Shield

Night Dancer "Warrior Woman"

Night Dancer detail

Beadwork - Thunder Bird Handle

Reubin Kent

Reubin Plays

Looking west at the approaching rain from Reubin's mother's house.

Looking south/southeast from Four State Overlook, a serene place to watch eagles in winter.

These Native Ways

 

My name's Reuben Kent, my English given name. I'm an enrolled member of the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska. I'm a member of the Buffalo Clan.

This first case talks about pre-contact pottery and the evolution of pottery in the Midwest. This is the Early Ceramic right after archaic when they're still wandering around hunting and gathering before they develop into agriculture and cooking, and other levels of existence where you're not constantly moving looking for food. You develop into a technology of pottery and other means of surviving other than just constantly chasing food.

It's very wide open. It's got a pointed bottom. Probably hand built. I think they've estimated its size about eleven-point-some-odd gallons. I'm not sure how many, but anyway, it's a nice good-sized cooking pot. The designs are related to the Hopewell people who lived around in the Kansas City area, but it was actually found a hundred miles south in the Questa regions of southeast Kansas. Hence the name "Questa Pot". It has the bosses and the stirations in this little design. Archeologists have utilized the design work to make that connection to the Hopewell people . One to two thousand years ago, AD one to one thousand .

Then you get into the second, the Middle Ceramic. This is a farmer, this is when you're hitting agriculture in a big way. All these pots have been found in Kansas. As far as the Midwest, I'd say. This is where they start talking about Onie-Ota culture. The Onie, Onie-Ota people just appeared. Nobody knows where they came from. I'm thinking an amalgamation of different people always moving and shifting.

They would form their pots. Archeologists speculate that they used a stone on the inside. That's called an "anvil and paddle" method of building. You get your pot together, and while you're putting the clay together, and they overlap, you take the paddle on the outside, and you hold the anvil on the inside, and you hit on the clay and it drives out the air bubbles and it makes to the firing. Better chance. It also leaves cord impressions, which is what you see on a lot of the pots. That's how they date some of them because you know they make them like that. Some of them smooth those cord impressions off and come back to put designs on them. Some of them didn't for various reasons. This is the tool that they used to make these clay containers. The anvil I think they used like buckskin with some sand on it as opposed to a hard stone. Stone gets heavier and doesn't have as much give. What you'd probably wind up doing when you used a stone and paddle, you'd probably wind up flattening the clay too thin. It would not take a beating as well.

When I was in Santa Fe going to school, a student of Native American arts, they gave me a choice of classes. They said ceramics or traditional pottery, I went for ceramics because it seemed more general and there was more opportunity .

I got wrapped up in some of things that they were saying; you people didn't do clay, you didn't have clay and that's not your tradition. It made me think about it; all these pottery shards, and all these archeological sites that they dig and find all this stuff. If we didn't do it, who did? So that got my interest going and I went back and started doing a little bit of research. I finally hit upon the Oni-Ota culture. I did more research with that, some of the designs, some of the speculations and thoughts of where these people came from and how they were developed. It's a different kind of history. It's an interesting history because depending on the archeologists that you talk to; there are different thoughts about where they came from and how they intermingled.

Some people say that there were woodlands cultures that developed. Others say that there was a group of people out of Cahokia, which is across the river from St. Louis. It's the largest Native American cultural center north of Mexico. I mean this place was huge. They had temple mounds that they called a wood henge, which was a large astronomy place. They had the Summer Solstice and the Winter Solstice marked. They had time to plant and they had all these things going on. They rebuilt a wall around it. I think they said it took about thirty thousand trees for one. I mean this place was huge. Twenty to thirty thousand inhabitants at one time, but that was some of the speculations.

There's a reason they speculate that there's a place in southern Wisconsin. It's called Az-lan. When they excavated they found the same types of defensive walls based on the same plan that they found at Cahokia prov from St. Louis. Some people say there might have been a northern colony. It might have been a trading post. All these things it might've been, but it's interesting.