Caddo potter Jereldine Redcorn named Red Earth Honored One
Caddo potter Jereldine Redcorn shows one of her pots at her Norman home. (Photos by Steve Sisney/The Oklahoman)
Some of Jereldine Redcorn’s traditional Caddo pots.
From Friday’s Weekend Look section of The Oklahoman.
Red Earth: Artist honors Caddo ancestry
NORMAN – Artist Jereldine Redcorn’s efforts to revive a beautiful part of her Caddo heritage have reached far beyond the tribe’s ancestral four-state home.
The Norman resident’s pottery has been exhibited at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian’s George Gustav Heye Center in New York and Art Institute of Chicago. One her pots recently was selected for display in the Oval Office, and she visited the White House in 2008 as a Rockefeller Fellow of Chicago’s Newberry Library.
“What has come from this has been an amazing thing I never dreamed I would do … I’m an artist,” she said.
Now, Redcorn has been selected as the 2009 Red Earth Honored One for this weekend’s 23rd Annual Red Earth Festival. She served as the first executive director of Red Earth but only has been exhibiting as an artist the past few years.
Growing up in the small town of Colony, Redcorn never learned about the Caddo’s long-lost pottery tradition. She said Caddos descend from the Spiro Mounds residents of Oklahoma and mounds people of Arkansas, Texas and Louisiana. The women created beautiful ceramics, but the tradition faded away in the 1800s.
“It wasn’t handed down. It was kind of like a portion of history that I was trying to find had been lost. And basically I started doing this for my own self,” she said.
In the 1990s, Redcorn got involved in efforts to preserve traditional Caddo songs and dances. She and a group visited the Museum of the Red River in Idabel, where she got her first look at Caddo pots with their intricate designs and graceful shapes.
“There were so many Caddo pots. It was a very emotional experience for me to see these because I thought of myself as a well-read person and I really didn’t know my own history,” she said.
She planned to organize a club to restore traditional Caddo pottery making. But she emerged as the one who learned to make the pots through tedious trial and error, meticulous research and dogged determination. Archeologists and historians encouraged her efforts and commissioned certain Caddo designs.
“I would think, ‘Can I really do this? I’m not an artist, I’m not trained. I’m a math teacher, for goodness sake,’” she said with a laugh.
Though she admits her first pots were rough, she persevered. Eventually, her skills grew and her efforts gained national recognition.
“It’s just amazing to have someone who came from a small, tiny little town in Oklahoma to grow up and be such a distinguished artist,” said Jonna Kauger Kirschner, president of the Red Earth board of directors.
The pots are hand formed from coils of clay, engraved with hand tools, burnished with smooth stones and finally wood fired with the help of her husband, Charles. Redcorn has taught workshops and plans more classes on the laborious process, but it is hard for people to continue making pottery.
“It’s a difficult path. I think people are really interested but it’s hard,” she said. “But it gets people talking about Caddo culture … and I think that’s important.”
Redcorn’s artistry and dedication to preserving Caddo culture make her deserving of the Honored One title, Kirschner said.
“The thing that’s just amazing about Jeri is that once she learned her art, it’s so important for her to pass it on to other potters,” she said. “She’s very modest, she’s very low-key, but she’s just so incredibly gifted and part of that gift is being willing to mentor other young women.”
-BAM
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
i wiss i was as good as you but im not 
You should and ought to feel so proud, wow!! Please take a moment for yourself to recognize the elegant breadth and scope what you have attainment! This is the gold metal of pottery, please I beg of you, please take a fingerwalk around the potter wheel as a pilot would take a victory show off ring around the runway!!! Wow. I would love for you to teach the girls pottery… what a gift you are to our community. Thanks so much.
very nice pottery im going to do a project on it