As with basketry, American Indian pottery traditions are difficult to generalize about because they developed so differently in different tribes. The fact of the matter is everyone needs someplace to store their corn. As far as I know just about every culture that does any farming at all developed pottery in ancient times, and American Indians are no exception. Southwestern Indian pottery is probably the most famous, for its colorful designs and figures, distinctive forms like the double - spouted wedding vase, and unique techniques like the Pueblo "black on black" firing.
The Southwest tribes are unquestionably, the ones who have preserved their ceramics heritage the best - and, not coincidentally, the ones who still live nearest to their original homelands. Elsewhere in North America, Indians were forcibly transplanted to reservations where their traditional agriculture was not viable; less malignantly, some tribes, like the Sioux and the Cheyenne, abandoned their farming practices ad adopted a more nomadic lifestyle when they acquired horses from the Europeans and were able to pursue the buffalo herds.
However, before European arrival, native pottery was made throughout most of the continent: the Cherokees, and other Southeastern tribes, the Iroquois and other Eastern Woodland Indians, the Cheyenne and other Plains Indians, and the Shoshoni and other Great Basin Indians. Further to the north, most of the people were hunter-gatherers, for whom pottery is less useful and more of a liability. Some artists from non-Southwestern tribes have recently begun t reclaim their ceramic traditions. Though varied widely, the basic technology did not - tribes did not use pottery wheels or other spinning instruments - their pots where coil pots and pinch pots by hand, as their descendants still do today.