Ancient Technologies: In Conversation with KC Adams and Kevin Brownlee | Gage'gajiiwaan

hello everyone my name is alyssa farron and i'm the curator here at the art gallery of southwestern manitoba so thank you for joining us today for ancient technologies this is a conversation where i'll be soon joined by casey adams who is a creative way artist and kevin brownlee who is the curator of archaeology at the manitoba museum so if you just stay tuned or stick with me shortly they'll be coming onto the broadcast hi casey we're back hi uh did you send the send it to um kevin i did so we are texting the link okay um so we are live right now oh awesome it's getting chilly in my studio all right so pretty soon kevin brownlee should be joining us but i'm just gonna get started and then um as soon as kevin joins then he joins so hi everyone thank you again sorry for the technical difficulties thank you for joining us my name is elissa farron and i'm the curator here at the art gallery of southwestern manitoba and i'm joined by casey adams and i'm also joined with kevin brownlee who is right here hi kevin hello we're now live um on the agsm's facebook page so sorry for the technical difficulties but we are we're back we're up and running yay um so i just want to go over the land acknowledgement again and then get you two to introduce yourselves so i'd like to acknowledge the fact that i am here on treaty two territory the traditional land of the cree ojikri anishinabe dakota and danny peoples and the homeland of the metis nation also given the fact that this is a talk about ancestral knowledge i'd like to acknowledge my own ancestors and invoke their presence into the space i'm grateful for them and grateful for the indigenous ancestors of this land who have laid the foundation for us to do the work that we do so this is a talk called ancient technologies and i'm gonna just ask casey to go ahead and introduce yourself sure uh dante my korean name is flying overhead in circles eagle woman and i my family is from fisher river and my mom's family my dad's family is from pegus first nation and uh we were talking earlier with kevin and his family also has uh from norway house so we've decided that we are cousins so i'm very excited to be talking with my cousin today great perfect um and kevin if you can go ahead and introduce yourself sure um yeah i'm the curator of archaeology here at the manitoba museum uh it's a position i've been in for 17 years i worked all over the province with a real uh focus on boreal forest and the north and that partly comes to sort of my background i was uh adopted at birth but my mother is scottish and my dad was from norway homes and so doing work on the ceramics and archaeology of northern manitoba certainly a wonderful tie to some of that heritage perfect thanks so much so thank you again casey and kevin for joining us remotely for this talk again for those of you who are just joining in this is a talk called ancient technologies where we'll speak more with casey about her process and kevin will still speak about the process too and so this talk is happening on the occasion of casey adams solo exhibition get you get you on which is now online so it was supposed to be an in-person exhibition happening at the argyle of southwestern manitoba but of course due to covid19 we had to sort of shift gears um and it's now an online exhibition and if you just look uh behind casey you can see some of the works that are part of the exhibition all right so let's just dive in and get started um so casey and kevin can you talk to us a little bit about what you two have been working on together for the past year or year and a half or so well i just i'll just start with how we kind of got to know each other um uh i was in an exhibition at gallery 1c03 where manitoba craft council put together an um a grant where indigenous artists learn from grant gul golds who is an experimental archaeologist on how indigenous pottery was made and the idea was that then we would respond to that learn about how to how to make it and then respond to it and then create an exhibition and jenny western had orchestrated uh all of this for us and one of the things that we were doing we also went to kevin brownlee's uh office right behind you uh where you where kevin's right now and uh we looked at um some of the examples of pottery so that's where we first met but i had been wanting i've been fanning girling for a long time and wanting to like meet kevin forever and we have a mutual friend stu and so i kept bugging stu saying how am i supposed to meet this guy how do i get kevin how does it feel to meet your biggest fans well it's awesome uh it's it's so wonderful like because there's like this this um yeah seeing uh you know a technology that basically sort of um was was left uh a few hundred years ago and then this whole process of renewal and and and inspiration and working from that i think has been just such a wonderful opportunity to work with contemporary artists um that whole exhibit that jenny western put together was just a great way of being able to showcase what we have and you know some of the you know sometimes we get too focused in on the archaeology and i thought there was some really amazing um sort of interpretations you know like looking at a pot um you know such as something like this that's you know painstakingly being put back together and having um indigenous women saying you know the the the the the role that women have had has broken down the family structure's broken down and we're now in the process of rebuilding and that is such a powerful statement and it's so wonderful to be sort of even a small sort of cog in trying to get that sort of uh reclamation happening nice yeah i was just about to ask if you could show us some of the the vessels actually before i do that i just want to remind folks who are watching um if you have any questions for casey or kevin please just type them below in the comment section and then towards the last five to ten minutes of the talk we will be taking um as many questions as possible from the audience um so kevin if you could show us some of the vessels that you were mentioning earlier yeah so we've got all like the the thing that happens with sort of the the manitoba ceramic tradition is it was all done uh predominantly through uh impressions made onto the surfaces of clay so it was