Unaker and the Making of America

The website of the journal British Art Studies is sharing R. Ruthie Dibble and Joseph Mizhakii Zordan’s article “Cherokee Unaker, British Ceramics, and Productions of Whiteness in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Worlds.”

Enhanced by many illustrations, the article begins:

In October 1767 Cherokee leaders gathered at Keowee, a Cherokee Mother Town in the far northwestern corner of the British Province of South Carolina, to determine a pathway to peace with the Mohawk and other northern Indigenous nations.

Their negotiations, however, were interrupted by a foreign visitor, the English merchant Thomas Griffiths. Griffiths had been hired by the potter and inventor Josiah Wedgwood to negotiate the purchase of five tons of unaker, a bright white mineral used by the Cherokee for millennia to make white ceramics and architecture.

Dibble and Zordan use unaker to trace the relations between Cherokee craftspeople, British settlers in America, imperial officials, Chinese ceramicists, and British manufacturers from the early colonial period through the disruptive Revolution and even up to the commemoration of the Roanoke Colony in 1985.

Along the way are geological samples, teapots, formal portraits, classical vases, and the c.1780 medallion above which shows, of course, George Washington.