on these trips that Mitchell learned the practice was displaced during removal and assimilation, and she took an interest to learn the practices and traditions of ancestral Cherokee pottery-making. Mitchell started working in ceramics by molding pipes from clay she sourced from a pond on her and her husband’s land near Vinita, Oklahoma. In 1967, Mitchell was determined to put those traditions into practice, incorporating the signature Cherokee Pottery method of coil pot hand-building and wooden paddle-stamping motifs. She made her own wooden paddle stamps with the symbols and patterns from remnants of ancient pottery sherds as well as patterns still in use by Eastern Band Cherokee potters. As her interest in pottery grew, Mitchell surveyed the methods of professional potters and sought the expertise of Michael P. Hoffman, an anthropologist at the University of Arkansas. A 1957 book publication of Southeastern Indian Arts by Emma Lila Fundaburk and Mary Douglass Fundaburk Foreman titled Sun Circles and Human Hands, was especially helpful for Mitchell when she began her pursuits in pottery.[9]
Mitchell’s pots were inspired by the methods of the Eastern Band Cherokee, Catawba, and Lower Mississippian pottery. Her works were hand-built from a coiled clay foundation that is patted flat by hand or by a wooden paddle until a desired and uniform thickness is achieved. A bowl basin can function as a mold and is often used to help brace the clay into a uniform and rounded shape for the bottom of the vessel. The incised designs are either engraved or stamped using a carved wooden paddle or clay stamp. For the braided pattern, a wooden paddle is coiled with twine and then the paddle is used to stamp the rope-like pattern onto the surface of the vessel. Mitchell had excavated her own local clays, hand-built her vessels and then fired in a smothered ground pyre. Mitchell experimented with many ancient techniques, such as “Nodena Red and White,” where she would use red and white clay slip (watery clay) to paint swirl patterns on the sides of her pots and vases.[10] Getting pots flawlessly smooth, Mitchell’s pots have a reflective quality that exemplifies her mastery of the craft. She also incorporated designs from ancient gorget shell carvings onto her pots, as well as creating effigy-styled pots with animal heads and tails sticking out on opposite sides of a pot vessel.
Mitchell passed on her practice to her children and to the Oklahoma Cherokee community, making her presence known in the Cherokee Arts Markets and the Santa Fe Indian Market. In 1982, she became the first Cherokee woman honored with the title “Cherokee National Living Treasure” for reviving Cherokee-made Pottery in Oklahoma.[11] The Cherokee Nation recognizes and awards “Cherokee National Living Treasure” titles to artisans and cultural preservationists that are keeping and sharing Cherokee knowledge and traditions.[12] Mitchell passed away in 2012, but her work resides in museum collections across the United States, and her protégés continue to teach her methods. Mitchell’s legacy continues to inspire a new generation of Cherokee potters including her daughter Victoria Mitchell Vazquez, who was also honored with the “Cherokee National Living Treasure” title for continuing her mother’s legacy as a traditional potter. She teaches the traditional pottery techniques at the Cherokee Nation Arts Center and Spider Gallery in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.
Figure 2: Jane Otsi, Hummingbird Pot, 2006. Ceramic. Courtesy of the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, the University of Oklahoma, Norman; Gift of Rennard Strickland, 2008.
One of the most distinguished potters that continues the traditions taught by Mitchell is Jane Osti. As a fine arts student of Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Osti started taking pottery classes and first experienced working with clay by throwing on a wheel. It was not until after attending a workshop taught by Mitchell in the 1980s that Osti committed to learning everything she could from Mitchell’s practice of the Cherokee pottery traditions. This pursuit led to her lifelong career as an established potter and instructor in the Cherokee arts community. Osti emphasizes the history of Cherokee pottery in her workshops and pottery instruction, carrying on Mitchell’s legacy of informing students of the full scope of the tradition. An episode of Voices of the Cherokee People on Oshiro TV follows Osti and Matthew Anderson, a fellow artist and Cherokee heritage preservationist, as they source local clay. While doing so, Osti explains the importance of passing on her skillset to younger generations, saying, “I don’t want this knowledge to ever go away…I want to teach others how to do it.” Nowhere is Osti’s dedication more evident than in her own family; at age fourteen, Osti’s granddaughter Lilly was admitted into Santa Fe Indian Market with her pottery. Further, Osti’s students make pottery on a professional level, for instance Karin Walkingstick, who hand-builds more abstract, mosaic pieces. While Osti’s work has progressed to a signature style, she explains, “The pottery that I make, no matter how ‘contemporary’ it gets, its foundation, what it’s based on, will always have its connection to Cherokee pottery.”[13]
While Osti learned and utilizes characteristically Cherokee clay hand-molding and coiling techniques, she also experimented with more contemporary ceramic studio-associated glazes and firing techniques. She admits that there is convenience in using technical clay tools and kiln firing for more consistent outcomes in making pottery. However, the imagery and motifs that Osti incorporates in the design of her pots are in keeping with Cherokee Pottery traditions. In Osti’s work Hummingbird Pot, the pot has been formed and incised by hand. Crosses and swirls with hummingbird adornments encircle and frame the unorthodox top where the rim follows the curved edges of the stamped pattern. For Hummingbird Pot (2006), Osti exquisitely finishes the work with a raku firing process, in which the glazes created a contrasting black and white finish with the green iridescent glaze mimicking the feathers of a hummingbird. Utilizing more common ceramic studio techniques for glazing and firing also allows for her to create larger, more colorfully vibrant and dynamic works. At her workshops at the Cherokee Cultural Center in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, she teaches audiences the history of Cherokee pottery and demonstrates how it is made from start to finish.[14] With an established presence in museums across Oklahoma and the broader United States, including the Smithsonian, Osti’s legacy and shared knowledge will live on for generations to come. Jane Osti has been teaching pottery for over twenty years and received the “Cherokee National Living Treasure” title in 2005.
