Hands-On History

From there, artisans handcraft the clay into bowls, pitchers, vases, and similar vessels, employing the coil method—stacking rolled cords of clay that are then smoothed out—for larger works. After the pottery partially dries, they scrape the surfaces and burnish the exterior using river stones to achieve that trademark glossy finish, sometimes also adding motifs. Finally, artists fire their creations in an open-air pit over the course of a day, slowly moving their pottery closer and closer to the heat source so the hot coals temper and color the pieces without causing thermal shock. A misstep at any stage of the highly variable process can spell disaster.

“When I was growing up, there weren’t many forms of entertainment, so I became fascinated watching what my grandmother’s hands could do with mud—which is what I called it back then,” he says. “She was able to make these beautifully balanced vessels playing with mud. When I became older and wiser, I realized something within my soul was drawn to that mud and that I needed to make time to learn from her.”

Georgia agreed, but on one condition: Upon learning the art form, Harris must in turn become a teacher for the next generation. He agreed, without a true understanding of the magnitude of that request.

“When I was 20 years old, that didn’t really resonate, but now that I’m 71 years old, I recognize what she was gifting me,” he says. “She gifted me with this knowledge that has been continuously transferred from one generation to the next, going back 4,000 years. She was essentially passing me the baton.”

He recalls with fondness the countless summer evenings spent on Georgia’s porch after his long workdays carving wood and making furniture. There he learned time-honored techniques, plus so much more.

“I was a student of clay with Georgia, but I was a student of history with my grandmother,” Harris explains, referring to two ways of relating to the same person. “I got a history lesson about what it was like to be an Indigenous woman during her time period and also what it was like for my great-great-grandmother, because her grandmother had similarly shared with her. The beauty of that is when I’m in the studio working with students, I share these things with them, too.”

Preserving this ancestral practice is not only an act of resilience but an act of resistance, considering the oppressive colonial-era policies that aimed to extinguish Native cultures across North America. “Indigenous communities have been tested over and over again, and we have persevered through so many hardships,” Harris says. “And yet we still have laughter; we still have joy. You can take away a lot of things from people, but you can’t take away their spirit.”

Having spent decades honing his craft, Harris is known today for his unique artistic vision and the eye-catching effigies such as birds, snakes, and other animals that he adds to his pieces. He is the first to admit he is very intentionally advancing the art form—sometimes to the displeasure of tribal traditionalists.

“I’m definitely pushing the envelope of our work,” he says. “I’m bringing those traditional vessel shapes forward but at the same time modernizing them with effigies. So it’s not the same as what our people were doing 1,000 years ago. But even then, they weren’t doing what was done 1,000 years before them. We have always been pushing and progressing.”

Pushing the bounds is something Harris emphasizes with his students, just as his grandmother urged him to do with this wisdom: You don’t know how far you’ll go until you try. The humbling practice itself also imparts hard-learned life lessons. The clay is at once forgiving—a rare medium in which you can smash what you’ve made and start all over—and fickle.

“When I first started doing this work, I discovered I was fighting against myself,” he says. “The clay is going to give you what it gives you, no matter what [designs] you might have in your head. There are days when I go into the studio and try to push, and the clay tells me no. But other times, the clay will say, Let’s go, and I’m in sync with it. That’s a wonderful feeling. It’s almost as if the clay is talking to me without making a sound.”