all while the clay was still wet they were impressing it so we didn't we didn't have a really strong tradition of painted ceramics and so what you see in sort of the american southwest and some of the polychromes that come out of mexico that's not what we're doing but the the range of sort of decoration styles that you can have with you know uh tools as you sort of drag them across the surface and print them is really remarkable as you start doing that kind of thing um yeah it's a really uh quite amazing thing to be able to see these various pots you know it's one thing to see the small shirts uh something like this or or this one here um but then you know the the impression of what a pot is going back to this one like you know all of a sudden when they start getting back into this stage you know particularly the public can start engaging with what it's all about um you know you can start imagining that certain pieces yeah and then watching grant and and now casey putting these full-size pots together using this ancient tradition is just so amazing because you're you know it's it's sort of history coming alive in front in front of you right and so casey when you see some of those vessels that kevin holds up um you know i guess maybe that take take us back to that first time when you met him um and you saw some of those vessels how did it sort of inspire you um for the work that you wanted to create well it's you know when when you hold one of those pottery shards it's a understanding and recognizing that this was created by an ancestor and and that um i know at the university of winnipeg they we also did a tour there and looked at their archaeology and one of the vessels on the inside i actually was feeling around and i could feel the fingerprint impression and it really it really brought me back in time and made me recognize like each vessel not only each little piece not only is holding knowledge but it's holding spirit and um the life of these women that made these vessels and all that knowledge that comes with it is created within it so it was really it was really exciting for me and it was um i often say this like i have i i follow instinct but what what we call it is blood memory and so my blood memory was just going crazy at that point in time because it was something that i recognized just like the first time i touched clay it was like coming home i understood clay i understood the the language of it the texture of it i understood it right away and it wasn't until years later that friends introduced this idea of blood memory to me that i realized that all my life i've been kind of following that trajectory using blood memory um and also being guided by the ancestors so everything that i did was always leading me to this point to where i am so it's like miss canal and and sorry it's like what it's miss canal which means and create uh my purpose and so what motivated you to want to even to begin this journey casey well uh like i said the ancestors were just guiding me in that direction and what was interesting and like i hadn't really thought of it but as soon as i moved back to manitoba after i graduated from concordia university i took like a course at the manitoba museum on indigenous pottery but it didn't really strike me at that point in time um mostly because we were in a fluorescent lit basement we were using commercial clay which doesn't really doesn't give you an understanding of how absolutely difficult it is to work with the clay here in manitoba um like it it was easy all right because you know i'd gone to school i used commercial clay on a regular basis it was simple to make these vessels so as far as i was concerned i'm like why can't they why couldn't they just make it prettier looking you know so it wasn't until uh i met grant golds and went out on the land and he taught me how to look for the type of clay that i needed to work with until he showed me all the techniques and of uh how he thought it was created and um it wasn't until i got to that point that i truly understood how difficult it was to make these vessels and why they weren't as pretty as say down south you know like it it's um it's really challenging and uh i just it was it was something that i knew i had to do and i often quote um william dumas where he says that you can't know where you're going until you know where you come from and so i needed to know where i came from so that i could you know move forward and it's been life-changing and so this is one of the reasons why i keep following these pathways that the ancestors keep putting in front of me is because i need to understand that so that we can move forward in the future right oh that's beautiful um and so kevin i just wanted to talk with you a bit about the technology aspects of the work um so the name of the talk is called ancient technologies which kind of sounds like a juxtaposition of these two words but but it's actually not so can you tell us a little bit more about uh the innovation um and just the the creativity that went into some of these these works these vessels yeah i mean i guess it's it's a it's i think the more and more i dig into sort of the technologies that were used by indigenous people and first nation people here uh you really start getting an appreciation for just the the breadth of knowledge and the expertise that's involved in that and one of the things that sort of struck my predecessor lee sims when he was working at the museum and looking at collections he started looking at uh the surfaces of some of these clay pots and finding that they had these real rough uh unusual sort of uh patterns on the outside and you know and people had sort of said oh well people use these paddle and anvil and that modern potters will use this sort of technique and so that's how the they're just having textile on them and he didn't necessarily believe that and he connected in with grant golds and this is back in the in the 80s and they started working up together and i guess when grant started having the same conversation saying i think they're making them inside of textile bags this can't be a thing they said well you're crazy but there's another crazy guy in canada you know lee sims go talk to him and the two of them sort of uh became this sort of force of working together and sort of uh reverse engineering the weaves and that kind of thing and like the beautiful