 Rethinking Black Duck Pottery is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money by the vote of the people. Black Duck Pottery is the term for pre-European contact indigenous ceramics found north northwest of Lake Superior, often recognizable by their textured surface. For decades, academia has taught that Black Duck Pottery was made by paddling clay with a cord-wrapped paddle, similar to some Asian ceramics. There is a new idea that challenges the old. This new idea is practical, hands-on, and can be clearly demonstrated. Experimental archaeologist Grant Goltz has developed along with his partner, Kristi Holman, and their associate, Lee Simms, among many others, that Black Duck Pottery was not paddled into shape, but created inside delicately woven, natural fiber bags that have not survived in the archaeological record. I'm filmmaker Scott Knudson. I was invited by the Manitoba Craft Council to join a group of First Nations women, including indigenous artist Casey Adams, as they learned this hands-on, experimental archaeology, and possibly insight into their cultural heritage from Grant at his rural Minnesota home. I've been studying pottery for probably since around 1980. There they come. Kristi, my partner over there, her main course of study when she was in the university was centered on ceramics too, so she has been studying them a long time. But there was a lot of misconceptions as to how this pottery was made. The problem was no one ever actually tried to do it. Looked at the surface and, oh, it looks like it's got cord marks on it, and so that must be what it is, you know. And when I started looking at it a little bit more, and then we would take impressions from the pot and then you look at those and then you see what actually made the impressions on the surface. I said, that doesn't look like a cord, you know. I said, wrap a cord around a pallon, pound on the pot, and that makes this. And I said, well, but look, I said, there's these little strands that go from one row to the next here. Every once in a while, you can see those, and that won't happen. And if they kept pounding it, it wouldn't be clear. It would be superimposed stuff going there, which way. And it's all nice and neat and clear, and I said, I think it's something else. And Lee Sims was on to that too. And so we started talking, and then we started figuring it out, and he talked about this one kind of weaving that nowadays has been done in Scandinavia pretty much, but it probably was all over the world. And he said, oh yeah, there's examples from Peru and all over. And it's not a weaving like cloth, you know, it goes like this. It's a weaving where all the fibers go in the same way and they're just twisted together. And he said, I think that's what it is. And I said, that would make sense. So a lot of the archaeologists just laughed at me, you know. They said, ah, you don't know what you're doing. And I said, well, you have never looked. At least I'm looking. Yeah. And I did some weaving. This is the first thing I wove. Now this is made from natural fibers. It's made from fibers of the wood nettle, which is a native plant. It's not the stinging nettle because that was brought over from Europe. That's not an interduced species. But there's always been a wood nettle, which is a native species. And the outside of the stem has fibers in it. And you can peel that off, you soak the stems in water. And then you can process these fibers. And that's what I made this autumn. And so here's my first example of that weave. You see how it's twisted? It's twisted with two strands right there, twisted together. Then one strand gets connected to a strand from the next twisted. And then they become a strand. The other one from it goes over here. So they interlink back and forth. That's what holds it together. And these sections of twists can be any length. They could be one twist or 20. And when you stretch that out, it looks like a row is a string. Yeah. See, and that's where people are getting the string. But if you look, there's little things go across every now and then. So you hook them together. And the string is kind of offset now and then. And the problem with the string on the paddle is that when you're paddling, it's really hard to keep it in a straight line. Yeah, and also gets pulled up with clay after a while. Yeah, that's right. And pretty soon you're not making clean lines anymore. But anyhow, this is what I did. And I made a whole bunch of pots in this thing. See, and what happens, you can put this around a pot and stretch with the pot. So as you make the pot bigger, this can stretch out and see what this does holds it together. That totally makes sense. As opposed to the paddling, because like we were talking before, the paddling makes it collapse inward into itself. And then you get rippling on the inside. Well, we're going to be using natural clays. This particular clay just came from just a little ways down the road. We're going to be going over there. Here we are out here in the scramble pit. And there's a cut bank so we can see how the clay that we're going to use for pottery, how it occurs. If you look right up on that bank, you'll see a gray, kind of grayish tan surface layer with a darker brown layer underneath that. And then it's just the yellowish brown underneath that, the lighter stuff. What has happened is that light gray surface, everything used to look like what's below, the lighter yellowish brown all the way to the top. But over time, the clay particles