 Yo ena nihia, yo ena nihia My name is Nancy Oakley. I am a migamog and wampanoag artist. I'm living in Esquicione, which is the largest first nation, migamog first nation reserve in the world. It says so on our side. I've been here for about 30 years. Before that, I lived in Massachusetts with my dad's tribe, which is the Wampanoags. We're the ones that met the pilgrims. My dad was the Grand Chief of the Wampanoag Nation for years, and he gave it up to bring my mom home. So I've been here ever since. And you never heard anything about migamog pottery. I think 1,000 years ago was when we stopped making pottery. You would see maybe a little tiny piece in, I think, a natural history museum and alfalfa piece about that big, but they have a whole section on the quill work and the basketry. Because of that, I'm taking something that we thought was forgotten and trying to revive it. My name is Richard Zane Smith, but in Windout, my name is Soha Hio. That was given to me in the Longhouse in Wendage, Quebec, and I live in Eastern Oklahoma. Some of the traditional arts that I do, pottery, woodworking, bow making and arrow making. But ceramics is really my specialty, I guess, and I've been doing that for over 40 years, all hand-building, and I've been making a living by doing this for over 35 years. And when I look at old stuff, the old pottery, and when I look at the old sherds, those are things that speak to us. We look at those things and we see that motion of a finger mark or a drag tool mark from a bone all. And those are things that we connect with, because that's motion. That's our ancestors' motion in action preserved in clay. And those things are like living. It's like hearing a song from the distant past and you see things like that. When we do what our ancestors did, it's a way of kind of like sitting next to them again. What we're seeing is kind of a reawakening of all these forms, these things that have been suppressed are now being sprouted. Patsy McKinney, and I'm Executive Director at Under One Sky Friendship Center here in Fredericton. I'm Mi'gma from Northern Dubrunswick. I'm very much a modern indigenous woman. I love learning more about who we were from our perspective. It just brings me more pride in who we are. And it's because not every child is born to be proud. I mean, I'm living example. My whole family is a living example of that. And so my philosophy is in the absence of pride is shame. So the philosophy here at Under One Sky, especially the Head Start, is to give as much of that pride to these little kids as we can in their identity. And the earlier that happens, the better it is for them, because we know once they hit mainstream, the bulk of it's going to be knocked out of them. I'm not a traditionalist, but I'm sort of reconnecting to some of that stuff from my heritage and love it, just absolutely love it. My name is Cora Wolsey, and I'm an archaeologist. My specialization is in Indigenous ceramics, primarily in the Main Maritimes region, from about 3,000 years ago to about 500 years ago. I work on trying to understand what needs people were meeting with ceramics. And I do that by dissecting the technology as much as I am able. So trying to understand what the pottery would have functioned as, so would it have been a cooking technology, would it have been storage? And I try to understand how it changed through time to meet people's needs as the cultures were changing. I feel that there is a significant value to archaeology in the way it can be used to share artistic and cultural art forms and culture forms with modern people and cultures. Cora Wolsey has helped me by sending her thesis, or parts of her thesis, on making my pottery. So that's where I was learning how the muscle shell and things like that was our main temper. She's some pictures of the shapes of pottery. So I've been very privileged to get to know Nancy Oakley and to get to know Richard Zane Smith, who are both fantastic artists and potters and other things. They have actually taught me a ton of stuff about the things that I study. So I have been so pleased to have that relationship because I'm learning a lot from them. They say that they learn a lot from archaeologists, and I believe them when they say that, but I think that actually we learn more than the artisans learn from us. The archaeologists have all this knowledge because they see this stuff every day. They're digging it out of the ground. They're processing it. They're doing samples. They're scraping off residue from cooking. There's so much going on there, and the technical skills and all that. But they don't necessarily know a lot about clay. They don't know the process of building. Something that I kind of came up with by looking at these patterns that I found on the old Shawnee pot. So often archaeologists would say, well, it was a cord-wrapped stick. And you can do it with a stick. I've done it with a stick, but not very well. But if you have a piece of river cane, which used to be everywhere at one time, then you put a spindle through it. And the reason I say that is because when we were looking at the collections in Kentucky, they put all these bone tools out on a table. And I was looking at one particular one and it caught my eye because it was very straight. And it had some little grooves in it. It kind of worn down. And then I started thinking about it. And I thought about the cord-wrapped pottery. And I thought, you know, rolling those sticks. And I thought, what if that was used as a spindle? The spindle was put through the cane, and you could just roll it. So I did some experiments. And I found that it's not only as good for stretching the clay going over a vessel, but when you turn it over and you start adding coils and you start building this way, you can use it as a one-handed rolling pin and you can stretch the clay going upward, too. I think there's a lot of good things about archeology, but there's a lot of bad things. I think archeology and some of the theories are just really just based on your own personal belief system and consciousness and try to adapt it to someone else's. I am non-indigenous. I have an Irish and Scottish and Dutch background and English background. So, of course, I have to be very careful about talking about Indigenous culture and the Indigenous