The Mesoamerican Clay-Figurine Project of Rio Hondo Community College

Contesting Trauma and Violence through Indigeniety and a Decolonizing Pedagogy

In 2014, the Mesoamerican Clay-Figurine Project at Rio Hondo College emerged as a lifelong teaching, research, and community partnership, in which the classroom is treated as an archaeological field site for unexcavated human artifacts. In this sense, every student represents a stratigraphy of living wealth and ancestral knowledge; a wisdom that is passed down, taught, and lives within every student. At the core of this project, one finds clay-figurines, or small-scale, earthly representations of the human and animal body. In Ancient Mesoamerica, people used clay-figurines as gifts, toys, burial offerings, and healing tools. Today, they carry the same significant meaning among student learners. Through self-reflective writing, storytelling, clay-work, and a host of decolonizing teaching and learning strategies, students train to materialize the meaningful and traumatic experiences of their lives. In retrospect, decolonization happens differently for the varied and various Indigenous learners of Turtle Island (The Americas). In all cases, it involves steering away from Western/Eurocentric practices that have historically hurt Native people. Together, students and teachers create clay-figurines filled with an array of land knowledge and deep esoteric aspects of the self. Moreover, it is important to note that we are not creating art, and art principles are hardly ever taught. All participants of the project are encouraged to rely on their hand-digit coordination and human senses to create useful tools and philosophies. The clay-figurines, their narratives, and other materials (i.e., stone, obsidian, feathers, etc.) used by students quickly surface as meaningful contemporary artifacts, loaded with vast human insights and native interpretations about the human and animal body. In the end, students in the clay-figurine project are trained to think critically about the human body and humanistic principles, and are encouraged to cultivate a healthy body through land knowledge, native food and language, and ancestral medicine and philosophy.

Project Themes Found Here: Ancestral Knowledge, Clay-Figurines, Mesoamerica, Storytelling, Decolonization, the Human and Animal Body, Indigeneity.

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