have been washed out of that surface, that gray layer, and they've accumulated in that brown layer. So the brown layer has been enriched with clay size particles to the point that it is just about ideal for what we need for making pottery. But that's typically what you'll kind of look for is that enriched layer because most places, the natural material doesn't have enough clay. But this is how it happens so that it becomes usable. And that's a typical soil cross-section of where you get clay. Sometimes there's more clay and you don't have to rely on that. But in most places, that's the best thing to look for. Sometimes they'll be brown, sometimes be red, sometimes it'll be gray, or different shades. OK, so this clay is dry deposits, but when you're at a riverbed on the side and you see those layers, you were saying, how do you prepare or do you use it wet or do you just prefer to dry it out? If you can find the clay and you test it and it seems like you can roll it out and it's OK, I mean, even this, if it's wet enough to make pots, you can just make pots as it is. If it's not quite wet enough, that's where the problem is because when it's partly wet, it's hard to add water, it's hard to get water, it's tough to mix the water into it. When it's dry, you let it dry out and pound it up and pulverize it, you can mix it with water real easy. If it's wet enough to use right out of the ground, you can use it because it's already got moisture. If it's somewhere in between, it's better to let it dry and pulverize it up because it's easier to do it. It's easier yet. OK, let's walk up there. We may find something before we get that far, if we do, we'll stop. I mean, if you're in the middle of a sand area, you won't get any. But if it's kind of more of the mixed glacial deposits, look around, you'll be able to find something like this. And it's easiest where there's exposure, like something like this. Oh, look, deer hooves. See the footprints? Right here, right here. And you follow them and you track them. That's great. And you eat them. We don't want to get out by the edge. And there's the dark stuff. Yeah, there's some dark topsoil on here that's been scraped off out there. It's a little deeper here. Not quite to it, almost. I'm going to dig out here. Don't get too close that edge, Scott. I can definitely feel it kind of resonates under each step and with each bit of your shovel. Yeah, you know, this stuff is kind of blocky. It breaks out these little blocks and they're all koto's clay. This is the good stuff. OK, I think you see the idea. That's the main thing. And see this stuff up above? See, that isn't. It's the stuff that's below. It'll be below this. And that's what we could see in that bank. Yeah. And see, that's that dark layer of getting this stuff. Yeah, you can immediately feel the difference. Right. And you can see it, even in this bank, there's places where it's here and then there isn't so much. So it kind of comes and goes. Some places are better than others. And you really have to feel it, though. Yeah, you got to feel it to know. OK, that's all we got to do here. OK, this clay came from the same place where we were this morning. This stuff has been sitting in this bucket for years since I'll dry it out. So what we're going to do is we're going to pulverize this clay up. And I'm just got a cement block thing here that you're working on now. And you can just OK. And then when we get some smashed up, now there's probably still pebbles and stuff in here that we haven't smashed up. So what I'm going to do is just run this to a little screen and get the chunks. And we'll squash those some more. And then we'll smash up a bunch more. When we get enough, we'll mix the water with it and get it ready for makepots. So what do you think the percentage is of the clay and sand? I'm guessing based on my training as a soil scientist so what I can feel in the mix that we end up using is going to be right around 35% of actual clay sized particles. And at least the same amount would be sand. And anything left would be the in-between sized particles. OK. And if the sand is 50%, that isn't a problem because there's still enough clay to bind it together. The silt particles, the particles besides between clay size and sand size, don't do anything positive for the mix. And actually, the less of that there is. The less chances of explosion. The less chance. The more workable your clay is. Oh, OK. Yeah, we were wondering about that because along the Red River Valley, that's farming territory and you've got a lot of rich clay deposits. But because we're also part of Lake Agassi, you know, that's all sand as well. So there's a lot of sand and clay. It's just like mixing concrete cement, the bags of cement stuff that sticks it all together, the fine part of cement. And then in that case, you try to have clean sand without a lot of what would be the silt in here. And you get a stronger finished product. And even in the pottery, and I've seen this with some clays that I know don't have a lot of silt. When it's fired, it's a lot harder. The fired clay is harder. And it just rings more when you tap on it. I mean, it still works the other way, but you get a better quality pot. OK, I'm going to quickly try to get this done so we've got something to work with. I feel like we need a second one so we can do it, too, beside you. There's another brick over there. I can move over. Just need another rock. Now we're good for grinding. You've got a big flat surface there. OK, now what I'm going