Transcript: Ramona Peters: Introducing a Wampanoag Clay-Being to Harvard Divinity School

ANTHONY TRUJILLO: So, would you just introduce us to the pot?

NOSAPOCKET: All right, well, this piece doesn't have a name yet or it may not have a name. I don't know. But as I was describing earlier, this is the texture on the bottom, and it was made by a paddle. And its shape is very classic to Wampanoag pottery. More of the coastal type.

So, around the coast, coastal pieces had more and rounded heads, whereas, a little more inland, they started to get flat so it would be squared off tops, more or less; a little different shape. But this is a classic shape for a coastal piece.

And then, yes, see that. I can remember when it was here and this took that long pause, like, 2 and 1/2 weeks. And I would sit with it every day, and say: “How’re you doing? What's next?” And ”What's going on?” And that's when I started to reflect on the patience it’s been to—for our people to get to this place in time and still remain loving and kind, right? It sounds like a rhyme, right?...

[LAUGHS]

So, in digging out clay and putting a different color in, or any such carving takes hours and hours and hours and hours. And during those hours, it's a meditation, of course. The last thing that happened on this part was scraping away, line by line, all of these little nicks to create a texture around these little glyphs. And what it did was it exposed the clay, the shell that's in the clay.

ANTHONY TRUJILLO: Oh, that's shell with the temper?

NOSAPOCKET:: Yes, it's not the white clay that I put in there. It's really the temper which doesn't show necessarily in the rest of the coils when I'm working with it. So that was an interesting surprise.

I thought the pot was done and it was like: “No no, no. Not done. Not done. Not done.” I'm like: “Well, why? What is it?” So, another few weeks go by—not done. Not done. And then it was like, OK, use this one tool, put it your hand, and then I started nicking away. And that was fun to do. It took all of about four hours, but yeah.

ANTHONY TRUJILLO: Wow. It's just fascinating how pot is also—I mean, as you mentioned earlier, a meditation on all of these things.

NOSAPOCKET: Yeah.