thing about making these pots inside of these bags and this is a really good example is the thinness that you can get these so when you're putting a pot like this together if you're using a paddle and anvil it will tend to sort of collapse in on itself the bag actually gives that extra rigidity to it um and allows so that then your pot is much lighter um then if you didn't have that it would be much thicker and so there's really some innovation parts of that i mean the other thing that i've you know when i was going through school i was told you know like when european copper kettles came in the primitive pots were sort of tossed out and you know indigenous people followed this one now i've uh subsequently sort of cooked inside of clay pots and looked at many of these things and you know we cooked a a mousse stew for uh three hours on an outside campfire and when we were serving it not a single bit of burnt food was on the inside of it which is remarkable if you had one of those like super thin metal pots they would burn in an instant if anyone's had gone out camping and using small thin metal pots they would have a tendency to burn and so the idea that there is this sort of like you know the primitive versus uh sophisticated technology really gets sort of turned on its head and yes eventually they were sort of adopted these ones but it was a more nuanced sort of process of saying like well while my food now doesn't taste as good uh and burns uh it you know it does have the luxury of being lighter being able to stack a whole bunch of these into to one another and so there were certainly advantages and those went out but it wasn't this sort of like immediate sort of process of oh well this is primitive technology and i think that really speaks to it also one of the interesting things some of the earliest copper pots are hammered out to have these round bottoms and it's interesting one of the questions i always have from kids when they see these these clay pots are like well why are they round don't they know how to make flat bottom pots but if anyone's cooked on a campfire having a round bottom pot sits so nicely in the the wood and into the coals that you know the last thing you want to do is have this and so when europeans started trading in these copper kettles you know one of the first thing they did when they did adopt them was hammer them and make them improve them by giving them these round bottoms so again it's sort of indigenous perspectives as to how they can improve this casey can you tell us a bit about the bag that you were holding up just a moment ago yeah so this is um it's made out of hemp fibers but this is a bag that i actually made and it stretches basically as you work with and the idea is that you put the clay inside the bag and you work with the um you you use i love this tool by the way this is like one of my the best tools i've ever had it's a scraper and a smoother at the same time so basically you this is how you scrape the insides of the clay vessel to get it thinner and and then you want to smooth with uh this part it's it's um that's this makes very similar markings that um i have in my sample of pottery shards right yeah yeah perfect yeah exactly and so casey can you tell us a bit about your um your learning journey like what has been the most challenging thing for you so far uh i think it's just trying to understand their processes so not being able to use modern day technologies and just digging clay from the land and then trying to figure out what combination would best be used if it has too much sand and silt and not enough clay you get a very specific um outcome it looks more like this and i don't have that many shards like this so and you get a lot of uh lime actually deposits and stuff so um i've it's just been really difficult just trying to find the right proportion of clay to silt to sand and i'm adding a lot of crushed grandfathers to help with the firing process i've never had an explosion yet okay yeah that's good yeah so that's really good i think one of the things that i was always sort of marveled in in uh sitting down with grant when he would talk about that is he was he was sort of like i always think of like here's somebody who's been doing it for 30 years like he's the master of making pots and he sort of says like i'm a junior he says i don't know anything he said you know like imagine and he's in it i love the way he framed it he said he said you know imagine like three or four thousand years of mistakes and improvements and then and that's what you were doing right and so like at contact there there was this like this generation of mothers and grandmothers and and and and uh of people making these plots and and and built on on years of trial and error and this works good and don't do this and make sure you do that and so all this is passed down orally from generation to generation now that the problem with the the adoption of of copper pots uh and the stopping of using these is that there's this break and so all of that knowledge and so what what casey's doing or what grant's been doing is all this sort of like it's it's experimental because you're trying to re-learn these things that were sort of passed down through generation to generation and it will take time to figure those all out i mean i i think the work that that casey and grant do are amazing i think they're great but you know that you know it's it's uh it's true there are there there's a much larger thing of those generations of of of learning that's there um and so kevin can you show us maybe a few more vessels as well and i think uh do you also have some tools that you may want to show us too i'm not sure if i've gotten so many any other i do i've got so there's there's some really just adorable ones and uh one of the pieces that i really love is you know we don't always get to see children represented in sort of the archaeological record or in the tools that we find but here's an example of this like tiny little pot um and it's a it's a creeper this one comes from the paw area and it's got these little things that we would call punctates on the on the surface and they are fangirling proportional to like what the the mother would be making a pot with much larger pot uh uh ones in there you know and you can see it's thick it's not really well smooth but you know the kid is already at a very young age