to do, I'm going to go get some water and we'll try and mix the clay right on here. Great. I feel like banning time. Yeah, like make a flower, add the water. That's great, Granny knows how much water. OK, we'll add some water and we'll just start. You can only do it if you're prepared to get dirty. Are you prepared to get dirty? We'll be in there with our hands pretty soon. You betcha. Until we get in our hands, OK? I'll get a little bit of it together here so we. So already wet clay is harder to hydrate. It is, because the water won't go into it. Yeah. But when you have something that's completely bone dry, the water is easily able to move around within the material. Actually, funny enough, it smells like my childhood. A little more. He's working it all together. You can make one big piece of it. I wonder what my ancestors did with their hair, because I get hair and everything. And as I'm working my hair, I, you know. Hold it, hold still, Mary. That's right. Obviously, they must have had different hair styles for different jobs you were doing. Oh, my goodness, look at me. Beautiful. If I say something rude, it isn't intentional. Are you kidding? I think it's a prerequisite as being indigenous to tease. I've been the butt end of teasing all my whole life, so I'm OK with it. Well, you know. I'm like the most gullible one in my family, so I'm a good target. Over the years, we've worked with a lot of indigenous people. And that's the one thing that's always so nice is you can joke each other and tell jokes on yourself. And it's. Nobody gets offended. Nobody gets offended. In fact, if you don't do it, you look that kind of funny. OK, I'll get a bunch of these out. They all work. I was told that teasing is like sort of social justice, that if a person starts getting too arrogant or out of line, too greedy, you tease them. Right, exactly. Sort of group mentality. If you become the butt of the joke all the time, then you're humbled and you understand, oh, I got to back off and change my ways. Not me. I just doubled out. I'm going to just get ahead of you a little bit here, so I can show you what I'm up to. I'm going to just roll out a couple funny fat coils. This is almost a little not wet enough. Yeah. OK, I'm putting a little bit of moisture with this, just to kind of be slippery on the outside for a minute, but it'll be OK. I just need to get a couple of these to get started. So what we're going to do is we're going to coil up kind of a pot that's almost like one of those cone shaped pots in a way, but the bottom won't be quite that pointed, but we'll be making it upside down. So with the mouth of the pot on here and the bottom, we'll end up up here. Oh, is there a dot? But see, I just start out like so. I don't spend a lot of time on this. You get started, and then I'll right away make another one to put on top of that. And it's nothing fancy at this point. And you're not too worried about the thickness at this point? Because I could know because I want to even that up in just a minute since I put the next layer on. But I guess technically for the folks back home, it's about a quarter inch, I think? Yeah, probably about a centimeter thick, 3 1⁄8 of an inch or so, it'll get thinner later on. And then we'll make another quick little coil, and that goes on top of here. And once I get all the ways ahead, you guys can pick up and follow right behind me. Now, what I'm going to do, you know, I just, with my thumb, I'm going to smear it on. And at the same time kind of flattening it, because see, then it stretches and gets longer, and they'll make it all the way around. And it looks kind of crude now, but now we'll start cleaning it up. You've got to have a little something to work with before you really do much to it. So I'm going to not let it get too wild full of cracks and stuff, but it'll have some. And then I take one of these shells and see it. And when you scrape this way, it smooths it. Later on, we'll be scraping this way if we want to thin the inside down because it'll shave off layers. But for now, we use it this way. See, we can just, and it'll, the clay will kind of stick on it at first. And because it's, because just like I said, that clay is like this and it comes apart. As that clay starts flattening down, it'll smooth off and it won't stick on here anymore. So we'll just work this around and see, we're kind of making it a little smoother on the inside. And this is also evening out to thickness a little bit. But we want this right now, we want this thicker than the finished pot's going to be because we'll be thinning it down later because it will stretch this pot out. So you're kind of going up side, but also slightly in an upward motion as well. Yeah, a little bit. See, now smooth this coil joint on the outside in a minute since I get this, kind of get the inside kind of roughly leveled out so the, so you can't see where it joins together. And then I'll go on the outside, kind of go over there. And then it looks terrible at first because it's sticking. Right. But it'll only do that for a while. As it starts getting wider. And this clay is real soft and flexible. And as we work it, it will get more rigid. So right now it's pretty sloppy. But at this point you can do that because I just want to smear this joint together right now. And I don't care how rough and ugly it looks on the outside right now because we'll want to, we'll clean that up later. Okay, now what I'm going to start is decreasing the diameter just gradually. And we're about at the point we can do that. So now I'll take this coil and I'll work from the outside. And that automatically makes the side slant in a little bit. At least for me. The main thing at this point is you want to have things pretty well fused together. One thing about, and I see people with commercial clay when they want something to stick together there, wet the edge and put it in, it seems to stick together. This doesn't do that. No. It just will not do that. In fact, it will intentionally not bond just to spite you. