Authentic Quapaw pottery produced using traditional methods by a Yellville artisan was moved into Saracen Casino this week as another facet of the focus the casino has placed on Quapaw culture.
The pottery is intended to be another part of the story of the Quapaw people that is, as the chief market officer, Carlton Saffa, said, "a story we're telling through the artwork and decor that is placed throughout Saracen Casino."
Betty Gaedtke of Yellville said she learned ancient methods of making pottery as a way of making sure the artistry was not lost.
"None of these pots are glazed," Gaedtke said. "That's a modern technique that they just did not do 500 years ago. What they do is they burnish, like with a rock, a smooth rock, and then they decorate it with other clays."
Gaedtke said what makes Quapaw pottery unique is the way it is decorated, specifically making wide use of the colors red and white in their pottery, as well as symbols such as the swirl.
"When you see that swirl, you know it's Quapaw," she said, noting that the Quapaws also incorporate the swirl as a design element in gardens.
"They did that at Downstream Casino and it's so beautiful when you're up high looking down at all that," Gaedtke said.
To learn the craft, Gaedtke, 66, who retired several years ago after working 32 years for the U.S. Postal Service, studied ancient pottery techniques and also used information she had learned from her grandmother.
"My grandmother was one of our last living pure-bloods so I got all of that all of my life," she said. "I just feel like if we lose our culture, we lose our tribe.
"I mean, this is wonderful," she added, looking out on the 80,000-square-foot expanse of the gambling floor. "I'm sure it's a great money maker, but without the culture, this is just another casino."
Gaedtke said that she was a member of the Quapaw Business Committee, the governing body of the Quapaw Nation, from 2013 until 2017. She said while she was a member she made a point of sitting in on all of the subcommittees, one of which was the Culture Committee.
"I never missed one. I loved it," she said. "But during that time I realized that we had completely let our pottery go to the wayside. No one was doing it anymore."
Gaedtke said during her younger years there were many opportunities for her to learn pottery but that she never had the time. But after she retired, she said, no one was left making pottery. However, she said, she began doing pottery about 12 years ago and during her time on the Business Committee, she began to study authentic Quapaw pottery style, and began to emulate it.
"That was when I really started getting involved and I had already been taking pottery lessons from people here in Arkansas," she said. "These hills are full of awesome potters, and I started seeking out people that did Mississippian pottery, which could be Caddo, Osage, but it's eastern Arkansas pottery."
Before she left the Business Committee, she asked to have an existing building on Quapaw land in Ottawa County, Okla., converted into a pottery studio, a request she said was granted.
"That's how it started and I just started going all over Arkansas talking about the Quapaws," she said. "One thing has led to another to the point that this is pretty much what I do all the time now."
Gaedtke not only uses her new pottery studio to create her own works, she said, but she uses it to pass on her knowledge of the craft to others as a way of perpetuating the authentic Quapaw style of pottery, preserving Quapaw culture, and of helping to instill a deeper sense of history and culture in others through the teaching of the skill.
"We have classes now in our new studio in Oklahoma," she said. "We have adult classes and we also work with the court system to bring in young people who have gotten in trouble with the law, and through culture we're getting them off the streets. So, we're teaching the kids and the adults, and we're booked solid all the time so it's been very successful."
Gaedtke said she only teaches authentic Quapaw pottery making because that style is unique to the Quapaw people. She said pottery of different tribal cultures incorporates different design elements, and what sets Quapaw pottery apart, she said, is the use of red, black and white clay pigments and iconic symbols such as the swirl.
"We have introduced the glazing to the kids, but we really don't get into that because that's not what the Quapaws did," she said. "Twice a year we go through the whole process of digging up the clay, processing it, and we come back and make a project out of it."
Gaedtke said pottery glazing is what gives some pottery it's brilliant colors and reflective properties, but she said Quapaw pottery makes use of clay pigments to make colorful designs that, while lacking the brilliance of a glaze, possess an ethereal beauty produced through the combination of color and design.
"After we fire it initially to the bisque stage, that's when you would come back and put a glaze on it and re-fire it to get those brilliant colors and stuff. But the Quapaws didn't do that," she said. "They only dealt with the red, the white, and the black, and they painted with clay."
Gaedtke said the clay is diluted into a liquid form and then painted onto the vessel, then the paint is burnished using a smooth rock until the vessel takes on a glossy hue, then fired once more to set the color.
"And it is gorgeous," she said.
Gaedtke likened traditional pottery making among the Quapaws as being very similar to sewing bees or quilting bees in which the older women would teach the younger women and girls the craft.
"It was probably a social thing as well as a necessity and a lot of the pottery had a little bit of whimsical put in," she said. "The Quapaws are known for that, for having good personalities, they're happy people in general, and they're still like that today. That was brought out in their pottery."
One of the design techniques Gaedtke has incorporated into her pottery, she said, is aging it to make it look like old pottery. The reason, she said, is to produce authentic looking pottery that can sit beside antiquities and look as authentic as the originals. The reason for that, she said, is to make searching for antique Quapaw artifacts less of a practice, which she said is grave-robbing, because so many of those items are found in ancient tribal burial grounds.
"I have this thing about grave-robbing and it is so active today. We still have our graves robbed," she said. "So one of the things I do with my pottery is I strive to make it look old. It's not going to be shiny and new looking. It's going to look like it was just dug up out of the ground."
Gaedtke said she does a patina to enhance any flaws in the work, partly to age it, but also because, she said, putting a flaw into a piece of work is a traditional Quapaw practice.
"The Quapaws are like, nobody's perfect," she said. "Only Creator is perfect. In bead work, they will make a mistake deliberately, so I just enhance the pot. If it's not perfectly round, so be it. You look at ancient pottery, it's not perfect. I want you be able to set one of my pieces up next to an ancient piece of pottery and it be right at home. I want it to blend so I do embrace that part of it."
Saffa said that every decorative and design element, from the carpeting -- made in the United Kingdom -- that depicts an abstract motif of the Arkansas Delta from the air, to a 48-by-10 foot landscape mural by local artist Henri Linton depicting iconic imagery of eagles, bison, the Arkansas River, and pottery images and designs such as the swirl.
"The swirl is the most iconic of Quapaw symbols," Saffa said. "It is shown throughout their culture. The pottery is a critical part of the heritage, and in some ways can be considered a fossil record, but Betty is living proof that it isn't a dead art as she continues in the tradition of ancient pottery making."
The carpet, he said, is an artistic representation of a satellite view of the Delta that spreads throughout the expanse of gaming tables and slot machines.
"So don't go looking for Lake Chicot or Bayou Bartholomew because you won't find it," Saffa said. "It's purely an artistic representation of the Delta."
He said in addition to Gaedtke's pottery, his management team is seeking out authentic Quapaw artwork, craftwork, and historical items to display as well. Plus, he doesn't rule out some displays being designed to highlight the Arkansas Delta's agricultural heritage as well, and he noted that such notes are placed into many of the design elements throughout the facility.
"Agriculture being the core of the economy here, it's depicted throughout," he said. "You see it in Delta Farms as a restaurant, you see it in the style of the Quapaw Kitchens buffet, because after all, you've got three things in Pine Bluff. You have a history of being an agricultural hub, but long before that you have the history of the Quapaws, and of course Pine Bluff is a hub of African-American culture and history."
All of that, Saffa said, provides a rich cultural history to the region that one of the goals is to showcase within the walls of Saracen Casino Resort.
