Black Bear Pottery

06/07/2025

This summer, I’m going to be selling my studio and home in central Minnesota. It is located between Brainerd and Garrison near Lake Mille Lacs. I ran it as Black Bear Pottery for more than 35 years.
This wooded property is 20 acres. The pottery is 26’x 44’ with a big work area, gallery space, kitchen area and bathroom. Attached kiln room includes a gas car kiln an electric kiln and some glaze materials. There is also a kiln shed with a catanary arch wood fired kiln
Approximately approximately 1800 sq. Ft, 3 bedroom house with 2 levels, lots of bookshelves and a B&W darkroom. Attached greenhouse .
Includes barn, chicken coop, shed and a Ford 8N tractor.
I prefer a potter/clay artist to get this place as it is totally set up .
I haven’t set the price yet as I need to get it assessed. Throw out an offer! DM me with questions.

07/08/2024

Note this is a correction on last night’s post!

Brainerd area peeps, I’ll be at Black Bear Pottery for the next 2 weeks. Wood firing July 13-14. Hope to see some of you during the firing or the following week!! I’ve missed you!!
218-821-0795

07/08/2024

Brainerd area peeps, I’ll be at Black Bear Pottery for the next 2 weeks. Wood firing July 13-14. Hope to see some of you during the firing or the following week!! I’ve missed you!!
218-821-0795

06/25/2024

06/05/2024

Regardless of your political affiliation, this is a good read and resonates in our present day concerns.

On June 1, 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican from Maine, stood up against Republican Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin and his supporters, who were undermining American democracy in a crusade against “communism.”

Margaret Chase was born in Skowhegan in 1897, the oldest child of a barber and a waitress, and became a teacher and a reporter before she got into politics through her husband, Clyde Smith, who was a state legislator and newspaperman. Soon after they married in 1930, she was elected to the Maine Republican State Committee and served until 1936, when Maine voters elected Clyde to Congress.

Once in Washington, Margaret worked as her husband’s researcher, speechwriter, and press secretary. When Clyde died of a heart attack in April 1940, voters elected Margaret to finish his term, then reelected her to Congress in her own right. They did so three more times, always with more than sixty percent of the vote. In 1948, they elected her to the Senate with a 71% majority.

When she was elected to Congress, the U.S. was still getting used to the New Deal government that Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt had ushered in first to combat the Great Depression and then to fight for victory in World War II. Smith’s party was divided between those who thought the new system was a proper adjustment to the modern world and those determined to destroy that new government.

Those who wanted to slash the government back to the form it had taken in the 1920s, when businessmen ran it, had a problem. American voters liked the business regulation, basic social safety net, and infrastructure construction of the new system. To combat that popularity, the anti–New Deal Republicans insisted that the U.S. government was sliding toward communism. With the success of the People’s Liberation Army and the declaration of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949, Americans were willing to entertain the idea that communism was spreading across the globe and would soon take over the U.S.

Republican politicians eager to reclaim control of the government for the first time since 1933 fanned the flames of that fear. On February 9, 1950, during a speech to a group gathered in Wheeling, West Virginia, to celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, an undistinguished senator from Wisconsin named Joe McCarthy claimed that he had a list of 205 communists working for the State Department and that the Democrats refused to investigate these “traitors in the government.”

The anti–New Deal faction of the party jumped on board. Sympathetic newspapers trumpeted McCarthy’s charges—which kept changing, and for which he never offered proof—and his colleagues cheered him on, while congress members from the Republican faction that had signed onto the liberal consensus kept their heads down to avoid becoming the target of his attacks.

All but one of them did, that is. Senator Smith recognized the damage McCarthy and his ilk were doing to the nation. She had seen the effects of his behavior up close in Maine, where the faction of the Republican Party that supported McCarthy had supported the state’s Ku Klux Klan. Clyde and Margaret Chase Smith had taken a stand against them.

On June 1, 1950, only four months after McCarthy made his infamous speech in Wheeling, Smith stood up in the Senate to make a short speech.

She began: “I would like to speak briefly and simply about a serious national condition. It is a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national su***de and the end of everything that we Americans hold dear…. I speak as a Republican, I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States senator. I speak as an American.”