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. This stuff, extra moisture on a joint makes it not stick together. Like I say, it's a whole nother thing. If someone want to run in and there's two of those fabric bags here. Not the really one I was showing you that's the real skinnies things. There's one that's got a little bit fatter strands. That's one we're going to use. It's a little smaller. It's in that box, right? It's in there somewhere. It's in the box. In the porch there? It's either it's in the box or it's right handy there. Yeah, that's the one. I'm going to soak that in water a little bit to wet that up. Let it get hydrated. Okay, now I'm going to take this kind of smooth this outside a little bit. I don't want it too lumpy because before I put that bag on I want a fairly even surface because this makes it easier. See, if you want to feel how thick I'm doing it that's probably you want to do that. Maybe you get some idea what because that's what you're going to have. Wow, that's going to become really thin. Oh, it's going to be like this when we get the pot done. That's insane. But that's what they were. It goes against everything I've learned so far. You weren't in that big pot that I got sitting up there. Go lift that big one. And you see how lightweight that is because it's thin. It's not quite that thin but for its size. It's thin. I've seen broken pots that were the size of that actually bigger and rounder on the bottom that were only this thick. They weren't even three millimeters thick. Wow. The whole bottom. That's crazy. Like an eggshell. That's crazy. Because they say like the strongest clay is porcelain at a really, really high firing. And like bone china, you know. But see this stuff behaves. And I've asked people how this resistance to shock and all this. And someone said something about what it probably does is when it gets fired it makes these what they call them micro cracks. He said it gets thousands and thousands of tiny fractures that aren't quite broken but they have worked like little hinges within the walls of the pot and it can just handle so much abuse. That's a great hypothesis. You know, that's what I've been one guy said whether that's really true. I have no idea. So this is what I call a kind of rough shape roughly shaped pot. It's in one piece. It's not going to look anything like this when we get it done. It's going to be that shape with the shoulders and everything in it when we get all done. But this is how it's going to start. Because that's what an upside down pot looks like the coned one. Yeah. You're going to have to use this at a university. A lot of spots here. Yeah. Yeah, show grace. Okay. It's the ingenuity. I'm going to just kind of, now, now comes the fun part. I'll set this down and I'm going to go get my other device. Now I'm going to set this up. That's a gorgeous object, hey? Let's just moisten this up a little bit so it's more flexible. And then what I've done, I'm going to wring out some of the water out of this. Yeah, I'll get it all over myself. I'm trying to make a fashion statement. Oh, yes. Okay. There's kind of an inside and an outside to this, but I'm not sure. Yeah, because see? Because this shows this a little bit more. It pops out. And the other side doesn't. It's more straighter. That's the side that goes next to the pot. Okay. Now we'll put this over that pot. Now, this is big enough. We could make a much bigger pot in this, but see what happens is I'll stretch it down and it'll get these ridges that come out of it because it stretches to make it into a longer, skinnier fabric bag. So I want to, okay. That looks like an art piece. Yeah. Well, it is an art piece. What am I saying? I'm going to pick this up. It's small enough I can do it. I'm going to set right side up in here. Okay. I'm going to make sure we got this kind of squashed into it. I've got a little extra here. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to start out in the bottom because I want to get that bottom. And I'll work my way up the sides. So your hand's at the bottom supporting it, so. Yeah, my hand's outside of the, on that. And I'll see how my hand's up against it when I'm working it. Right. So you're still cradling it even though it's got that hoop and the hide. Yeah. As I work my way up, this bag will stick on it a little bit more. And you're always pushing it back onto the bag, right? Yeah. Now when I get up here higher then I can do it more directly. And you're using like aggressive or firm movements? I'm intensely trying to push it enough so it stretches the pot. Okay. It's gorgeous. Let's do a little bit here. But see that the inside is getting smooth and it's totally different shape now. Yeah. And it looks like butter now. Like it looks so beautiful and smooth. Let me just get this. We'll hold it up. See, you can see what the shape is starting to do. See how wide it's getting now? Yeah. Like it was like this. Yeah. And now it's like this. So beautiful. Considerably different. And see, we're