It Feeds My Soul

Lillian Pitt

 

My name is Lillian Pitt and my Indian name is Wakamu and my ancestry on the BIA papers is Warm Springs, Wasco and Yakama.

The memories of the elders are very special because they are the last of the quote unquote traditional type of people who saw Celilo when it was a regular fishing place, who spoke only their Indian language, and who dressed the way they dressed.

I fell in love with ceramics and loved the way it felt. I loved the way it smelled. I just dreamt about it. I became obsessed with ceramics, with clay and couldn't quite realize what I wanted to make. I made some masks. There were different kinds of masks: Alaskan, and African, and Southwestern and Northwest Coast.

I feel that it is a sacred act, although I am not a spiritual type of person, but when I am really working with it, it is kind of sacred to me because I'm in a meditative state and I am very calm and very peaceful with it and so I don't know that there is a... anything written about it. It is just how I feel. There is just this intimacy and closeness with it and I feel like it is a blessing to do this

Some of them are very abstract and I do series. I do a woman's series which I have a spider woman and she is very beautiful. They seem to turn out exquisite without my help. I take them through the one process and as they go through the other process, they get their own spirit. In the raku firing they get so beautiful. I just love them. Spider Woman is made to honor the women that hold the families together, teach the children and have to build and rebuild their homes. I like to name them after my mother, my grandmother and my sister and all these precious women that I know and most of whom are gone.

There is Feather woman in which she has an abstract eagle feather on her head. I can't use eagle feathers because they are commercial items. I just make clay feathers to honor women who are our teachers. Those pieces I feel very privileged in doing, as well as doing, the Hawk Woman, and the Bird Woman, Coyote Woman, Wolf Woman

There is a stick Indian mask and the stick Indians are legendary beings that live in the mountains and they will whistle a good person to safety if they are lost, and a bad person deeper into the forest. If children misbehave while picking huckleberries or hunt, the stick Indians will steal them from beneath their covers at night, never to be seen ever again. That's why we really behaved when they were in the mountains. I do stick Indians and with my only criteria is giving the pursed lips and that has been somewhat characteristic of my work is having the whistling lips.

Then there is She Who Watches from the pictograph from the Columbia River Gorge. She is on the Washington side but she is over looking the river and the Oregon people and I have done her in all different methods, even dry point prints.

She overlooked the village where my great grand mother lived and so there is that personal connection with her. She did a good job because if it weren't for my great grandmother, I wouldn't be here. I didn't know about her until the elders told me about her. That's where my great grandmother lived until 1910 and got moved to Washington. I later found out the bones that were from Memaloose and the Wishram cemetery, when they were returned, my great grandmother was one of those people. I didn't know that until last year. The reburial of my great grandmother's bones back to the earth makes the image ten times more special. All these images are very personal to me and very loved. Every time I do them, it is just like a prayer of thanksgiving for my people for the river people, for the salmon, for the deer and you know, it feeds my soul.