Dakota Pottery

©1999-2015
Wisconsin Pottery Association
P.O. Box 705
Madison WI

Pine Ridge Pottery
1930's-1980's
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota

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Pine Ridge Pottery

Peter Flaherty spoke at the February 13, 2001 WPA meeting on Pine Ridge Pottery. Peter said that he became interested in Pine Ridge Pottery through direct and indirect means. Peter met a Fulper dealer that had a piece with the milky glaze, which he found attractive and unusual. Peter gave a very interesting presentation. The following was gleaned from his notes as well as the sources noted at the end of this article.

The Pine Ridge Indian reservation, established in 1890, is located in southwestern South Dakota. In the 1930s the Work Progress Association (WPA) setup a boarding school on the reservations, the goal being to remove children from their homes and place them in school where they spoke only English.

There is no tradition of pottery amongst the Lakota Sioux Indians of the Great Plains - the Sioux were a nomadic group that followed the bison herds and as such were light travelers. The Sioux are reported to more frequently have used baskets than pottery, baskets being far lighter to transport. The pottery that they did travel with was not decorative, but rather very functional. Thus Pine Ridge Pottery might be considered a white man's medium decorated by Native Americans.

The WPA project brought white instructors to the boarding school, to provide pottery for home use and to help the Indians sustain themselves as craftspeople. Bruce Doyle was hired in 1937 to run the ceramics program in the high school. Doyle, a North Dakota native, had studied in North Dakota, probably at UND, where he connected with Margaret Cable. In addition Peter Flaherty told us that Doyle had studied at UCLA, the University of Washington, the University of Oregon and the UW-Milwaukee. In his 1988 book "Art Pottery of the Midwest", Marion Nelson reported that Doyle's son said his father studied pottery in Madison, Wisconsin. Doyle is credited with making molds at the Pine Ridge Reservation and with formulating glazes suitable to local clays.

Perhaps coincidental to Doyle's arrival, in 1937 Margaret Cable, director of ceramics at the University of North Dakota, was hired for six months by the U.S. Field Services as a Traveling Education Specialist in Ceramics. Much of her time seems to have been spent at the Pine Ridge Reservation teaching a course designed for ceramics instructors - the course was usable for credit at UND and USD. In addition to teachers, community members were also welcome to attend this class.

The years 1937-1940 are considered to have been the most productive at the Pine Ridge high school pottery. Doyle built two large kilns and taught both molding and throwing. Pottery supported the other craft programs during this period, earning $40, 000 for the school. Doyle left in 1940 to take a promotion to principal in Allen, S.D., but his trainees maintained the pottery program for quite some time after his departure. However, sometime during the 1940s the production of Pine Ridge pottery at the high school ended.

Among those trained by Doyle were three sisters of Sioux origin who are credited with continuing the Pine Ridge pottery after the high school program ended. Ella Irving (known as Ella Woody during the late '30s and Ella Cox during the 1940s) secured a loan to purchase a log building in downtown Pine Ridge to continue pottery...