getting this surface texture in in a little bit. Oh yeah, cool. It's coming in. It's not really a lot. We'll get more of that in it as we get this thing a little stretched out. Oh, okay. So now you're starting to go in to create. See, now we've got that shoulder. Right. The shoulder. Now what I'm going to do, I'm just going to move this instead of moving the pot in there. As we develop the shape, we'll have the bag more adhered. Yeah, put your hand inside and out right here. Oh yeah. See, I could not do that when I was holding it in my lap as I was working because it was just cracking like crazy. So it's really important to like make sure that the basket's attached on there so that it can hold the shape. Right out at the beginning, there's no way you can because your pot's way too small to even do it. But now as you start developing or toward the final size and shape, someplace I can see the shoulder's a little bigger so I'm pushing it in. Yeah. Bringing it up maybe a little bit because it's lower. Yeah. And we'll keep adjusting that as we go. Yeah, see now we're going to see that. So kind of texture. Yeah. You working for? So cool. That's so great. I've got kind of a drawstring on here. I should pull that together a little bit. I got to find the other end of it. Here it is. I'm wondering if the bags were used for other purposes. Oh, I'm sure it was. Yeah. I can see someone picking blueberries in one of these. I can see people having these for a lot of use. They're a container that it's not rigid so it's easy to carry around. Yeah. Stuff it into something a whole bunch of them and it doesn't become anything of a burden unless it has its contents in it and then it's got a purpose. Yeah. See, if it wasn't for that bag, this pot would've just fallen apart because of that. Yeah. It supports it even though there are little problems like that. It probably has a lot to do with the fact that it hasn't dried out. Yeah. The clay is actually at this point we should be hoping it dried out a little bit more than what it has. Yeah. Because it's on a rainy, crappy day. This is probably didn't make pots on days like today. No. No. This is one of those smooth surface cone shaped pots. Yeah. I don't know if we'll be able to have everybody do their pot in that thing and that other one might not work. So if someone wants to make their pot into one of these instead, here's an example of one. This is by the way, remember I was talking about that one that froze full of water? This is it. And that was in the winter of 1990. You can see that was been cooked in a lot of times too. That's actually a replica of one that was found up by Thunder Bay, Ontario. Okay. As I went up there to their archaeology lab and looked through all the broken pots and stuff that they had and made a bunch of drawings and measurements and that was one of them. And did they think, did they know what these things were? I do. What are they? They're cockle shell that's from the North Atlantic. Like this one? Yep. Oh. It's the edge of this. And see. Yeah. What archaeologists have said because that's a real common kind of design on these particular kind of pots. And they said, oh, that was a carved stick edge that they put notches on both sides and people use that to make these designs. Well, the only thing is we see these designs on hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pots and the little wiggly things are always exactly the same. It's so precise. And there's a pattern to them. They get a little finer at one end and then they get bigger toward the other end. Now, if you had a hundred people, carbon, wooden, tools, they're not all going to look identical. They're not. They're going to be a lot of variability. And yet there isn't. So I thought that has to be a natural object. It has to be and it bothered me. And they called it a pseudo scallop shell. A scallop is an ocean type shell that has a wavy edge like that. Yeah. They got an edge like this. Yeah. They're usually kind of like the old shell oil symbol logo and they got these ridges and it gets that edge. But they called it a pseudo scallop shell because it was not a real shell. Well, a scallop shell has slightly different undulations than this. It won't match that if you would try to use one of those shells. But so anyhow, at the Grand Mound Visitor Center, West of International Falls, where the big mounds are and all that. And that kind of pottery is pretty common. Washes all the lakeshore and river bank when it rebroad's and stuff. And the guy that managed that site, you know, he'd go along the river and pick up the stuff that was eroding out so the tourists wouldn't haul it away. One day when he was after he found one of these shells along the rainy river between Canada and Minnesota. Yeah. Now that's not the North Atlantic Ocean where these things live. These are ocean shells. These are. Golf of St. Lawrence is the closest place you would find them. Okay. Okay. There's pottery like this out there. There's pottery like this all the way from there to here. And then it goes on up into Canada. And the older pottery's out East and then it gets more recent as you come West. So it shows probably those people moving from that area but bringing these shells with them because that was something that was significant to their culture for one reason or another. Yeah, one point in time. And they used it to decorate the pottery. I mean, it's not the only decoration they put on but it was one of the real common ones. Yeah, I was up there one day, he