picking up that thing which i think is amazing actually and then this one is really cool because this sort of goes to uh what casey had said this one actually has uh fingerprints on the back side of it you're not going to be able to see it in this light but actually there are fingerprints left by the woman who made this pot which i think is just such a cool way of sort of connecting into those people we've got other plots like this where we've got this whole woven technology not only are they made inside of these woven bags but you would have like a woven collar that then is impressed and then you get this incredible sort of pattern up on the surface um and so where were some of those shards found um what locations in the this one is uh near thompson manitoba this one is from st norbert this one is from lockport area this is on the winnipeg river this one comes from northern manitoba gower river area um [Music] and um roughly when do those pieces date back to uh the first pottery manitoba shows up about 2 000 maybe 2500 years ago in manitoba and that is basically produced um all across the province uh up until circle the the boreal forest is sort of the the boundary zone um when you get up into the sort of sub-arctic area pottery tradition really falls off so it kind of corresponds nicely with the cree territory which we know the crew we're making pottery the danny not so much and so there's that process uh in there and they basically made it all the way through right till um uh european contact um that's incredible nice um and so casey i wanna shift gears a little bit and talk about your your work your your artistic practice um and so um you sort of talk about uh birchbark technology like that's one of the key series in this exhibition can you just tell us about your thoughts around this uh the natural the technological worlds and how you bring those two uh those two worlds together in your work right so uh i've been i've been going to the water gatherings the nebay gatherings in the white shell uh for several years now it's been happening annually there was uh one year where there was a break and nothing happening but uh i've attended almost all of them uh and the idea behind though the nibe gathering is that we come together as a community um inviting anyone and everyone to come and learn from the elders and there's a teaching lodge that's out on the land and people can learn about how important it is to protect the waters for the future and you know it makes sense because you wouldn't have this kind of gathering in a convention center you're just not going to get that same sort of understanding and importance of it so being right there right beside the river and there's like rapids close by and then the petriforms are close by so it becomes a really important space and kevin you can probably um talk about it a little bit afterwards about that particular spot banana point but um so there's evidence of of ancestors being in that area which totally makes sense because it's a nice flat clearing area and uh so learning about the importance of nibbe learning from elders learning from students and scientists um talking about how we have to think and for towards the future and so my work sort of drastically shifted towards instead of thinking of uh now technology technology now in terms of being able to save us um i'm now looking back to that knowledge that our ancestors held on how to create that balance and so what i'm trying to do is visually create that knowledge that has been passed down to myself and anyone who's attended the gatherings and create these sort of visual maps of of how we can use these ancient technologies in guiding us to the future [Music] yeah and i think that's totally relevant especially in this context of covid where it tends to feel like you know which direction is humanity even going nobody knows um yeah so that's that's very incredible um and how long have been made the gatherings been happening uh let's see i think uh it was i think there's been six five or six yeah um there was supposed to be one this year but we had to cancel but i noticed that today that they've already posted the date um for next year so i'm very excited about that okay nice perfect cool um and kevin can you talk to us a bit about experimental archaeology um i know that this is sort of um like a method that you that you use can you just tell us a little bit more about what that involves yeah i mean it kind of goes back to how i got into archaeology altogether i was not as interested necessarily in the the arrowhead or the piece of pottery it was the story behind that it was like how what was life like and i think the problem with archaeology is that you know things deteriorate and so what's found uh in the ground are only the durable material culture and so something like this or the bags that that casey is finding uh deteriorate over time and don't preserve and so we are left with a very small percentage of what people actually had long ago and then we have to so we're trying to recreate this picture of it and you know and sometimes it's a little bit sort of abstract for people and i find uh experimental archaeology when you are making a pot um i mean i was fortunate talking about birchbark made a birchbark canoe and and in in process of doing that you know like you gain a huge appreciation for the the technology of people in the past and and and the knowledge that they carry it around i mean i think we're we're so lazy in today because it's like well i'll just look at up on you know youtube or i'll you know but like before you had to carry all this knowledge in your mind like you know you had to keep all those steps in the right order in the right way to be able to make that canoe and like you know now it's like okay do i do i sew this first or do i pin this over here first right like i think we certainly get a little bit lazy that way and like so the level of like the way you have to sort of use your brain long ago i think is is really critical um but yeah i think it really it changes that whole perspective when you start looking at um how uh whether it's uh harpoons and the whole sort of other technology that are involved in sort of bringing in a fish or tanning hides um doing any of that kind of stuff really is is is that part that i i really gravitate to and the ceramics are just sort of one part of it but it's it's