Wampum Belts Research Articles

Towards a Critical Diplomacy

Abstract This essay reflects on the potential that deepened reflexivity around cultural diplomacy has to radicalize the study and practice of diplomacy through engagement with academics and practitioners in the field of cultural relations. It explores culture’s role in cultural diplomacy as an expression of Eurocentric dualist constructions of nature and culture that reproduce a Western episteme and reassert universalizing claims that deny other ways of knowing and relating to the world. It aims to unsettle settler diplomacy by engaging with contemporary artists who mobilize understandings of the wampum belt as a function of diplomatic relations to give voice to the political consciousness that animates the Indigenous practice of place-based internationalism. In so doing, it advances a methodology toward increased reflexivity and critical space for discussion across disciplinary formations that currently function to separate the cultural and the political in centering Western statist diplomacy as the taken-for-granted field of diplomatic activity.

Self-Destituent Power in Iroquois Diplomacy: Interpreting the 2020 Talks on the Tyendinaga Tracks

Preserving the original agreement between the Rotinonhsión:ni (Iroquois) and the first settlers, the Two Row Wampum belt (Teiohá:te) displays two parallel lines, where the original peoples’ canoe and the settlers’ ship are said to sail side by side, suggesting that allied parties to move in the same direction they must respect their mutual autonomy. Drawing on the transcripts of negotiations between Canadian officials and Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk) warriors in Tyendinaga, this article examines how the Two Row Wampum's notion of alliance through separation played out in the 2020 rail blockade movement in support of the Wet'suwet'en people's fight against the Coastal GasLink pipelines. Central to the text is Kanien'kehá:ka warriors’ suggestion that, beyond relations with settlers, the Two Row Wampum applies to relations between and among Indigenous nations, clans, genders, and even nonhumans. The intricate consensus-based decision-making protocols that compose the Rotinonhsión:ni Confederacy's precolonial governance system likewise attest to the respect for separation that pervades all relations, as if the potential of Rotinonhsión:ni diplomacy to render sovereign power destitute had reached a constitutional stature.

Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance by Heidi Bohaker

Reviewed by: Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance by Heidi Bohaker Natasha Myhal Heidi Bohaker. Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. 304 pp. Paperback, $34.95. In Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance, historian Heidi Bohaker addresses the doodem (clan) traditions within the Anishinaabe worldview and how their governments interacted with settlers and then later settler colonial policies beginning in the seventeenth century. Anishinaabe philosophy within Doodem and Council Fire indicates that a doodem was given by the Creator to the Anishinaabe, which detailed responsibilities for them. This book presents a rich and detailed analysis of the doodem as an "analytical category" (44) to support Anishinaabe histories. The beginning of the text details the doodems' meaning to the Anishinaabe, as a philosophy, system of law, and a foundation of their alliances with other tribes and European settlers. The text then demonstrates the Anishinaabe view of doodemag (plural) as living ensouled beings, that they were in relationship with and held responsibilities toward. Thus, these relationships guided their own negotiations and the treaties they would later make with settler governments. The rest of the text provides an in-depth analysis on doodemag as different facets of Anishinaabe philosophy and law. Bohaker first relates Anishinaabe stories (aadizookaanag) that were written down by either European trader or interpreters and includes, when possible, Anishinaabeg writers and their own doodem stories from that time. This lays the foundation from an Anishinaabe perspective on how doodems informed Anishinaabe kinship practices. "To share a doodem is to be immediate kin" (57), and thus Bohaker describes how the Anishinaabe view kinship through "shared souls" and not blood. Bohaker's work is different than other historians in that she [End Page 357] provides a nuanced analysis of the how Western categories, such as kinship, imposed on Anishinaabe life, do not adequately describe relations between doodem. In her reliance on Euro-American written accounts, she pulls from the accounts of fur traders. In particular, a seventeenth-century fur trader Nicholas Perraut describes in his writings how Anishinaabek governments were based on doodems. Bohaker's book is filled with various accounts such as this, which shed light on how doodems related to a particular place, and how doodems took up various roles in the community. Bohaker goes on to describe how doodemag represented various cultural and spiritual practices for the Anishinaabe, such as burial practices, adoption, and marriage. In particular, these topics extend themselves to the overall argument that doodemag are a web of relations. Bohaker emphasizes that one's doodem encompasses a way of life and often teaches the person how to live through everyday acts, ceremonies, and employing care toward others. A web of relations is best shown through a discussion of the environment and alliances. For example, the Anishinaabe used wampum belts or strings to record alliances in what Bohaker considers "the literal weaving of thoughts from living human being and materials for living marine, floral, and faunal beings" (92). When the Anishinaabe exchanged wampum with other tribes and Europeans, it signified an alliance that came with a set of responsibilities. Ultimately, the Anishinaabe philosophy of minobimaadiziwin (to live well/balance) informs doodemag relations. Their philosophies remind them to care for their relations, which extends into the foundation of their governance. The second half of the text describes doodemag through the Anishinaabe worldview of fire and leadership practices. Bohaker's emphasis on the Anishinaabe government as founded upon council fires supports Anishinaabe decision-making through alliances. Bohaker critiques the terminology or labels prescribed on the Anishinaabe—such as "nation," "tribe," "village," or "band"—emphasizing the Eurocentric nature of these terms, as they do not accurately describe the fluidity or seasonality of how council fires shift within various regions. Bohaker then goes on to describe how Anishinaabe leaders embodied doodemag and were guided by their teachings. The meanings behind certain doodems, such as the thunderbirds "with its wings outstretched," imply "preparing to do battle with the underwater manidoog, [End Page 358] protecting the Anishinaabek from dangerous lake storms" (140). This analysis is illustrated with images of doodemag so readers can visualize Anishinaabe employment of these images. Bohaker reminds...