Referring to Senator McCarthy, who was sitting two rows behind her, Senator Smith condemned the leaders in her party who were destroying lives with wild accusations. “Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism,” she pointed out. Americans have the right to criticize, to hold unpopular beliefs, to protest, and to think for themselves. But attacks that cost people their reputations and jobs were stifling these basic American principles. “Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America,” Senator Smith said. “It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others.”

Senator Smith wanted a Republican victory in the upcoming elections, she explained, but to replace President Harry Truman’s Democratic administration—for which she had plenty of harsh words—with a Republican regime “that lacks political integrity or intellectual honesty would prove equally disastrous to this nation.”

“I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”

“I doubt if the Republican party could do so,” she added, “simply because I do not believe the American people will uphold any political party that puts political exploitation above national interest. Surely we Republicans are not that desperate for victory.”

“I do not want to see the Republican party win that way,” she said. “While it might be a fleeting victory for the Republican party, it would be a more lasting defeat for the American people. Surely it would ultimately be su***de for the Republican party and the two-party system that has protected our American liberties from the dictatorship of a one-party system.”

“As an American, I condemn a Republican Fascist just as much as I condemn a Democrat Communist,” she said. “They are equally dangerous to you and me and to our country. As an American, I want to see our nation recapture the strength and unity it once had when we fought the enemy instead of ourselves.”

Smith presented a “Declaration of Conscience,” listing five principles she hoped her party would adopt. It ended with a warning: “It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques—techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life.”

Six other Republican senators signed onto Senator Smith’s declaration.

There were two reactions to the speech within the party. McCarthy sneered at “Snow White and the Six Dwarves.” Other Republicans quietly applauded Smith’s courage but refused to show similar courage themselves with public support. In the short term, Senator Smith’s voice was largely ignored in the public arena and then, when the Korean War broke out, forgotten.

But she was right. Four years later, the Senate condemned McCarthy. And while Senator Smith was later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, McCarthy has gone down in history as a disgrace to the Senate and to the United States of America.

04/08/2024

A real go getter!!

F***y Cochrane Smith (1834-1905): The last speaker of a Tasmanian Aboriginal language

F***y Cochrane was born in 1834 at Wybalenna on Flinders island. Her mother was Tanganutura of the North eastern tribe. As a young girl Tanganutura had been moved to Wybalenna on Flinders Island with others of her tribe and family by George Augustus Robinson, Protector of the Aborigines. She was abducted soon after her arrival by a sealer named James Parish. Upon her return to Wybalenna, Tanganutura took Nicermenic as her husband.

F***y was the first child born at the Wybalenna settlement, and that put her in a unique position. As a youngster she learnt songs, stories and culture from the different language groups across Tasmania. At the age of five, F***y was taken from her parents and fostered to the settlement catechist Robert Clark on Flinders Island. Clark's wife is said to have given F***y her surname, Cochrane, after her own maiden name.

F***y spent the rest of her childhood in white homes and institutions. She was sent to the Queen’s Orphan School in Hobart at the age of eight to learn domestic service skills but disliked the prison-like discipline there. She was returned to Wybalena to work for Clark as a domestic servant until the settlement closed in 1847.

Clark treated her with appalling neglect and brutality. An official investigation into allegations of cruelty by Clark to children in his care found he had "on several occasions chained and flogged F***y Cochrane". Another of the Wybalenna Aboriginal children who suffered at Clark's hands was Mathinna, a young Aboriginal girl who was rescued from Clark by Lady Jane Franklin, the wife of Tasmanian Governor and explorer, Sir John Franklin, by adopting her.

After the closure of Wybalena the Palawa people who survived, including F***y and her family, were sent to Oyster Cove (south of Hobart). F***y’s father died there in 1849.

In 1854 she married William Smith, an English lawyer and ex-convict who was trandported for stealing a donkey. She became F***y Cochrane Smith. For many years they ran a boarding house in Hobart, before moving to Nicholls Rivulet near Oyster Cove, where she was granted 100 acres. F***y raised their six boys and five girls in a simple wooden house. The family grew their own produce but their income came from timber; F***y worked in the bush splitting shingles and carried them out herself. She would walk 50 km to Hobart for supplies. The grant was a government compensation to aboriginal persons.

In 1899 and 1903 F***y Cochrane Smith recorded some Aboriginal songs on wax cylinders. One evening, Horace Watson attended one of F***y Cochrane Smith’s concerts. He was so impressed, and conscious of the historical moment, that he decided to make phonograph recordings of the songs. These are the only recordings ever made of Tasmanian aboriginal songs and speech. There were two recording sessions, the first of which was made in the rooms of the Royal Society of Tasmania in 1899, followed by sessions in 1903 at Barton Hall, where the photo was taken.

