Color terms and consonant symbolism

[BARudes at aol.com]

In a message dated 7/19/2006 12:19:59 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
John.Koontz at colorado.edu writes:

> Subj: Re: Color terms and consonant symbolism 
>  Date: 7/19/2006 12:19:59 PM Eastern Standard Time
>  From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu
>  Reply-to: siouan at lists.colorado.edu
>  To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu
>  Sent from the Internet 
> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, 19 Jul 2006, [ISO-8859-1] A.W. Ting wrote:
> >  I just found another piece of information. The Catawba valley potters
> >let their clay age, just like what the Chinese have been doing it since
> >ancient time. This gives more plasticity of the clay. I don't know if
> >other cultures does the same, or when the Catawba potters learned it.
> >These Catawba potters are not necessarily Catawba Indians. I think
> >there are no pure Catawba Indians any more because of their custom to
> >marry outside and their small population. "
> 
> I think there might be some vagueness on the chronology here.  I assume
> that aboriginal Catawba pottery was a thing of the past by the 1700s, if
> the progress of matters in the East was anything like that in the
> Mississippi Valley.  Most of the Mississippi Valley Siouan groups were
> quite vague on the whole process of making pots by the late 1800s, as they
> had been using trade equivalents for so long.  Radin elicited quite a
> fanciful process from Winnebago speakers.  Whether any modern Catawba
> folks have taken up ceramics again, I couldn't say.
> 
> >It appears that the aging process of clay mixtures seems to be a pretty
> >common way of processing worldwide (with regard to pottery in general
> >and not restricted to the production of porcelain).
> 
> Not sure if this last was Alfred or his friend speaking, but I recall
> seeing some discussion of tempering in the friend's web site, and I can
> report that adding burnt shell to clay as temper is one of the diagnostic
> features of Mississippian cultures (from c. 1000 AD and earlier),
> including Oneota, which has a sort of rough equivalence with early
> Mississippi Valley Siouan.  It's thought that the lime this added to maize
> boiled in the pots helped break it down to make it more digestible.
> Earlier and peripheral areas used fine sand and also "grog"  - crushed
> sherds of earlier pottery - as temper.
> 
> It's not clear to me on what basis and at what time Mt. Unaker was named,
> i.e., whether by the European commercializers of the kaolin digging
> operations, or earlier, by the Cherokee.  There are a fair number of
> "White Mountains" in the world, of course, named so for various reasons.
> I recently drove over Red Hill Pass in South Park and noticed that the
> slopes were indeed somewhat reddish, especially by contrast with the soil
> of the main park basin.
> 
> 

Pottery making never died out among the Catawbas. It was the one thing that 
served to "define" Catawba culture from prehistoric times up to the present. 
The tradition is very old (dating to the Late Archaic Period) and indigenous to 
the Carolinas. During the 19th and early centuries is was still widely made 
and sold as a tourist item. The tradition died back (but not out) in the middle 
of the twentieth century with dispersal of the Catawbas and the loss of 
federal recognition. In 1965, one Catawba woman wrote that "there is no one here (on 
the reservation) now that speaks or would understand the Catawba language. 
Only a few of the older women make the pottery any more. I still make it." 
(Doris Wheelock Blue, quoted in Douglas Summer Brown, The Catawba Indians: The 
People of the River, USC Press, 1966, p. 365). Brown goes on to comment that "is 
pottery, the single, most characteristic Catawba artifact, the last link with 
these ancient people and their ancient ways?" (p. 365). Pottery making 
underwent a resurrgence in the late twentieth century and there are now a fair number 
of master potters among the Catawba.

As the anthropologist Frank Speck documented, the Catawba pottery tradition 
was brought to the Cherokee in the mid-19th century when a number of Catawbas 
married Cherokees and moved to Cherokee land. Thus, it is unlikely that the use 
of the Cherokee word for 'white' in reference to pottery dates any earlier 
than the mid-19th century. I should also not that there are no terms related to 
pottery making in Catawba that bear any resemblence to Cherokee uneka 'white' 
or the Chinese term.

Blair 
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