really sort of the the tr you know rather than sort of theorizing about how things would have been done if you actually take the process and start you know making stone tools tanning hides you have you'd have it you look at archaeological material totally different you sort of say oh you know somebody would say oh this is used for scraping hides and i look at that it's like there is no way you would be able to scrape a hide with that it's not nearly sharp enough or whatever and i think it's it's when you start having that sort of tactile part i mean i'm also a huge you know i have to see somebody doing it uh to be able to undertake i mean i was fortunate to learn how to tan hides and i always wanted to learn how to tie tan hides the traditional way and i read books and all kinds of stuff and i had no idea how to actually do this and then i was fortunate enough to sit down with some elders in uh um nelson house and they started showing me the process and then it was like it clicked it was like that's how you do it and so it was that whole process of being able to do those so yeah mm-hmm very nice uh what were you holding up just a moment ago casey these are tools that kevin made for me oh nice and uh so that i can make markings on my my vessels so this kevin do you want to make do you want do you want to talk about what what this was thought to look like yeah well it's actually a credit goes to a really good friend of mine that she was a student working with me in the archaeology lab for a while um but nicole scholeski you know she came she and i were working on a pottery book which we still hope to come up with some day and one day she came in and she said you know she said what does an umbilical cord look like i don't know let's let's look it up and so we looked it up and it's this it's got this sort of twist going on into it and one of these really dominant sort of decorative techniques we call chord wrapped object impressed and so you get these beautiful sort of patterns and casey is showing exactly what it is on on her new one okay when i start seeing those and so we said oh my god like is you know everything has meaning and you know in working with elders and community members everything has meaning nothing is done sort of randomly and here's this decoration technique that brings um uh uh perhaps draws from this idea of the umbilical cord and it's that umbilical cord that connects this generation to your parents generation to your grandparents generation and there is an unbroken chain of that umbilical cord as you go back in time and that's how they talk about it and i and i sort of started thinking like wow what an amazing sort of piece to sort of have represented on your ceramics another really dominant one are these sort of round holes we call them punk gates and i can't look at those and not think of the moon or the grandmother moon and you know i think as we start looking at these as as having much deeper meaning on those i mean the when we go into a sweat lodge the sweat lodge is going back into the womb uh the pregnant woman's belly looks awful lot like the shape of a clay pot women are water carriers vessels are water carriers there's this unbelievable piece the the the bump that happens on the inside of clay pots um called bosses look like a pregnant woman's belly button like there's all these just amazing pieces in terms of how we start seeing those and even in the in the language i was uh told that the the word for uh for a cooking vessel is increa is a skeek and it comes from ascii which is land and so or earth and these are earth pales and so people are making these ones and so whether they're using a clay plot uh hundreds of years ago or metal pot it's a skeet is what they call that particular one and so even in the language we've got this sort of continuity of references back to the clay the earth as being important in that process and i think it's really it's really important as we try and engage people with this i think to try and sort of engage with youth in the community who are searching for identity i certainly gravitated towards archaeology as a way of sort of even understanding where i fit in this world and i think that many youth in communities and urban areas certainly struggle with as indigenous people where do i fit into this world and i think going back to your roots and finding out sort of where we came from certainly helps us as we move forward yeah absolutely there's um there's a cree word that my friend tina linklater translated for me uh and i'm going to try to say it it's a mini which means our spirit awakens when we remember our past i just i absolutely love that and i feel like that's something driving me towards um constantly learning and constantly trying to um figure out from the past because i feel like the more i get the more i learn the more i can then pass on to others because um uh i think the the more that we understand from where we come from the more that we can um truly move forward in a good way and in a healthy way i'm going to read a quote from a friend of mine steve loft and he kind of says it perfectly when members of a community assert control over their own lives and culture politically socially and artistically they go beyond oppression thus control of our image becomes not only an act of subversion but of resistance and ultimately liberation so i think that's why it's so important that we we do look to these past technologies oh that was so powerful it just hit me um and can you also talk a bit more casey about um passing on that knowledge those values on to future generations um and particularly how you involve your family in that process too right um well definitely uh i was raised without knowing my culture so anyone who knew me early on my career i used to say things like oh no i'm assimilated i uh i'm fine residential school did its job i'm i'm okay with like not knowing and uh you know i have a good friend kathy mattis with alyssa you know very well and she just shook her head and said okay see she said one day you are going to start working on this and you're going to start working on your identity and you're going to start learning about your culture and you're going to start working in community and i said no way and sure enough that's exactly the direction that i went in so i give kathy a lot of credit for just her understanding that i was just i