I did not set out to be a potter.
The clay found me.
In the same way the river remembers its bends,
in the way songs rise unbidden in the chest
when the wind carries the scent of home.

I was born from great woman, medicine keepers, root workers, wisdom stewards;
Diné, whose stories emerge from the land,
and African American/Creole, whose songs and food pulse like a drumbeat in the bones.
Both carry a memory of shaping ritual with our hands, both speak the language of earth, water, fire,
and the patient dance of turning the seemingly mundane into ceremony.

Ancestral memories of craftsmanship coursed through my veins. My Nana, my Dad’s mother, and my Granny, my Dad’s grandmother, were talented cooks and rootworkers—always tinkering in the kitchen, crafting exquisite meals and medicinal tinctures. My Gram, my Mom’s grandmother, was a talented weaver and medicine woman. I grew up herding sheep with her on the land and would gather plants and other herbs to help her make natural vegetal dyes.

When I first came to clay, the sensation of its texture felt like pressing into the belly of the earth itself, warm, alive, willing to hold my story.
The clay did not ask for perfection,
only truth. It remembered the fingerprints of my ancestors and welcomed mine among them.

In my vessels, I braid two lineages:
the horsehair firing of my Diné ancestors,
black as the starless night sky over the mesa;
and the sacred symbols of African mudcloth,
markings that carry the geometry of protection,
fertility, and resilience.

Each piece is an altar,
a place where fire and water reconcile,
where two bloodlines meet in ceremony,
where the ancient future takes form.

When I lift a finished vessel to the light,
I see more than pottery.
I see my great-grandmother’s hands,
my ancestors’ songs, and the way my mother and father’s ancestry taught me to weave ritual into every moment of life—not as a hobby, but as a way of remembering who I am.