said, grant me, I gotta show you something. He went in the bank cabinet and he pulled up on these shells. He said, I found this in the river bank. What do you think? I said, I think it confirms what we've been thinking all along that this is not a carved tool. It's something natural, yeah? It's something natural. Oh, it's so cool. That is so nice. Yeah, and so even a simple little thing like finding this right away, it tells us something about people. It tells us something that these people had connections to the Atlantic Ocean. And here we are, you know, this stuff was brought in. And I'm going to go around and kind of dry this out outside of it a little bit. Don't feel bad if you have problems getting that pot to do this without it kind of falling apart. Because that's something that does take, you gotta do it a bunch of times. If the pot kind of starts really falling apart, it's not your fault. It's part of learning. Right. Okay, here's our rough pot and you can see it's a little not real even, but we can straighten that out as we go. I'm going to set it in here and I'm just going to leave it for maybe about an hour to just kind of let the air get at it. This is still pretty wet. Oh yeah. But it's not as wet as when we put it on there yesterday. It needs to be damp because it needs to be flexible. I want to dry it's kind of stiff and you can't make it firm to the pot. But this is ready to go. Somebody wants to. Me, me, me. Me too. Okay. You can see where the center is. That should go on the center part of your pot. Okay. And I'm going to go around from the other side so I can kind of reach across and help you out a little bit from that side. Right here. And do I start pushing it onto it a little bit? Yeah, you should kind of start stretching it a little long way because then it makes it skinnier. So if it's bunching up on one side more then move it around to the side that it's not. And so you should be able to get your tool like this and kind of rub it down into the clay a little bit so it'll start sticking to the clay a little bit. Get it smashed down. And set it right side up, right center it right in the middle there. Okay. Now what we're going to do is what I forgot to do with my line is we're going to tighten this top up. Tighten it, okay. And see there's a drawstring that's through this. And for now we're going to try to make it more the size of the top of this pot instead of having it so big. So willy-nilly. Yeah, so it won't fall off so much. Tie this up with a big bow in it. Easy to pull apart. Now you can take the shell and what you'll want to do is hold your hand on the outside of this and you can kind of lean it toward and go way down to the bottom and just start gently at first, you know, shaping it and to try to stretch that pointed bottom out so it gets round. Okay. And you'll have to be in a hurry. You can take... Take my time. Take your time. Okay. The main thing is to work gradually and work all the way around and then as you get the way at the bottom done then gradually work around and work farther up and you can lean it towards the side that you're working on right now because it's not going to contact. Now I'm kind of going like this around, right? Yeah you can go that way and go every which way that... Whatever seems like is making the form of the pot. What I'm going to do is I'm going to finish off this rim of this vessel and put the decorations on. Right now I'm just kind of evening up some of the high spots, leveling it down. It's not bad to start with so it's not going to take me too much to do this. Now this type of pottery was most commonly decorated with what we call cord wrapped objects or cord wrapped sticks or what have you. In other words it's a tool that has had a cord wrapped around it. It's a piece of deer bone and we've made a fine twisted cord out of natural fibers. There's a hole drilled through the end of the bone here and we tied a knot in the end of the cord ran it through so that knot goes up against the hole and then we've just wrapped this cord around and around and around and around then we got to this end and then we had another hole and we put the cord through tied it around and tied the knot off. So we end up with this tool that has rows and rows of cords and what's how this is used by pressing it into the damp clay to leave an impression. Usually the decoration is confined to this upper rim part. It doesn't go down onto the body. What I'm going to do, tilt this up a little bit and then I'm going to apply this tool pushing it into the clay and see how it's making that row of decoration. Then we'll move down a little bit and do it again. So we got two rows and then I'll turn the pot a little farther and we'll just continue until we get all the way around the pot. Try to keep these lines as straight as we can. This clay is just about the right hardest to do this. If it's too soft this tends to get plugged up with the clay in and it makes kind of a messy decoration. If it's too dry it won't push into the clay. So just keep going until we've got two rows of this all the way around the pot. Yeah. Okay, just a little bit left and we've completely gone around the pot. Okay, so now we've got two rows like that all the way around the pot. Now what we're going to do is we're going to take this and use just a short end of this and we're going to put some designs. Now I'm right handed so if I do this right handed they're going to slant this way. If I was left handed they would slant this way. So usually they do slant