It was a seasonally overcast, muggy day when I attended the inaugural Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) Fest at the First Americans Museum (FAM). While wandering through the displays set up inside the glass Wichita lodge facade, I saw many teachings represented in artistic creations, diagrams, and displays. I could smell smoke and ventured to the courtyard to see what was burning. In the grassy area between the mound and the glass building, I found Chris Houk (Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma) and Joshua Garcia, both from the Wyandotte Nation Cultural Center & Museum. They were cooking hominy (dried and soaked corn kernels) in pots over a small fire.

The smoke billowed on the late morning breeze. Its wafts reminded me of the many cooking fires I’ve sat near and tended— and evoked the many fires that have burned on this particular patch of ground for centuries.

At the center of the fire, a small, well-worn pot, about 8 inches tall, nestled between burning logs, its contents bubbling jauntily. Chris Houk spoke to the assembled crowd about an ancestral Waⁿdat technique for cooking hominy: primed with ashes of earlier fires, ready for their slow boil. In this way, he explained, one fire feeds the next as the community comes together around making, eating, and living. 

Looking more closely, I recognized familiar motifs and designs from another pot I knew. I asked whether the artist Richard Zane Smith (Wyandot Nation of Kansas) had made this cooking pot. Houk confirmed that it was one of Smith’s works, explaining that although he is a well-known and successful professional artist, Smith also makes functional, beautiful pots for the community to use in ceremonial and other cultural ways. I had recognized this one, full of life-sustaining, ancestral food, as a close relative of the larger Feast Pot displayed in the nearby FAM galleries.

That morning, the earthenware object inside the museum was enlivened by its relative at work in the courtyard. The clay material; the lively corn, ash, and fire; and the people sharing their wisdom—all enriched my understanding of Smith’s pottery practice. More importantly, I saw an example of how Native people reawaken traditions sleeping under histories of oppression. In this, I was gifted a new example of a community making home in this place.

On the bank of the Oklahoma River, just before it gently bends north to define the eastern edge of Oklahoma County, the First Americans Museum rises over the prairie. Its building echoes the architecture of the Wichita people’s grass lodge. The Hall of The People’s colossal glass facade reminds those willing to learn whose land this is. The rivershed is part of the ancestral home of the Wichita people. On the building’s western side, a mound rises 90 feet above the freeway, stretching 1,000 feet from the building. The mound, like much of the architecture at FAM, is meant to evoke traditions of the 39 tribal nations that now call Oklahoma their home. Mounds are forms used by ancestral communities in what is now the southeastern United States, many of whom are now located in Oklahoma.

The museum’s site at the crossroads of I-35 and I-40 in the southwest area of what is now Oklahoma City has long marked a place of convergence for the peoples of this land. Many communities have crossed these paths and made this land home.

From old migratory trails for people, animals, and other relatives to overland commerce routes, cattle trails to riverbeds, the throughways meet here. Overlapping paths connect the southern Plains past the rolling foothills of the Ozark range to the coastal port cities to the east. They bridge this land to the deserts to the west, the expansive grasslands of the north, and down toward Texas. Cars, trucks, trains, and airplanes constantly careen past and overlap one another here, using the Canadian River (called the Oklahoma River within the city limits, where it parallels I-40) as a path marker, each on its own way.

The land here was once called Indian Territory, then Oklahoma Territory, and now the state of Oklahoma. Most of the tribes of Oklahoma came here during the 19th century as a result of forced removals from their ancestral homelands. The Waⁿdat community was removed from its homelands in Ontario, Canada; into the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois; then from the Ohio River Valley; and again from what is now known as Kansas; and ultimately into present-day Oklahoma. Though several centuries of displacement fractioned the Waⁿdat Confederacy into locations in Quebec, Kansas, Michigan, and Oklahoma, it survives and remains resilient today, creating new traditions and new relationships.

The tribes of Oklahoma are proof of the vitality and sophistication of their cultures. Here, Native arts and cultures come alive. As Native people make a home on this land, we recognize and celebrate longstanding knowledge, cultural practices, and ancestral art forms. As tribal people, we feel our relationships with the land deeply. Place-based relationships are embedded in our art, calendars, food cycles, songs, dances, and languages.

I am a member of a tribal community in Montana: I am a member of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes in far northeastern Montana. That is over 1,000 miles from Oklahoma City, where I now live and where I encountered Richard Zane Smith’s pots. I entered the place we now call Oklahoma a decade ago, feeling alien. Its dry, red dirt, long stretches of pin-straight dusty roads, and unique town names can seem foreign and inhospitable to an outsider. As I’ve experienced this place, I have sought to learn from those who have already built relationships with this land. It has been instructive for me to see people coming to Oklahoma and making it their new home. Learning from old ways reminds us that knowledge exists to sustain us and help us create belonging.

In the springtime, the tribes of Oklahoma celebrate the return of warmer weather through living and reviving traditions. Every year, they honor the vitality and resiliency of those who survived and their strength in crafting a new life here, in this place. They cook wild onion dinners with scrambled eggs and salt pork for big gatherings and ceremonies. Preparations for summer powwows and other gatherings get underway in earnest in the early spring.

