By Ian Anderson, Cultural Coordinator at White Earth Tribal and Community College
Boozhoo akina awiya (Hello everyone)! Our featured artists this month are Janet and Eliza Klarer! Janet and Eliza are White Earth Ojibwe artists who work with a wide array of art mediums. They are a mother-daughter duo who teach Woodland-style pottery and other traditional art forms throughout the region. Janet learned how to make traditional pottery from her mother, Judy Toppings. Her mother worked throughout her life to help revitalize traditional White Earth clay lifeways, from traditional gathering practices all the way to finished pottery. Judy taught these ways to many people throughout our community and passed it along to her daughter and granddaughters. It was important to her to help make working with White Earth clay accessible to everyone, and to help our community build a good relationship with the land here. This is especially important because White Earth clay is the namesake of our reservation, Gaa-waabaabiganikaag, meaning, “Place where there is an abundance of White Clay.”
This summer at the White Earth Tribal and Community College, Janet and Eliza hosted a four-day workshop on how to work with clay. Over these four days, they taught how to gather, process, mold, and fire clay pottery using traditional methods. This helped to de-mystify the process and make it more accessible to our community, so that others can help to carry this knowledge forward. When asked about her perspective about this work, Eliza had this to say:
“I am excited to share my clay work with my community, I hope that by having my work in our local gallery, I may inspire others on the reservation to shoot for the stars and that anything is possible through the power of community.
I feel it is impossible to share my story without including my grandmother Judy Toppings, as she was the driving force that inspired my artistic abilities. It was through my grandmother that I started exploring the art of sculpting with clay, among other media such as birchbark, sewing, and beadwork. She was a teacher and multifaceted artist, and my mother, my sister, and I were her assistants for some of her clay classes with the community. During these classes, I started playing with sculpting little animals, who did not come out of the fire in one piece. I am proud to say that 15 years later, I made two tiny raccoons with clay. Although fired with modern kilns, they survived and looked adorable, which led me to create more raccoons with my hand-processed clay from our White Earth Reservation and firing them successfully in the primitive fire pit.
With my grandmother as an example, I hope that I may continue her work in sharing traditional woodland pottery techniques, and their significance in human history, with anyone who wishes to learn. I am thankful to my mother for her support of my path to becoming an artist and for being her partner in teaching others about this ancient art form. In teaching how to work with clay, we help people learn about themselves, as it can be therapeutic to some and a sensory overload to others. By doing this work we reveal the clay artists of the next generation, and I think that is worth something.”