Shell Beads and Belts in 16th- and Early 17th-Century France and North America

Scholars generally agree that wampum belts were new artifacts among the Indigenous peoples of northeastern North America in the first half of the 17th century. However, the context of and reasons for their emergence are still little known or misunderstood. Archaeologists and ethno-historians have often assumed that the shell beads used in the manufacture of wampum belts were Indigenous artifacts and part of a long tradition that continued until the Colonial era. Although this tradition did exist, I nevertheless argue that wampum belts were also the result of profound changes: they emerged as novel tools for intercultural communication in the aftermath of European colonization in the 16th and the first half of the 17th centuries. Studies have up until now focused on the impact of the Dutch and the English, as opposed to the French, despite their widely-acknowledged role in the bead trade and the emergence of wampum. This study seeks to fill this gap with an interdisciplinary analysis of the written sources and archaeological collections.

Towards a Haudenosaunee developmental science: Perspectives from the Two Row Wampum

AbstractThe Two Row Wampum belt represents a treaty between the Haudenosaunee and Dutch about how the two nations would coexist with each other in the context of settler colonialism. The oral tradition of the Two Row Wampum states that the Haudenosaunee would travel down the river of life in a canoe containing their ways of being and knowing, while the Dutch would travel alongside them in a ship with their own orientations to the world. However, the original principles of the Two Row Wampum contrast with the colonial realities of the Haudenosaunee. In an application of the Two Row Wampum to developmental science, in which the river is the life course, mainstream developmental science is the ship, and Haudenosaunee developmental science is the canoe, I use thePrinciples of the Two Row Wampumto propose a Haudenosaunee perspective of the field. I compare this with how mainstream developmental science dominates the field, marginalizing various Indigenous developmental sciences in a manner similar to theBetrayal of the Two Row Wampum. Though I recommend that mainstream developmental science returns to the principles of the Two Row Wampum, I demonstrate that Indigenous developmental sciences operate beyond the constraints of developmental psychology by centering Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies to promote Indigenous futures.

Edgar Huntly's Gun Violence and Indigenous Mechanisms of Peace

AbstractThis essay analyzes American gun culture, past and present, through two lenses: a set of early Euro-American writings on weapons and defense, including Charles Brockden Brown's well-known novel Edgar Huntly, and a little-known but capacious archive of Native American materials, philosophy, and story. While the Euro-American writings and the Indigenous archive both raise crucial questions about the relation between weapons and human subjectivity, only the Indigenous archive presents vital alternative object orientations that promote peace. Considering wampum belts in particular as an Indigenous mechanism of peace, this essay argues that to understand American gun violence we must pay attention to Indigenous efforts to cultivate relationships by putting forth healing objects and burying the weapons of war, efforts that are largely erased from the colonial records and from the contemporary imagination of the past. Ultimately, Native American theorizations of object orientation and human subjectivity challenge both our understanding of the colonial past and our current conversation surrounding gun violence.

War, Wampum, and Recognition: Algonquin Transborder Political Activism during the Early Twentieth Century, 1919–1931

This article argues that modern Native political organizing in Eastern Canada began shortly after the Great War. The Algonquin at Kitigan Zibi coconstructed and participated in transborder political networks designed to bring attention to their cause and claims. They employed their treaties and wampum belts including the Royal Proclamation of 1763 to argue for the recognition of their treaty rights and traditional lands. By 1931, the Department of Indian Affairs was successful in temporarily shutting down Algonquin political organizing. However, throughout the remainder of the twentieth century, the Algonquin continued their transborder political associations and continued to press for recognition of their treaty rights and traditional lands.

