FS: It's a good one this time.
Is it working better for you?
-FS: Yeah.
-FS: Good.
FS: I'm doing it thicker.
FS: But you can still... Work it?
You can, and I'm not going to do.
It's your pot.
You can take and just rip this off and then just, and put another little coil in there.
Just do it.
Just do it.
Every time you make another one you find yourself getting better and better and you learn how the clay works.
My name is Debra Martin.
And I live on the Pamunkey Indian Reservation.
And it is just outside of King William County, because actually we are a sovereign nation unto ourselves.
And there is proof that actually we've lived here for over 10,000 years and some say more than that.
And when you look around at all the pottery shards that you find and all the arrowheads, just all the different little pieces of our history that is here, you know that we have been here for ages and ages and ages.
FS: My name is Jennifer Dixon.
I've been living on the reservation for over three years now.
However my family has lived here for many generations.
I grew up with my grandmother making the traditional coil pottery.
I spent many years in this museum with her and with the elders of the community making pottery and seeing how the clay was dug from the river.
FS: My name is Allyn Cook Swarts.
I'm a Pamunkey tribal member.
I live here.
I'm also the tribal administrator for the tribe.
I go through my yard and I'm constantly picking up artifacts, pottery artifacts along the river, along the whole reservation.
We're standing right here at the Pamunkey Indian Museum.
So if you take a look here everything that you can think of, pottery is a part of this.
FS: The Pamunkey Indians used the pottery for storage, whether it be for grains, for water, for cooking.
Some of the pots were made more conical in shape because that way they could sit in the fire easier.
As times goes by of course they end up being not so utilitarian.
FS: It's now become an art form, but this was necessary for the Pamunkey people to actually survive.
FS: This is where the magic begins.
This is where the ladies sat to make their pottery.
Everyone had a different seat.
My mom sat right over here.
And everyone had a different seat and all of them worked together.
They came here at nine in the morning and left at three in the afternoon.
They made their pottery and they sold it.
But that was a big money maker for them.
They worked all year for that.
FS: It was a very active place to be, the ladies would make their pottery there.
They would sit there and they would, I want to say gossip.
And they did, they'd gossiped about what was going on down here on the reservation.
And this was in the early 30s and times were tight for everybody then.
So the state ended up providing the financing for building a pottery school.
And in that pottery school though also they had a teacher there that taught how to make their pottery fast by making molds of their favorite pots.
FS: The Pamunkey women would make pottery to sell to Jamestown, to Williamsburg Pottery, to display here in the Pamunkey Museum.
My great grandmother was a potter, used the Pamunkey Pottery Guild and she always told me growing up that one day she was going to teach me how, but as I got older she was less able to do it.
FS: For the pottery school today we don't use it that much now.
It has sort of fallen to disuse.
And that was the sad thing that we lost so many potters.
I had this fear of it being a lost art, because I remember there were some years I didn't come down here, my grandparents were gone, and I came down here one day to the museum store that we have and there wasn't hardly anything in there.
And I was so sad.
So when I got back down here it was like, yes, I want to get my hands in this clay.
And I love it.
And I love, I'm teaching a class here today on the reservation, to get some of the younger people involved in making pots.
I do it all the time.
So now how do I correct this?
Don't worry about it.
It's okay.
It's just clay.
FS: I really wanted to learn from my great grandmother and after her passing it was really hard for me to even think about doing pottery again.
So when this opportunity arose I was asked to try to put together a pottery class just for, you know, Pamunkey people to learn.
And I, I jumped on it.
I knew this was my chance to get back into it.
FS: Well, first we start off with learning the history of why we do it and how it's done.
Then we start off with making a walnut size ball to then pressing it and then rolling out the coil and then building each layer and melding the pieces together, one step at a time.
FS: Really for me it's letting the clay speak for itself, not trying to force it, not trying to make it perfect.
That it's not meant to be perfect.
It's supposed to be natural and have its own shape and you're just molding it.
FS: The clay that has been used through the years, and I still use it too, is from the banks of the Pamunkey River that we live on.
The river is such an important part of our people.
It was travel for us for thousands of years.
Any place you dig down, at least a foot, you're going to find clay.
And I have to put this one more row on here.
I think it's so important as part of being a Pamunkey woman to be able to pass down through future generations.
So we try to keep it going and it's almost like you feel the spirit of your ancestors still there, doing the same things, gossiping and talking about things and what's going on in your life.
FS: It's a constant reminder of where I am, where we've been.
FS: I don't want it to be lost.
It's so easy to lose what you don't practice.
FS: If we don't continue learning then it doesn't get passed onto our children.
FS: I remembered how much it meant to me to sit and have time with my grandmother and those things.
And learn our traditions and our culture.
FS: When I've heard people, oh, there's still Indians here in Virginia?
Well, yes, there is.
We've never left.
We've always been here.
We're still here.
It's important.
It's very important to be a part of that and the generations from way back to your ancestors that are still going on today.
We didn't lose that.