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Hill

When he was a young boy, Robert Hill developed a strong passion for collecting traditional art and reading about native peoples. Now, the University of Georgia adult education professor is using that passion to help preserve the craft of pottery-making for a region of the Navajo Nation.

Hill, an associate professor in the College of Education, has been a student of traditional art his entire life. His mother grew up in Appalachia and Hill frequently visited relatives in the mountains along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border as a child. During the mid-1970s, he lived a year in Brazil as a botanical explorer. There he became acquainted with cultural anthropology and aboriginal societies.

Early in his analysis of literature on folk art and self-directed learning, Hill unearthed a publication titled, Southern Arizona Folk Arts by James Griffith (1988). The book laments the loss of the folk pottery tradition in the Tohono O’odham, a tribe formerly known as the Papago. The publication reinvigorated his interests in Ingenious culture as well as summers he spent in the Southwest studying pottery with two very distinct tribes, the Puebloans at Santa Clara and the northeastern region of the Navajo Nation, both in New Mexico.

Navajo elder Sara Natani clearing away fuel (manure) from recently fired pottery.

In 2000, Hill visited the Tohono O’odham Nation in hopes that someone was keeping the pottery tradition alive. One afternoon during his pursuit, he noticed an outdoor fire-pit where pots had been fired. Hill knocked on the door of the home and chatted with the woman who was concerned about the loss of their pottery-making tradition. They developed a friendship and he began conducting an extensive literature search for ethnographic accounts of the Tohono pottery tradition.

Hill ultimately uncovered a document, written in the Tohono O’odham language that described a step-by-step process of potting. He shared his findings with the Tohono woman and later received a letter from her that would complete his Tohono journey. She expressed her gratitude for Hill’s inspiration, but said that he must ultimately remain an outsider to the sacred culture because he is Anglo.

“Even if I had been Native American from another tribe, I would probably have experienced the same fate,” said Hill. “It was an honor and a tribute to have been allowed a brief journey with her as a potter. To this day a pot made by her sits on a table in my office. I think of the Tohono O’odham people often.”

To continue preserving the Navajo pottery traditions, Hill joined with UGA colleague, Ervan Garrison, a professor of anthropology in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, the Institute of Native American Studies, and his long-time pottery instructor and elder, Sarah Natani, to create a project for the Navajo Nation to engage in arts and cultural practices. They hope to strengthen the Navajo community and to draw attention to the issue of endangered cultural knowledge and practices, such as Navajo pottery.

Hill said the ceramics program in the Lamar Dodd School of Art has been instrumental in his journey, helping him build his knowledge of pottery.

Like the Tohono O’odham, the skill of Navajo pot-making has become a challenged art to keep alive in the Navajo community. The practice is threatened by cheaply produced, often imported commercial items. Studies show that millions of dollars of “Indian” crafts imported from Asia are sold in the United States each year, said Hill.

A "Deer Spirit Pot" Hill made the summer he studied with the well-known potter, Dolly Naranjo. It’s made from hand-dug and processed clay, covered with a natural red iron slip and burnished to produce the high gloss surface. It was fired in a container in a modified fire pit.

With the continued celebration of Navajo ceremonies, it is essential that Navajo pottery arts are kept alive because the ceremonies require the use of traditional pots for herbal offerings and traditional food preparations. Moreover, the pottery arts are the portal into something much bigger than the art form itself.

“Conserving the cultural practice of pot-making simultaneously allows for the transmission of a people’s relationship to the Earth through a process often called, “harvesting,” the clay for which a prayer is offered beforehand to give thanks and ask the Earth to care for them,” Hill explained.

Hill’s project, “Mobilizing a Navajo Community through Pottery Arts,” intends to maintain the rich and unique culture of the Navajo Nation. The project was recently awarded a $10,000 grant from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation that indirectly goes towards expenses for the projects’ workshops, and the Navajo Nation. An additional College of Education summer research grant will assist this work.

Throughout the project, several Navajo potters, with the assistance of Hill and Garrison, who is a co-principal investigator and an expert in analyzing pottery, will teach the art of pottery to its communities. A list of individuals interested in learning the art will be composed; about eight of them will be chosen to study and make Navajo pottery during a six-day workshop, held in the Shiprock region of the Navajo Nation in New Mexico.

“The tradition of Navajo pottery is much more than about making pots—it’s about creation stories, Spirits that inhabit their World, relationships and harmony with others, Cosmology, holiness, beauty, happiness and so much more,” Hill said. “In the big picture, conserving endangered cultural knowledge, such as pottery, is really about preserving Native American identity.”