archeological record because it's not mine to talk about, except as far as what I see evidence-wise. A belief among the Indigenous people, well, pretty much everywhere in North America, that people have been here since time immemorial. And so it's really important for me as an archeologist to not take that and say, oh, yeah, well, we have evidence for people being here from about 15,000 years ago. So that's basically what they mean by time immemorial. No, that's not what they mean. That they have been here since the beginning of time, basically. There's no way for me to say that that was the earliest time, especially considering that in archeology, we just keep on finding more and more evidence that pushes that early date back even earlier. We've had terrible experiences with anthropologists and archeologists coming here, coming here to Oklahoma, coming even to our homelands and just becoming the expert of everything. When we work with archeologists, obviously, we want to see a sensitivity in those people who are, especially when they're looking after our remains. I'll tell you right now, when we reburied, I'm just going to make a conservative estimate of 800 ancestors we were buried from the ROM. When they put out the tray of burial goods that were supposed to go in that grave, it was just a little smidgen of things. I mean, that, to me, was an eye-opener. Like, where's all the grave goods? And it really bothered me that they're tucking away some stuff that's just like, oh, no, we can't put that back in there. These are not treasures. These are gifts that were given by our ancestors to be put in the ground. For our ancestors. And we want that to be restored. There has been a lot of political jostling over the last few centuries to try to move Indigenous people into a position of not having very much say in what goes on. We are almost always viewed externally from what it looks like for Euro-Western philosophies, what that looked like for them. My experience with history on my people was wearing this wandering band of nomadic loincloth wearing. People, if it hadn't been for European contact, we wouldn't have made it. We had well-developed societies, well-developed territories, political systems. We were brilliant, but that isn't how we got portrayed, right? The public doesn't really want its perceptions of Indigenous people challenged. People found a way to take ceramics and put temper into them and fire them to just the right temperature so that they would not crack under thermal stress in a campfire. And that this technology is not possessed by Europeans up until about 200 years ago. This is a technology that is now being used by NASA to send, you know, shuttles into space and when they enter Earth's atmosphere again, they need protection, and what are they using? They're using that exact technology, these ceramic tiles that are made in that exact way. It's hard for people to accept that the technology was not primitive. That's what it is. People think of the technology as primitive and it's hard to challenge that. People who've come in, they've snatched up a bit of culture of ours and then they zoom off and disappear. They win the trust of an elder and they zoom off, they get published, the stuff comes out on paper. A lot of it is like, I didn't say that. I didn't say it that way. He's making it sound like I said that. And so there's this disconnect for so many years about anthropologists and archaeologists. I mean, the words were just like dirty words around here. But today it's different. It's really different. And I think we're really happy about that. The younger archaeologists that are coming out of universities and they've been trained to be culturally sensitive, they're a joy to work with. They're interested in what we have to say. They're interested in learning from us and not just like teaching. Because the reality is we can't do this alone. We can't make any of the changes alone. Cora took us on an archaeological survey. So we weren't digging anything. We were just out walking around. So what Cora did is what reconciliation is. It isn't a bunch of fluff and talking. She actually took me out there. She didn't have to do that. And that was incredibly meaningful and we don't get enough of that. That's how I think it needs to change and for people to be aware of what our position could be in that. It's not about taking it from them and giving it all to us. But we could share it for sure. In your sense of how was archaeology helping with my pottery or with my art form? How we describe archaeology is archaeology from the formal written theses of people or is it from the traditional knowledge passed down? That's a form of archaeology to me. Is it from the things you see around you? It's not a one-sided relationship that might have been in the past. We're exchanging ideas and things like that which I find so I'm thankful for. I'm very grateful for that. In that way I feel like both the archaeology is brought to life and the indigenous traditional knowledge is augmented, is also brought to life. I feel like the two can really lift each other up. We are starting to see more indigenous people going after that degree. They start a summer maybe working with an archaeologist doing digs and cleaning artifacts and they kind of like this and I really enjoy this. People are encouraging them man we need you in there we need somebody to oversee those things because to have our own indigenous peoples out there rubbing shoulders, Kim keeps things people more alert. Indigenous people who are educated in archaeology should have special training and how to talk to archaeologists and how to ask questions about the archaeology that's being done. For instance, is this necessary? Is this work necessary? What are you going to learn from it? How is it going to benefit indigenous communities? What's your perspective? What's your bias? What is your framework that you're carrying with this work? Indigenous people never get the opportunity to ask any of that stuff and never really get the opportunity to realize that they should be asking those things. So to me that's the next stage is having archaeologists have a constant dialogue a constant conversation with indigenous people so that there is a real indigenous voice in archaeology. We are Nui We are We are Nui