had no idea what i was talking about and um so i'm really grateful for her her guidance yeah in my family um i've been trying to guide them in a good way like my twin sister went to a nibbe gathering she participated in a sweat for very first time so it was really touching and my parents were supposed to come this year so that's not happening but um it's in and uh i'd like to say that my son is going to pass on this knowledge he's not there yet he's not ready well he participated in the workshop last year yeah he did do the smudge bowl um we worked on it together so that was great but currently i am actually um working with a group of ladies teaching them how to do spraying bags which is really uh the the textile from here um sorry so i have this this is a spraying bag and it's written by carol james her and grant had worked together and he told her what he was looking for and so she figured out how to make these bags and what's really interesting is some of the the technology that our ancestors used uh she has written in this book and carol james is actually here in winnipeg so i've been learning from her how to make these bags and uh i have several other women working with me on learning these technologies so that we can then go out and pass it on and the my next step is also to teach others what i know you know about clay and about harvesting wood nettle and things like that yeah i was just down with grant last fall and and we were sort of doing some more reverse engineering on pottery from northern manitoba because we've we've figured out sort of a style that's uh found in southern manitoba and a little bit into northern manitoba but there are other we there are so many other weaves and the complexity of these weaves and uh you know with his sort of decades and decades of experience really sort of approaches these in a different way and and you know can see past sort of what is sort of the negative impression of this textile and then try and reverse it and so you know we've uh worked out two different weaves last year it makes for a slightly different sort of manufacturing technique and so hopefully when life comes down i'll be working on making a different style of sort of bag and then seeing how well it performs and again i think it's as as in in the past people are adjusting the technology to accommodate for differences in clay and if it was a a lesser grade clay was available they made uh accommodations to be able to work with it and make it into these pots and so again i think everything was sort of this constant sort of evolution and and and change and so again it's trying to go through those so i i'm really excited about seeing that whole process because it is i mean i think it's so funny you know we've often been sort of thinking about you know traditional clothes is sort of always hide and i think man you know we you talk to grant and he says no he said there would have been like a whole woven industry and there's even reference down in minnesota by one of the lakes that he's worked at uh net lake and in the history in the fur trade journal they said oh those are the people of the of the woven cloth it's like oh so the people that actually do weaving from nettle of fiber to be able to do these so again it's this whole unbelievable pattern yeah uh this thing this is actually a woven uh outfit um that was pre contact look at the sophistication of that like it's pretty amazing it's just the detail yeah it's salt river in arizona okay nice i always say the warmer the climate the more time they have on their hands to do like intricate stuff like that i mean yeah you can't first of course we're like survival yeah it's cold you gotta just get more yeah um so i want to take some time to answer or to put some questions from the audience to you guys we've have quite a few questions coming in uh okay so let me see where i should begin um okay so i'm gonna bring up this question that's coming in from brittany weber she says hi kevin do you have any information about the residues from the pottery you've shown i would be interested in knowing what types of meats or plants were cooked in them uh a little bit of that certainly we've been doing uh tests on so some of the residue that's on the inside of the pots um we can find things like phytoliths and and starch grains and so we can see corn beans squash wild plants and so we can see whether they're eating prairie turnip or some of these other ones which is and and wild rice so there's this really sort of unbelievable sort of realm of world that you can sort of get into um you can also start looking at this um uh the the fats and then sort of uh look into what kind of animals are cooking in that as well it's a pretty uh expensive and a very specialized sort of area and so we do a little bit of that here we certainly know that some of these plots we've got wild rice showing up uh corn beans and squash really show up quite f a lot even into the boreal forest and i think this is one of the sort of interesting things is that we think of these as agricultural products of what people were growing on the plains down in maybe southern manitoba and down into the dakotas um but we're starting to see you know this showing up in 1500 year old pots in the paw area so yeah it's really cool to see that sort of next sort of stage as we start looking at these so it's totally a process that is uh growing leaps and bounds with technology hey brett and brittany [Laughter] um nice okay i have another question coming in and it's from dennis sinclair uh so danny asks you mentioned pots's cooking tools is there are there any preservation benefits or abilities in the use of clay pots um certainly the performance i think is is really the was the one that i really noticed um i haven't seen like again i think it's it's as we start experimenting and testing some of these we can really get into some of the other sort of uses of them we certainly know they were going to be used for uh carrying water and and that kind of thing what other things were they doing any fermenting or that kind of stuff yeah there's sort of realms of possibilities of of of how they were using the plots and what they were using them for but yeah yeah yeah yeah i know that you talked about the um i guess the the quality or the taste of the food and it's being less likely to to burn the food so there's that it's crazy like it's