A Sacred Assignment

Gussie Fauntleroy

Pahponee's pottery emerged from a powerful experience that continues to guide her art and her life

SMOOTH PRIMITIVE FIRE JAR, CLAY, 11 X 12

To create her very first pot, Pahponee—who goes by her Kickapoo name, which means Snow Woman—used 20th-century ceramic techniques, wheel-forming the vessel and firing it in an electric kiln. For her second pot, she stepped back at least a hundred years. She asked her father and other relatives how pottery was made by their ancestors. Then she taught herself to work the clay as they did, coil-forming the pot and firing it outdoors in an open-pit fire using buffalo dung.

In both cases the artist was guided by prayerful intent and inner listening that told her what she should create and how her work could be a blessing to herself and others. Today, more than 25 years later, Pahponee (pronounced Pah-PO-nay) continues to use both ancient and modern-day pottery techniques, and her creations have earned numerous awards, including recognition from the Santa Fe Indian Market, the Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market, and the Eiteljorg Museum’s Indian Market, among others. In the process she has learned first-hand that sacredness does not reside in any one method of working in clay. Instead, she believes, it is reflected in how she approaches her work—with mindfulness and a desire to allow the voice of the clay to speak through her, as it did through her ancestors long ago.

Pahponee’s early childhood was spent in the Midwest. Her heritage is primarily Kickapoo and Potawatomi. Although those tribes’ ancestral homeland is farther north, in the woodland areas surrounding Lake Michigan, the United States government relegated the two closely related tribes to reservations in Kansas when early settlers pushed west. Pahponee’s father’s extended family was actively involved in Native ceremonies, dance, and the traditional arts of beadwork, drum making, and silversmithing. Her grandparents created dance outfits, and her father’s family once performed for President Harry S. Truman.

Pahponee’s parents separated when she was an infant (they later reunited), and when she was 9, her mother—of Powhatan, Cherokee, and German descent—moved her children to the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state, two miles from the Pacific Ocean. People often ask the artist about the aquatic imagery on her pottery’s carved and incised surfaces, wondering how a heritage of landlocked tribes produced such designs. She responds by citing 13 years spent where she could smell the ocean every day. But she also explains that the word Kickapoo means “they move about.” She sees herself as heir to the legacy of a survivalist people who moved frequently and adapted to new circumstances, broadening and deepening their cultural traditions as they did.

“It doesn’t matter where I live, I’ve always felt that my indigenous roots are with me, whether I’m near or far from the reservation,” the 50-year-old artist asserts. She is sitting in the studio at her home in rural Colorado, southeast of Denver. The home’s ground level consists of a studio for herself and her husband, Greg Elston, also a ceramic artist. Upstairs is the living space, now quieter since their two sons have grown and moved out. The couple’s 40 acres are located on a high, wide-open plateau, and from their west windows they can see the entire Front Range of the Rocky Mountains.

Like her forebears, Pahponee has “moved about” considerably over the years—starting as a “high energy” child, as she puts it, who rarely sat still. She was voted most artistic in high school, taking whatever art classes were available. College was at Graceland University in southern Iowa, where liberal arts studies included drawing and painting. There she met her future husband, whose passion was ceramic art. “Greg had the ability to work large, and his big pots looked like canvases to me,” she recalls. “I asked him if I could decorate the surfaces of his pots. I began to carve on them to have them tell stories.”