this way so we know they were mostly right handed potters but once in a while probably a lefty. Yeah, so now what we're going to do is support it on the inside with our finger and like a centimeter apart. I'm putting them fairly close and this combination of design is fairly common. I mean, they're not all like this obviously. There, now we've got that. Now usually there's a decoration on the top of the rim and sometimes there's a decoration on the inside. What's common on the inside when there is something is another slanted row of these marks although they're generally longer and they're not done very deep and they're usually kind of more widely spaced and so they just kind of look like that. Then I'll be patching those as things go on. Sometimes when the clay starts stiffening up it's easier to patch those because right now they still want to move when you fix them but as long as they don't get too carried away on you, you're still okay. I'm getting some nasty cracks but that's not going to actually end effect this part. I know it doesn't seem like that. It can be possible but it's true. Yeah, this stuff is strange. Strange but good strange. On this particular style of pottery, a lot of times what you see is the very edge of the lip looks wider and that happens when you do this. You don't push this straight down, you tilt it a little bit and you don't go level, you have a little outward bevel to it. See what it's doing? It's widening this and it's kind of distorting the top edges of these things a little bit. It also kind of squashes some of the cracks at the very lip. Yeah, that'll fix it. I'll fix it. I just grabbed it wrong. Let me get this kind of taken care of and do as I'm going to just roll out a long little skinny thing of clay and I kind of squash that crack in and put this less, this little thing of clay in there and I'm going to smear it down. I'm going to take this which has the same twisted stuff like that bag has got but I'm just going to go over that patch and blend it into the rest of the pot. Getting around here Yeah, it's beautiful as that. Yeah, I see I got another patch to do over there but we'll get that. It happens. There's that part done. Now the last thing I'm going to add is I'm going to put a little design down lower on the pot and again that's going to be made just with the end of this tool the last few little wraps. Okay, now I'll get a different tool. I got a variety of little sticks and things that I can use for this one. This will be between those two rows of horizontal decorations and we'll just push it straight in. This would have been done by a stick or twig that's been whittled to a circle. Yeah, it's usually pretty circular and pretty moody round. Now what this does it makes a little dense in the outside and as we get this around you'll be able to see what it does on the inside. It makes little bumps on the inside. Good morning. See this is the end of the bay that's full wild rice but it's dying down now. Okay, I'm going to get some stuff to start a fire. I guess I should help with the logs. Do you want me to grab some stuff? Here's the pot we're going to fire it's been drying for about a week so it should be have most of the moisture gone but before just to make doubly sure I'll set it here and let it let it warm up a little bit as we're getting the fire going and then we'll need enough of these size sticks to cover it over I'll cut these a little bit. That's true. She can't get into too much trouble at the shoreline. I see there's certain amount of moisture that never will dry out on its own because it's just bound too tightly to the claymile kills themselves and we want to get rid of as much of that as we can just to minimize possibility of it flashing into steam and trying to get out and taking the wall of the pot with it. I never would have thought that we would stick to smaller pieces. Yeah, because we don't need a fire to last very long. The little bit of residual moisture that's in the clay has gone to the point that it's not going to cause us problems. Now watch, this one will break all apart, right Chris? Okay, we've let this pot heat up now, so there shouldn't be any moisture in it, so we shouldn't have any problems with it disintegrating from steam so I'm rearranging these bottom logs here and we're going to set the pot on those in the fire and there's a little space so air can get in. So now we're going to start stacking wood around the pot. What we want to do is put enough wood in here that we can't really see the pot. We're not using big wood because we want to burn up fairly rapidly. Can some of you grab a little bit of birch bark? Yeah, there's a lot of humidity today that's kind of got this wood is not taken off like it's supposed to. Yeah, here we go. We're starting to start to move now. I mean, you got to get something going on that side to get that started. Yeah, that's what we want to get going. I'm going to get a big round blaze here and take off. There it's going to make it though. That'll probably be okay. The bottom is better, Nicky. Yeah, the fire is going to keep the wood now. Gradually a lot of wood there will keep going, but as soon as that fire burns down so the wood falls kind of away from the pot, it'll be all done fired. We should start seeing some orange glowing in between, especially if we look down on the bottom. It should be getting about that hot. It's kind of hard to see in there. Yeah, right now all I can see is the... It's not quite there yet. Nope. The whole pot won't, because