crazy apparently there's there is a a quote in one of these fur trader journals that do talk about how the the flavor of food it was it was women talking about how poor the food tasted after the introduction of metal pots which i think is just so it's it's wonderful right and it's something we don't necessarily think of i think now as people are cooking and paying more attention to you know traditional ways of doing these things i mean like one of the things that i know grant does down in the states is well he'll cook stews and that kind of thing for feasts and so he'll show up at a feast on a first nation or native american reservation down in the states and will bring these sort of like meals that he's cooked inside of these clay pots and the elders just are like fanatical about it it's amazing right but it's just one of these things where you know here you are touching the pasta when we made pots and or cooked a meal in northern manitoba uh up in cross lake it was probably the first meal cooked in a clay pot in like 250 years like like how cool is that so amazing actually i wanted to talk about that a little bit more we don't have too much time left but the role of women in the community um and i know casey that's also kind of like a running theme in your work as well can you just sort of talk to talk to the people a little bit more about the significance and role of women well i mean they were so much so important to the community women held so much information so much knowledge her roles and responsibilities were tremendous i mean in my own family history um it you know you hear that uh if you wanted to be if you were a white settler uh coming over to manitoba and you wanted to survive you better take up a a native wife if you want to live because uh she knew how to um how to go for food how to force forage for food how to set up camp how to make sure that you stay alive and so that is my family history basically right there a lot of strong women in the community in my my family history where um they were skilled at so many different things and what's really interesting is how my blood memory i'm really walking in the footsteps of my ancestors anyone who's followed my career knows that i'm not just a ceramicist i'm not just a photographer i'm not just a sculptor i you know i i basically touch so many different mediums and i'm constantly learning these different skills and move jumping between them all so i have at least eight different projects going all at once which is exactly how the women live their lives as well so i find that really exciting but um i also feel that you know a lot of people say well women uh they're not supposed to touch drums they're not supposed to be drumming but um i've heard where people say well no the reason why women are picking up drums is because the men can't do it alone and that we need to build up our community again and that the women are taking up that role to help help guide our community in a better way and i like to think that i'm doing a small sort of small sort of portion to to help community and and feel pride and feel um understand that everything that we learned in school and public school system was was wrong and that the technologies that our people had weren't primitive they were actually quite sophisticated and also understanding balance balance within our environment but also understanding the connection of everything that's around us all living things and beings so i think i think that is a a big role in a woman's job is to passing on that knowledge passing on that idea of balance and i think the pottery is from a from an archaeology standpoint such a great way of being able to look at the role of women because that is sort of all accounts say that it was the women who were the ones that make were the predominant ceramic people and so that is an expression of them as as as women as as in many cases for the the creed they were mostly following a matrilineal metro local um society and so they there was the women that were the ones that were in charge um you know and everything kind of gets a little bit messed up when european contact happens because then you know the dynamics are here are these traitor men dealing wanting to deal with the the um uh men on the other side and so there was a whole change to that process and i think um yeah it's really empowering to see that sort of uh that elevation again of women within our communities perfect thank you so just a couple more questions um before we wrap up so one question coming in from des mentak does ask has there been any research into the anishinaabe nehiwa et cetera names for these vessels uh i kind of touched on that with the the the way the cree and the north are referring to them as this geek and how a skeek is a cree word meaning uh basic basically um earth pales or earth containers uh made from the earth and but i would expect similar things within the anishinaabemowin language as well um and so yeah i think there's a lot of pieces in there that uh can be drawn out yeah i believe um sherry koppenis who's from 3d3 territory she uh translated akigok as um so aki you know you have that earth reference again so akikok as being like the vessel um okay um this last question although i think you already touched on this casey what fiber are you using in the spraying bags um and are you making the cordage as well sorry and so i like to show it off it's got like this little pointy bottom and everything um i am actually i work with um wood nettle so every september um just before the first frost i will go down by the water and i will um harvest wood nettle and i have some here actually and it's uh it's um it's not stinging nettle stinging nettle is um an introduced species wood nettle uh has broad leaves like this and it stings but the sting only lasts for like 10 minutes not even whereas stinging nettle can last for like a week um the the it's used as a medicine for anti-inflammatory but the outer bark you can actually easily pull it and you can make cordage like instant so uh you can you can make um cords really quickly and i can almost see like the women sitting down by the fire listening or storytelling or laughing and just sitting there making cordage you know with this stuff is it i have stuff that i harvested three years ago and i'm still using that material so it easily you can hydrate it and work with it quite