[Elise Boulanger] Hello! My name is Elise Boulanger, and I'm a Citizen of the Osage Nation. I am the Curatorial Research Assistant on the Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum initiative. I grew up in northwest Arkansas in the Ozark Mountains, and I'm also a ceramic artist. I felt drawn to this collection of ceramic vessels because this clay comes from Benton, Arkansas, and that town is located in my nation's ancestral territory. What really strikes me about this clay body is the variation in colors. There's a marbling technique making each one very different, and looking at the various colors, I know as a ceramic artist that these are derived from oxides, and I use oxides frequently in my work. These pots were created by a non-Native artist and distributed by a manufacturing company. This wasn't long after my tribe, the Osage Nation, relinquished their ancestral territory to the United States Government and purchased their current reservation in Indian Territory in Oklahoma. Seeing this, it makes me wonder how I might be able to return to that area where this clay was collected and, I thought of what a joy it would be to work with this clay. I often gift my pieces away. And once I was gifting an Osage Elder and Knowledge Keeper three bowls that I made. And he told me that, within our nation, there used to be an entire clan of people who created pottery for various uses of everyday life, and all of these purposes would have been considered sacred in a sense. He said after European contact and settlement and trade with many different people, the Osages incorporated a lot more metal into their everyday lives, and ceremonial activities as well. So over time, the practices of creating pottery became dormant. It gives me hope that, in the future, our practices of clay will be returned to our people.