Conclusion
At what point does revival become continuity? Benner and others may have misjudged how and why the practice of Cherokee pottery was ever “lost” and “found” or when it was “revived.” It remains to be seen that Mitchell’s work was a genuine effort of revivalism of Cherokee Pottery, especially for the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. What Mitchell has done through her hard work, talent, dedication, and teachings has created a legacy that preserves the tradition of Cherokee Pottery in a place where cultural genocide attempted to annihilate it. Because of Mitchell and Osti, the art of Cherokee-made pottery will continue because of these powerful women’s efforts. Despite genocide and trauma, these histories have ultimately revealed t, that Indigenous traditions persist. Scholarship must move beyond the misrepresentative labels of “lost,” “vanishing,” or even “revivalist,” to describe Indigenous art in inapplicable instances. How can Cherokee Pottery be revived if it is still made, taught and practiced? When misplaced and misused, these terms, romanticize indigeneity and Indigenous art something that only exists in the past. The work done by Mitchell, Osti and Eastern Band elders and teachers of Cherokee pottery ensures the continuation of the practice and tradition for generations to come.
Endnotes
[1] A primary example of this used in an archeological survey from 1909 by M.R. Harrington entitled, “The Last of the Iroquois Potters.” The article also emphasized the making of pottery from the Qualla boundary in North Carolina. This survey only examined one elder and her daughter, 70-year-old Iwi Katalsta, who showed Harrington her pottery making processes for his article. Anna Fariello quotes Harrington, “…I say, the Ceramic art of the Cherokee is dying, while other Eastern Tribes retain little more than vestiges and memories.” Brett H. Riggs, Cherokee Ceramic Traditions of Southwestern North Carolina ca AD 1400-2002: A Preface to “The Last of the Iroquois Potters,” North Carolina Archaeology 51 (October 2002): 34-54. M. Anna Fariello, Cherokee Pottery: From the Hands of Our Elders (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2011), 94.
[2] A primary example of this used in an archeological survey from 1909 by M.R. Harrington entitled, “The Last of the Iroquois Potters.” The article also emphasized the making of pottery from the Qualla boundary in North Carolina. This survey of course only examined one elder and her daughter, Iwi Katalsta at age 70, who showed Harrington her pottery making processes for his article. Anna Fariello quotes Harrington, “…I say, the Ceramic art of the Cherokee is dying, while other Eastern Tribes retain little more than vestiges and memories.” Riggs, Cherokee Ceramic Traditions of Southwestern North Carolina ca AD 1400-2002: A Preface to “The Last of the Iroquois Potters,” 34-54. Fariello 2011, 94.
[3] Fariello 2011, 97.
[4] Vladimir J. Fewkes, "Catawba Pottery-Making, with Notes on Pamunkey Pottery-Making Cherokee Pottery-Making, and Coiling," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 88, no. 2 (1944): 69-124.
[5] William H. Sears,"Ceramic Development in the South Appalachian Province,” American Antiquity 18, no. 2 (1952): 101-110.
[6] These tribes were termed “civilized” because of the ties to white economics, even to the extent of owning enslaved people. The tribes were assimilated to American settler culture in that they spoke English and practiced Christianity.
[7] Andrew Denson, Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest Over Southern Memory (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 18
[8] Leonard A. Carlson, Indians, Bureaucrats, and Land: The Dawes Act and the Decline of Indian Farming, (Vol. No. 36. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981).
[9] Sun Circles and Human Hands is a helpful resource used by scholars today to reference design and symbolism of Southeastern Indigenous art. Emma Lila Fundaburk and Mary Douglass Fundaburk Foreman, Sun Circles and Human Hands: The Southeastern Indians Art and Industries (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001). 56-94.
[10] Fundaburk, Sun Circles and Human Hands: The Southeastern Indians Art and Industries (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001). 88-89.
[11] Julie Pearson Little Thunder, Oral History Interview with Anna Mitchell (Oklahoma Native Artists Collection. Oklahoma State University Library Oral History Research Program. November 11, 2011).
[12] Brett D. Burkhart, Review of Cherokee National Treasures: In Their Own Words. ed. by Shawn Morton-Cain and Pamela Jumper Thurman, Great Plains Quarterly 39, No. 3 (2019), 312.
[13] OsiyoTV, “Jane Osti: Our Pottery, Our People,” YouTube video. 5:18, June 13, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frdVcGOCW3A.
[14] Jane Osti, “Cherokee Pottery Demonstration with Jane Osti,” Cherokee Heritage Center, Tahlequah, Oklahoma, January 2019.
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