quickly yeah i've been i've been trying to try to figure out what they were using in the north because uh wood nettle is great but it basically you know winnipeg is about this and and maybe a little bit up the red river is about as far north as it goes we've got evidence of these textiles being in northern manitoba and so i've played around a little bit with um using uh uh willow which grows all over the place and so again it's really early but again i think it's sort of part of that process of sort of experimental archaeology and just playing around and how do you make fibers and indigenous plants to to what casey said rather than sort of introduce species how do we make these things work because that's really what they were doing yeah there's um there's if anyone's interested there's also uh basswood as well that was used and there was also cedar that you could use as well and um oh geez my mind is blanking on her name but there's there's a woman that's working on those older fibers she's doing research she's doing her phd right now on it and i can't think of her name dog dog bane is another amazing one and it is super strong it's way stronger than wood nettle but it is picky to work with but once you get it i mean it comes out almost looking like silk like grant has worked with it and like he had sort of a run of this stuff and like it's just it's yeah it's like silk it's amazing so i wanna just ask one last question before we wrap up and it's because it's coming in from someone who i think is related to you kevin their name is meredith brownlee [Music] [Laughter] i think you asked you answered something like this she asked how far north does pottery extend northward did inuit use pottery it's actually a good question uh in manitoba we basically see that sort of tree line and sort of boundary up into uh big sand lake which is part of the seal river is the furthest north we've seen pottery manitoba now and there isn't a real well-established sort of inuit traditional pottery but there has been a little bit of work i think it was on banks island in the last 10 or 15 years and they've found what they believe to be pottery they've done some ct scanning of it so it looks like even the inuit had some kind of tradition of that so yes it really it really depends i think part of it also depends on having access to good clay when you move into places like alberta they don't have that really well developed ceramic industry because they don't have clay like we're in the middle of like lake lake agassi and so there is clay everywhere in manitoba but you go into like alberta and there are many places where you don't have good access to clay yeah and you know i just went to the national museum in auto in hull and uh i was looking at their archives of clay shards and there was one in great slave lake uh an example and it was so thick and it was almost like uh the thickness of say soapstone yeah yeah you know and it had lots of sand like it was a high sand content you could tell like i could tell because based on my own experiments and stuff like that it had a lot of like rocks in it so a lot of grandfather rocks just so that because it's so thick it needs the air to get out when it's going through a firing so so that it doesn't explode so this had like tons of rock in it tons of like that kind of material and it was super thick like it was crazy so it was really interesting how it it reminded me of like soapstone but it was clay it was a clay shard i think that sort of speaks to sort of the the the ingenuity of of how this technology was then adapted to situations where you did where you had lesser quality clays or or that kind of thing and they were like like they were determined to make it work right and and they would make they would they would then sort of say oh well if i do this based on my like our oral tradition and our our traditional knowledge we know this should make it work and so again i think it speaks to really that sort of level um perfect um so any final comments that you guys want to say before we wrap up i kind of feel like i could do this all day yeah i think i asked you at the beginning i said so what are we going to talk about and it's like oh well it doesn't matter i don't like to talk no problem so kevin kevin and i actually uh so um i like to visit my cousin every so often and go over to his office so that we can totally just geek out and uh talk clay and and fibers and stuff like that so uh yeah seriously this could this could keep going as far as i'm concerned oh yeah no it's i think that the really cool thing is just the the whole you know seeing this sort of uh yeah resurgence of this as a technology and recognizing the significance of women and this is something and also really that you know i mean as an archaeologist as a as a first nation archaeologist you know the the idea of communities taking ownership of that past i think is such a powerful part and as this whole ceramic thing that has been taken off in the last few years sort of led by casey up here i just think it's such an awesome expression of that and i i think it's again it's it's drawing on those pat taking ownership of how the past influences our future and and also i'd like to see more uh first nation archaeologists and i think that's really important because uh what what doesn't happen is from a scholarly point of view the spirit gets left out and those understanding of connections between land and water gets left out so you know it's so important to have somebody like kevin in this position to be like a role model for for future generations and i think that's really important perfect oh that's a great way to end the talk well i want to say thank you to casey and kevin for sharing your knowledge with us today big um and i want to say that casey's online exhibition it is online now so go to agsm.ca so that you can access the link so that you can see her work her incredible work and this conversation is going to be saved and accessible on the agsm's facebook page as well as the agsm's website and thank you for everyone who tuned in we had quite a few views almost 800 people we reached so and i think that will continue to grow as um in the coming days as people re-watch the recording of the video so thank you casey and kevin and yeah i'm going to sign us out take care of you thanks so much bye take care guys

2021-07-03 20:36

Other news