1ST ED. 2023
Nader Khalili
Ceramic Houses also explores the theme of people and land belonging to each other in mutuality that is engaged with in Our Sacred Waters: Theorizing Kuuyam as a Decolonial Possibility. There is much information about architecture, displacement, tradition, engineering, and creating resourcefully. Beautiful diagrams are side-by-side with anecdotes from a teacher traveling with an international group of students through Iran. Building on thoughtful observation of resources, tradition, and engineering principles, this book bridges an unexpected connection between ceramics and housing as a human right.
Our Sacred Waters: Theorizing Kuuyam as a Decolonial Possibility
Charles Sepulveda, from Decolonization: Indigineity, Education & Society, Vol. 7 No. 1 (2018): Indigenous Peoples and the Politics of Water
This essay is filled with hard truths and generous possibility. Written by a scholar with familial roots in the earliest human emergence along the riparian ecosystem known as the Santa Ana River in Southern California, this piece asserts belonging to the relationship between water and soil and all the living beings among them. Through oral family history and documented historical accounts, the life of the river is made vivid and tangible, as is the abuse wrought upon the people and place under colonization. This essay changed the way I move through this land I was born and raised on, and moved me towards the heart of my practice with soil. Thanks to the Native people who have stewarded their land, knowledge and relationships into the present. I have a path as kuuyam/guest with a mandate to assist in the restoration of health to the land and people.
The Girl With the White Flag
Tomiko Higa
‘The Girl With the White Flag’ is an autobiographical account of childhood survival during the battle of Okinawa. Tomiko Higa was 5 years old when she was separated from her family, and while bombs rained down on the island, Tomiko sought safety, sustenance, and companionship among the non-human beings she was raised in familiarity with.
I am Uchinaanchu (Okinawan), and it has been difficult for me to access narratives translated to English that provided me with the specificity this book is filled with. The land and people of the Ryukyu (Okinawan) islands are stereotypically defined through a lens of conquest and empire, but this text offers self-definition through relationships to land and nature, which is an important component of my practice with clay. There is agony and magic in this amazing account, and it impacted the shape of my life.