Indigenous Making and Sharing: Claywork in an Indigenous STEAM Program

Participatory design research project. Data was collected during an Indigenous STEAM camp, where Indigenous youth engaged in practices of walking, storytelling, and clay making.

This article explores Indigenous perspectives on making and sharing within the context of an Indigenous Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (ISTEAM) summer camp program. At the ISTEAM camp, youth engaged in practices of walking, storytelling, and making. Clay making, in particular, is explored in four episodes from the program through which four principles for Indigenous making and sharing emerge.

Community members (Indigenous youth, families, artists, and scientists) were involved in co-designing the program.

This article describes Indigenous making and sharing an act of resurgence, and a refusal of settler-colonialism and Indigenous erasure. Reclaiming traditional forms of making enacts Indigenous knowledge as continual, thriving, and self-generating.

Video, audio recordings, field notes, interviews

In the article, they offer four principles for Indigenous making and sharing, specifically for within youth-based learning environments.

"Clay became a preferred medium for youth and participating adults because it allowed participants to engage with it in the same way that previous generations have for millennia: mixing clay from its dry unmixed state to molding and working clay into ceremonial pieces that renewed relationships with and responsibilities to lands, waters, and community" (p. 10).

Education
STEAM
STEM