Cherokee Unaker, British Ceramics, and Productions of Whiteness in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Worlds

Abstract

This article examines the uses and meanings of unaker, or “Cherokee clay”, among Cherokee and British potters, and between their respective political and cultural worlds, in the eighteenth century. By the time the British arrived in southeastern North America in the late sixteenth century, Cherokee peoples had been producing complex ceramics made with the fine white material rooted in the Cherokee value of kinship with the material world since time immemorial. Recognizing the potential value of this white clay, British colonists made efforts to possess unaker as part of the larger colonial project of dispossessing the Cherokee Nation of its land. In the colonies and in England, potters including John Bartlam and Josiah Wedgwood used unaker strategically within the intertwined projects of fashioning a distinctly British ceramics tradition and a racialized national identity rooted in mercantilism. This article uses evidence of Cherokee ontologies alongside the correspondence of British potters, eighteenth-century patents, and the analysis of specific wares to describe the contradictions in establishing a British imperial identity through the appropriation of an inherently Indigenous material. In illuminating unaker’s inalienable kinship with its Cherokee family even after its extraction from the ground, and into our present moment, this article suggests new approaches to the study of British and colonial decorative arts made with materials gained from the expansion of empire.