the part on the top doesn't usually get quite that hot, but it gets hot enough to fire the clay. If the pot was going to break and pieces blow off, it would have done it by now. So we didn't hear a popcorn popper song we know were going to go. A lot of times by now the wood has burned up enough it's starting to fall off. It's just wicked. So it's probably inside that fire it's probably in the neighborhood of about 950 degrees centigrade. Yeah. The wind's helping. The wind's coming good so the fire is getting lots of oxygen so it can burn. You know with our training in school everything's about slow not shocking the pot. No, everything's slow. Warm it up slowly. Mm-hmm. You have to fire on a non-windy day so you can control how hot it gets. I've fired pots in Snowstorm in Brandon, Manitoba. Or was that Saskatoon in one of those places? But one day we were out firing and Kathy Flynn was there. The pots were to the point the fire was falling away and they were pretty much almost orange and every time the snowflakes would hit a little speck of clay it would go pop and it would fly off making me this microscopic little pit in the surface when a snowflake hit it. But it didn't not enough that you when it's all done you hardly could tell. It is kind of a dull glow at the bottom down there. It's plenty hot enough. Yeah, you can see it's starting to kind of take on that sort of ghosty quality. Yeah, it does. It gets kind of peach orange. That's almost done. If the fire would fall away now it would be fired well enough. I'm just so impressed. That's just amazing. Never would have thought that these small sticks basically would create such a phenomenon. Yeah, see it's starting to fall away now. But yeah, you're right. It has that kind of glow. Yeah, and so bright you can't really see it well into the fire and it doesn't get quite to that stage all over. It's mainly in the lower part. Actually, that's probably better because that's where it's thickest around the rim. So it really needs a little more firing to get all the way through to the interior of the clay. Plus it gets more wear and tear too, right? Yeah, that's going to be the strong part of the pot because if it's going to break that's where it starts. And I've always fired everything from the bottom up. See, sometimes when I've got a big pot and the wood falls off the top fairly soon when it gets about like this, I'll reach in with a stick and turn the pot the other way around so it's right side up so the bottom gets more in the heat. But see around that rim, that is glowing. You just you can see it mostly in the holes. Yeah, it's really subtle, but it's there. Like if you've ever been part of a Raku firing you know that look. For all practical purposes, it's done. We can kind of knock the fire down a little bit. Why are you taking it off? Yeah, I'll just get the fire away so it starts I'm going to get a different stick and I'm going to tip it over. Oh, it's tinging. Look at that sound. It's good. That's what we want. It's good. Ting, ting. Ting-tings. See, there's a side that didn't get any air at it. So that turned black. That's cool. I like that. All those different colors that come in are kind of interesting. Oh, look at that inside. Beautiful. You can see the shiniest where I burnished it. See the inside, we kind of burnished the inside when the clay was almost dry. We call leather hard with a smooth stone and so you can see some of it's kind of got a shiny finish on it. What it does is it just really makes the molecules tight together. So you're really pushing onto the clay and the molecules are getting tighter and tighter and tighter and so you get that shiny surface. When the water disappears the shyness goes away but then when you fire it when it doesn't get enough oxygen as you were talking about then the shine comes back. And see now what we could do we could have like three rocks in there and we could lift that pond on there and we could start cooking in it right now. Really? Yeah. There it is. A fired pot. We wouldn't have needed necessarily as long as long as it gets warm so it's not comfortable to touch before you put it in the fire that's more inadequate. Sometimes that only takes five or ten minutes especially if you're pretty confident that your pot is nice and dry if it's set for about a week and this hasn't been the best drying condition although up until just the last couple days it was pretty you know, sun-shiny and decent and the humidity was down. And this one is scraped down to where it's relatively thin. That helps. All right. Too thick and you might get explosions. Yeah. So we can gradually move it out on it. It's probably cool enough it's not going to start cracking from the rim. It's now going to be it's going to stay hot a long time because ceramic like that really retains heat. And you can tell that when you're cooking in them because once you get it up to temperature of cooking you don't really need much of a little bitty few piece of wood to keep the heat there but it does not cool off fast. I've had big pots you know when I put water in them and got it boiling. And then I scrape all the fire away and it just keeps boiling for a long time and it's 10-15 minutes later you can still see that it's simmering and moving and there's no fire under it all. I'm seriously going to have to make some pots and like take a camping with me. Yeah. It's really fun and it's interesting and you know pay attention to what's happening and you learn things. I can't wait to tell my Cree friends.