Appreciation or Appropriation? An Indigenous Moment in the American Numismatic Narrative (1999–2009)

Abstract

American coinage, both circulated as well as commemorative, involves a host of cultural markers that represent the legal iconography of American national identity. The umbrella of American identity is one that covers places and peoples living in the continental United States, arctic and subarctic Alaska, and islands in the Pacific and Caribbean Oceans. As legal iconography, state and territorial American quarters serve as emblems of folk legality in which culture and law constitutively craft one another in ordinary tangible ways. While these quarters depict, and perhaps even celebrate a multicultural polity, the iconographic process of remembering may be more a statement of post-colonial design rather than genuine commemoration of the past and indigenous present of American Indian, Samoan, Native Hawaiian, Native Alaskan, Chamorran, Puerto Rican, and other indigenous peoples under American jurisdiction. These quarters present a theoretical paradox involving the portrayal of images that appear on them. This paradox represents an indigenous moment numismatically framed through non-English phrases and depictions of culture outside the continental forty-eight states. This chapter will examine this paradox as an indigenous moment in the numismatic construction of public memory illustrated by the minting of linguistic variety and cultural imagery on American state and territorial quarters.