21. Caddo Pottery R2-D2

Nothing happens in cultural isolation.

Chase Kahwinhut Earles, Keeper of the Seeds of Knowledge. Collection of the Historic Arkansas Museum

Caddo pottery was among the most refined ceramics in all of North America, traded throughout the Southeast before European arrival. Objects ranging from everyday vessels to sacred burial effigies were renowned for their artistry and technical excellence. The tradition had almost completely died out, however, until the early 1990s, when a handful of Caddo potters set out to revive ancestral techniques: digging the clay, hand-building using coils, firing in an open pit fire, polishing and incising the surface.

Chase Kahwinhut Earles is a contemporary Caddo artist who continues the pottery revival. He is also a person living in the 21st-century, alive and awake and swimming in the same culture we all are. And he loves Star Wars.

Even as Earles sculpts wonderfully compelling animal figures drawn from his tribe’s mythology, he has also re-created iconic Star Wars characters and spaceships using the same ancient techniques. We might be tempted to find this incongruous—shouldn’t he should stick to traditional Caddo subjects if he’s going to help revive traditional Caddo pottery? But artists should not be pigeonholed into making work about their cultural identity, asked to stand apart from the powerful slipstreams of human culture. Part of Star Wars’ success is its fusion of futuristic and traditional-looking iconography in its retelling of ancient myths about power, origin, and transcendence. With a light touch, Earles’ Star Wars figures demonstrate how nothing happens in cultural isolation, how there’s no such thing as a vacuum of cultural purity. How we are never operating alone.

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Links:

• Chase Kahwinhut Earles website

• More about the Indigenous Futurism movement

• “Artist Profile: Chase Earles,” by Juli Oberlander, The National Willa Cather Center, November 18, 2021

• Caddo Pottery Introduction - Sam Noble Museum, University of Oklahoma

• Who Are the Caddo? - Texas Beyond History

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This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 words on 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary. Through December 31, 2026.

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