The original recording of F***y's songs was the subject of a 1998 song by Australian folk singer Bruce Watson, "The Man and the Woman and the Edison Phonograph". Watson's grandfather, Horace Watson, had been responsible for making the Smith recordings.

As a convert to Methodism, she hosted church services in her kitchen until she donated some of her land for the building of a church, an act of generosity that constituted a rare case of an Aboriginal person giving land to whites, rather than having it expropriated.

One of their sons became a lay preacher and F***y was active in fund-raising and hosted the annual Methodist picnic. She was known for her generosity and culinary skills, with people travelling long distances to sample her cooking.

Through all of this, F***y Cochrane Smith kept close ties with her people, including Truganini, who taught her bushcraft and with whom she would fish, hunt and collect bush tucker and medicinal herbs. She also adorned her Edwardian dresses with traditional accessories – shell necklaces, feathers and animal furs. Likewise, she reconciled her traditional spirituality with Christianity and was a bridge between two cultures. Reconciliation personified.

After Truganini's death in 1876 F***y made claim to be the last surviving full-blooded Tasmanian aborigine. Parliament recognised her claim and increased her annuity to £50 and in 1889 gave her a free grant of 121 ha.

This set off spurious pseudo-scientific attempts to establish if she was a 'full blood' or whether she was, in the language of the day, a half-caste. The community was bitterly divided. Contemporary witnesses, F***y’s own testimony and her parents’ claims all concur that her father was indeed Nicermenic and not the white sealer James Parish. Scientists took samples of her hair, took facial measurements and closely examined photographs of her pronounced 'European'-like facial features to see if they were original or touched up. Questions were asked as to why she never had an Aboriginal name, all of which fueled the speculation about her full Aboriginality.

At that time Europeans conceived Aboriginality differently from today. Where we understand aboriginality to reside in identity and community acceptance - and not just DNA, their thinking was that they were savages; their Aboriginality was a negative thing that had to be 'bred out' of them by training them to be 'civilised people', not savages.

In her later years F***y was conscious that she was the last person on earth who knew the language, songs and stories of her people. Her reaction was to share her culture by giving recitals of traditional songs, stories and dance across the state.

F***y Cochrane Smith died at Cygnet, about 15 km WSW of Oyster Cove, on 24th February 1905, two years after the death of her husband. Her funeral cortège was followed by more than 400 people and she is still remembered warmly as 'one of nature's ladies' who could entertain any gathering with her sparkling eyes and ready wit.

She was buried secretly to avoid the desecration that happened to so many of her people. Her children’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren make up a large proportion of the current Tasmanian Aboriginal population. The church built on her land at Nicholls Rivulet is now a museum in her honour.

source: Our Tasmania

04/07/2024

Making repairs.

04/02/2024

In a time when American women are seeing their rights stripped away, it seems worthwhile on this last day of Women’s History Month to highlight the work of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who challenged the laws that barred women from jobs and denied them rights, eventually setting the country on a path to extend equal justice under law to women and LGBTQ Americans.

Ginsburg was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 15, 1933, in an era when laws, as well as the customs they protected, treated women differently than men. Joan Ruth Bader, who went by her middle name, was the second daughter in a middle-class Jewish family. She went to public schools, where she excelled, and won a full scholarship to Cornell. There she met Martin Ginsburg, and they married after she graduated. “What made Marty so overwhelmingly attractive to me was that he cared that I had a brain,” she later explained. Relocating to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for her husband’s army service, Ginsburg scored high on the civil service exam but could find work only as a typist. When she got pregnant with their daughter, Jane, she lost her job.

Two years later, the couple moved back east, where Marty had been admitted to Harvard Law School. Ginsburg was admitted the next year, one of 9 women in her class of more than 500 students; a dean asked her why she was “taking the place of a man.” She excelled, becoming the first woman on the prestigious Harvard Law Review. When her husband underwent surgery and radiation treatments for testicular cancer, she cared for him and their daughter while managing her studies and helping Marty with his. She rarely slept.