When FAM hosted the first TEK Fest in March 2023, it was to mark the season’s return. TEK Fest invites members of tribal nations in Oklahoma, who carry different forms of ancestral knowledge, to share their experiences and wisdom, perpetuating survival strategies and community continuity. While I had seen Richard Zane Smith’s pots before, it was here that I first encountered them used in a community context and learned from the Waⁿdat experiences of building community and place-based relationships in this “new” place.

Smith’s Feast Pot evokes a Waⁿdat canoe prow emerging above a river, gently sloping up out of the pot’s round body. The work is accompanied by a carved oak spoon that depicts a kneeling figure before a similarly shaped bowl. Their head bows over the imagined offering inside.

In FAM’s galleries, Feast Pot sits in a clear glass vitrine surrounded by a sampling of carefully woven reed baskets, a rawhide box, and other artfully carved and coiled pots and bowls from tribal communities in what is now Oklahoma. These are sensibly arranged to demonstrate how the 39 tribes create forms that carry inherited memories and knowledge into the future.

Smith has studied pottery sherds from the Waⁿdat ancestral homelands in Ontario, Canada, and he recognizes the distinctive character of ancestral pottery. Though the Waⁿdat people have been removed to what is now Oklahoma, Waⁿdat pottery traditions trace a long relationship with their homelands.

Smith’s technique draws on ancestral practices, rooted in those forms and networks of living. “Cooking and pots seem to be the natural result of bringing back traditions,” the artist says. While Smith is deeply invested in reviving such ancestral practices, he has also adapted his work. It reflects the different relationships with the land that have shaped him and his community over the centuries. His adaptability builds on histories of resilience in the face of immense change.

Rather than using only clay from ancestral homelands, Smith often harvests clay by hand from lands now stewarded by members of the Cherokee Nation near Vinita, Oklahoma. In good relational practice, Smith engages in a short prayer ceremony with the Cherokee Nation caretakers of the land before digging the clay.

Following the formulas of traditional Waⁿdat pottery, Smith mixes mussel shell into the clay and uses granite for temper (a material added to prevent the clay from cracking as it dries and to help stabilize the finished pot). He also uses ancestral techniques to build and fire hand-coiled pots. Traditional pottery is not made on a wheel but carefully coiled and flattened into thin walls reinforced by locally sourced temper. Smith fires his pots on open bonfires rather than in kilns. For this, he prefers to use wood from trees that grow in both Oklahoma and his ancestors’ homelands. He uses traditional fire-making and tending practices and protocols. 

Studying archival records and listening to recordings on wax cylinders, Smith transcribed and learned about cultural practices that had long since gone dormant over centuries of community dispossession. As a result, his pots now often include incised lines near the lip, a reference to ancient Waⁿdat pottery practices. Beyond being visually pleasing, Waⁿdat pottery reflects cultural teachings about the universe and spiritual practices in longhouses. The motifs symbolize water, relationships with the land, and the environment. Pots are understood to carry life-sustaining forces and to have intrinsic life-giving properties. They are both functional and aesthetically important, merging beautiful form with carrying cultural practices.

Language and song are also critical in Smith’s process. “To awaken a sleeping culture is not just planting one kind of seed in a garden. It takes many seeds! Arts, crafts, culture, ceremony, and language all have to grow together,” he explains. Often, the artist sings songs in the Waⁿdat language while digging, coiling, and firing his earthenware. Though he is in a new place, this practice continues relationships with the land and knits his artmaking with his ancestors.

And once they are finished, Smith’s pots are used to cook ancestrally important foods. Physically and metaphysically, his practice is unified with ancestral form.

In recent years, Smith has turned from his very successful professional art career toward helping Native communities reawaken their cultures. He sees his role shifting to teaching new generations of Native youth. Smith holds workshops with relative communities, including the Seneca-Cayuga and Miami Nations in what is now Oklahoma, the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, and the Mohawk Nation communities at Akwesasne and Kahnawake.

Combining teaching, relationship building, language revival, and ancestral art-making practices sinks Smith’s work, and his relatives who use them, into deep, nourishing relationships with the land. While they are not in their homelands now, members of their community remember where and who they come from. It’s something that the Native nations and people in Oklahoma have been doing for over a century—for generations.

Made from the land, from clay the artist dug by hand, and carefully worked and refined into beautiful forms, Smith’s pots are living relatives that reflect expansive networks of kinship rooted in place. I was reminded on that warm March morning that Native peoples’ art forms echo our homelands and relations. Art holds powerful keys to remind us of, and teach us about, who we are. And it encodes the longstanding knowledge that carries us to tomorrow.

Editor’s note: While connected, the terms Wyandotte, Wyandot, Waⁿdat are not interchangeable and reflect dialectal and historical differences. Wyandotte refers to the federally recognized Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma. The Wendat (or Wendat-Huron) Nation are located in Canada. Bands of descendants such as the Kansas band prefer the spelling Wyandot. Waⁿdat is the traditional tribal name and language.

About the Author

Dr. Alicia Harris is an Associate Professor of Native American Art History at the University of Oklahoma. She teaches courses ranging from an Introduction to Native American Art to graduate seminars on Native American women artists, Native land art, and other special topics. Dr. Harris received her PhD from the University of Oklahoma and is a member of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes in Montana.