When we met with Valaria Tatera, one of our earliest subjects and a member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, she was working on a project that is part memorial, part activism. She was creating ceramic squash blossoms, hundreds of them, each by hand, each a symbol of cultural belonging, each marking the life of a missing or murdered indigenous woman or girl. The project, ultimately to make thousands of these, was a journey with an undetermined end, since the ongoing documentation of these cases by researchers and activists is unfinished, she told us. The shape of the blossoms is organic and uniquely feminine, their material fragile but hard fired. Valaria attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and has been included in many exhibitions, including at the Walker’s Point Center for the Arts, Scout, Redline and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan. She was a finalist for the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship and the United States Artist Fellowship and a featured clay artist at the Lakefront Festival of Art. She is an artist-teacher. This is evident from her work, but also her voice.