After he graduated, Martin Ginsburg got a job in New York, and Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School, where she graduated at the top of her class. But in 1959, law firms weren’t hiring women, and judges didn’t want them as clerks either—especially mothers, who might be distracted by their “familial obligations.” Finally, her mentor, law professor Gerald Gunther, got her a clerkship by threatening Judge Edmund Palmieri that if he did not take her, Gunther would never send him a clerk again.

After her clerkship and two years in Sweden, where laws about gender equality were far more advanced than in America, Ginsburg became one of America’s first female law professors. She worked first at Rutgers University—where she hid her pregnancy with her second child, James, until her contract was renewed—and then at Columbia Law School, where she was the first woman the school tenured.

At Rutgers she began her bid to level the legal playing field between men and women, extending equal protection under the law to include gender. Knowing she had to appeal to male judges, she often picked male plaintiffs to establish the principle of gender equality.

In 1971 she wrote the brief for Sally Reed in the case of Reed vs. Reed, when the Supreme Court decided that an Idaho law specifying that “males must be preferred to females” in appointing administrators of estates was unconstitutional. Chief Justice Warren Burger, who had been appointed by Richard Nixon, wrote: “To give a mandatory preference to members of either s*x over members of the other…is to make the very kind of arbitrary legislative choice forbidden by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment” to the Constitution.

In 1972, Ginsburg won the case of Moritz v. Commissioner. She argued that a law preventing a bachelor, Charles Moritz, from claiming a tax deduction for the care of his aged mother because the deduction could be claimed only by women, or by widowed or divorced men, was discriminatory. The United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit agreed, citing Reed v. Reed when it decided that discrimination on the basis of s*x violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

In that same year, Ginsburg founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Between 1973 and 1976, she argued six gender discrimination cases before the Supreme Court. She won five. The first time she appeared before the court, she quoted nineteenth-century abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sarah Grimké: “I ask no favor for my s*x. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.”

Nominated to the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton in 1993, she was confirmed by a vote of 96 to 3. Clinton called her “the Thurgood Marshall of gender-equality law.”

In her 27 years on the Supreme Court, Ginsburg championed equal rights both from the majority and in dissent (which she would mark by wearing a sequined collar), including her angry dissent in 2006 in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber when the plaintiff, Lilly Ledbetter, was denied decades of missing wages because the statute of limitations had already passed when she discovered she had been paid far less than the men with whom she worked. “The court does not comprehend or is indifferent to the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination,” Ginsburg wrote. Congress went on to change the law, and the first bill President Barack Obama signed was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

In 2013, Ginsburg famously dissented from the majority in Shelby County v. Holder, the case that gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The majority decided to remove the provision of the law that required states with histories of voter suppression to get federal approval before changing election laws, arguing that such preclearance was no longer necessary. Ginsburg wrote: “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” As she predicted, after the decision, many states immediately began to restrict voting.

Ginsburg’s dissent made her a cultural icon. Admirers called her “The Notorious R.B.G.” after the rapper The Notorious B.I.G., wore clothing with her image on it, dressed as her for Halloween, and bought RBG dolls and coloring books. In 2018 the hit documentary "RBG" told the story of her life, and as she aged, she became a fitness influencer for her relentless strength-training regimen. She was also known for her plain speaking. When asked when there would be enough women on the Supreme Court, for example, she answered: “[W]hen there are nine.”

Ginsburg’s death on September 18, 2020, brought widespread mourning among those who saw her as a champion for equal rights for women, LGBTQ Americans, minorities, and those who believe the role of the government is to make sure that all Americans enjoy equal justice under law. Upon her passing, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton tweeted: “Justice Ginsburg paved the way for so many women, including me. There will never be another like her. Thank you RBG.”

Just eight days after Ginsburg’s death, then-president Donald Trump nominated extremist Amy Coney Barrett to take her seat on the court, and then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) rushed her confirmation hearings so the Senate could confirm her before the 2020 presidential election. It did so on October 26, 2020. Barrett was a key vote on the June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, the Supreme Court ruling that overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion.

Ginsburg often quoted Justice Louis Brandeis’s famous line, “The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people,” and she advised people to “fight for the things you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”

Setting an example for how to advance the principle of equality, she told the directors of the documentary RBG that she wanted to be remembered “[j]ust as someone who did whatever she could, with whatever limited talent she had, to move society along in the direction I would like it to be for my children and grandchildren.”

~ Heather Cox Richardson, March 31, 2024

04/01/2024

Firing today, behind the rim.