Spring 2006

Rose Kerstetter, Iroquois Potter

Rose Kerstetter is an Iroquois Potter and a member of the Oneida Tribe of Indians of Wisconsin. Ms. Kerstetter was born in 1918, at Oneida, Wisconsin, and graduated from an Indian High School in Flandereau, SD. She then went on to attend and graduate from the Haskell Institute, which later became the Haskell Indian Nations University where she studied the business course track. Later in life at the age of sixty, she received her Associate in Fine Arts degree from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). In 1996 Ms. Kerstetter returned to Oneida following the death of her husband in 1990.

Ms. Kerstetter has taught classes, given workshops and had other artists apprentice with her. She is currently writing a book with an interactive CD to teach people how to make and fire pottery traditionally.

Her pottery was accepted for the Indian market in Santa Fe, the annual Native American fine arts market.

Below are answers to questions regarding her work and life.

1. What was it like growing up in Oneida?
Rose’s family moved a lot when she was a child. Rose’s Aunt Celicia and Uncle Loomis lived on a farm in Oneida. When they would stay there Rose and her brother Floyd and sister Cecilia would play in the hay loft. She picked blackberries, strawberries and beans to keep busy. Rose can remember enjoying her time in Oneida, as a child. Her family moved to Oneida when Rose was about ten. Rose’s family lived in a house her father bought for $500 during the Depression. Rose didn’t live on a farm but Oneida was a rural-farm community and she fondly remembers swimming in Duck Creek as a child.

Another favorite childhood memory for Rose was the Ho-yan, New Year’s in Oneida. Rose can remember Ho-yaning. The traditional Ho-yan, took place during the Mid-Winter Festival.

In ancient times, if there was no one home when the children knocked on the door, the children would take one item from the outside of that person’s home or yard. When they had gone through the entire neighborhood the children would lay out all the things they collected from people’s yards and the grandmother divided up the food. The children would sit and eat and play until the adults came back from the festival to take their stuff back. This was just a tradition, like Trick or Treating.

The majority of the adults in the community would go to the festival and the children would be left at home with a grandmother. The grandmother would take the children around to the houses in the neighborhood and the children would knock on the door. If someone was home they would give the children food. This was the ancient event that took place prior to the mid 1800's.

Today the tradition goes that on Ho-yan (New Year’s) you go to friends’ houses and when you knock on the door they answer and give you a donut as you greet each other Ho-yan. Rose adds that coffee or cocoa is offered usually as well as the donut as winters are cold in Wisconsin.

2. How old were you when you started at Haskell? What was this experience like?
Rose was 19 years old when she started at Haskell. She went to Haskell thinking she would take Business courses until she figured out what she wanted to study. Rose became a secretary after Haskell. She was a secretary from about age 20 to 50, did not like secretarial work and just knew there was something out there more satisfying.

Rose was a secretary for the Adjutant General at the Tank Destroyer Replacement Training Center at Camp Hood, Texas, during WWII When she and her husband moved to New Mexico from Connecticut she just could not make herself work as a secretary any longer. Her husband said she didn’t have to work so she stayed at home. When people would ask her occupation, she would say she was a potter.

3. When did you first learn traditional pottery? Who taught you?
Rose taught herself her craft. When Rose was about 30 years old she and her husband lived in Connecticut. They would take their children to the museums in New York State on the weekends. New York is where the Oneidas were originally from; they are one of six tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy. Rose remembers really loving the ceramic pots at the museum.

She would view them and long to hold them, they looked so smooth and perfect. Since she could never touch the pots in the museums she decided to make her own. Rose’s husband helped her buy some clay and she started with a potter’s wheel. She didn’t like the wheel and it was untraditional so she began the traditional coiling method. She worked at it for years but could not perfect the forms until she went to art school.

The shape she described as traditionally Iroquois is not flat on the bottom but slightly rounded with a constricted neck and with a round body. This design is difficult especially in attaching the collar to the body.

Rose and her husband moved to New Mexico when her husband retired as a high school teacher. They lived 40 miles north of Santa Fe, where the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) is located. Since she already had the skills to make handmade pottery, and there was no instruction in traditional pottery making at that time, Rose learned to use the pottery wheel, how to mix glaze recipes and fire them, experienced raku pottery making and firing and studied art history and other courses that gave her the confidence to experiment with clay as an Oneida artist and potter.

4. Do any of your children share your interest in ceramics? Did anyone else learn from you?
None of Rose’s children share her talent in ceramics. Rose has had two apprentices, and both are Oneida potters, Kenneth B. Metoxen and Jennifer M.Stevens. Two other Oneida women have requested apprenticeships with Rose. This will have to wait until Rose’s book, Culture in Clay, is finished and off to the publisher, hopefully this year.

The book is about traditional Iroquois pottery, which originally was used for cooking, eating, and storage purposes.