The Vatican 1831 Wampum Belt: Letters Revealing its Origins Among the Algonquin and Nippissing Groups at the Lake of the Two Mountains

The Vatican 1831 Wampum Belt: Letters Revealing its Origins Among the Algonquin and Nippissing Groups at the Lake of the Two Mountains

The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Volume 5: US Popular Print Culture to 1860 ed. by Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray

Reviewed by: The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Volume 5: US Popular Print Culture to 1860 ed. by Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray Amy Sopcak-Joseph (bio) Keywords (Lang: English) Print culture, Print production, Book history, Cultural history The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Volume 5: US Popular Print Culture to 1860. Edited by Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 712. Cloth, $135.00). [End Page 763] A volume with the name “Oxford History” imprinted on it often evokes a specific vision: a weighty tome with hundreds of pages between its boards and a title embossed in neat gold lettering on the wide spine. The book likely sits on the shelf of a personal or university library. This staid vision is the opposite of the kinds of reading matter, and implied readers, that US Popular Print Culture to 1860 takes as its subject in its forty chapters. The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture is a nine-volume series; Volume 5 is the third to see publication. In it, editors Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray offer up an interdisciplinary set of forty-one contributors from history and literature departments as well as schools of communication and library and information sciences. The result is a collection that not only contextualizes a diverse array of popular texts but also expands the boundaries of what forms constituted “popular print” to begin with. The entire Oxford series centers on the question, “What kind of reading was ‘popular reading’?” (61). The editors of Volume 5 intend to upend any quick and easy answer that their own readers might have in mind. Zboray and Zboray charge that the field of book history in the United States, with which these essays are in conversation, is “too top-down, value-laden, object-centered, supply-sided, processual, and restrictive for a history of popular print culture” (5). While Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin might have sold more copies than any book except the Bible, the Zborays’s volume moves away from privileging bestsellers and even the book form itself. US Popular Print Culture to 1860 strives instead to take cues from early American readers and embraces a capacious definition of “popular print.” In this telling, any kind of text that readers often engaged with falls under the scope. This includes imprints that were produced cheaply and inexpensively for wide distribution. These chapters, however, are attentive to how “alternative literacies” contributed to popular reading (61). Early Americans read letters and wampum belts, copied lines into commonplace books that they circulated among friends, attended lyceum lectures by well-known authors, and viewed commercialized pictures. The editorial decision to focus on the intersection of “popular” print with these oral and manuscript cultures distinguishes this volume from another epic undertaking on the subject, the multi-volume A History of the Book in America series produced in the 2000s by the American Antiquarian Society and published by the University of North Carolina Press. This volume is divided into four parts that are carefully crafted to avoid conveying a progressive narrative or imbuing certain genres with [End Page 764] significance over others. The editors stress that the four parts emphasize “stratification” and that much of the content introduced in early chapters “remains valid throughout ensuing chapters” (10). Within Parts II through IV, chapters appear in alphabetical order to avoid the appearance of ranking each subject’s importance. Such organization drives home two primary goals of the volume. First, Zboray and Zboray take issue with the argument that the history of print in the British North American colonies and the early republic could be characterized by a shift from “scarcity to abundance” (7).1 Second, they demonstrate significant continuities in the production, distribution, and usage of popular print amid technological, economic, and cultural changes. Parts I and II provide a baseline understanding of the production and distribution of texts as well as the genres familiar to early Americans. Part I, “Foundations,” includes synthetic overviews of staple topics of book history: print and book production, authorship, literacy and education, and the circulation of print from the colonial period through 1860...

Literary Indians: Aesthetics and Encounter in American Literature to 1920 by Angela Calcaterra

Reviewed by: Literary Indians: Aesthetics and Encounter in American Literature to 1920 by Angela Calcaterra Joshua David Bellin (bio) Literary Indians: Aesthetics and Encounter in American Literature to 1920 angela calcaterra University of North Carolina Press, 2018 246 pp. Angela Calcaterra’s Literary Indians makes a significant contribution to the ongoing reevaluation of American literary history using the tools of Indigenous Studies. Focusing on Native texts, material culture, and aesthetic practices from the early eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, Calcaterra rejects the conventional understanding of the “literary Indian” as a “construct of Euro-American literary imagination or national feeling” (2); instead, she models a literary history that takes into account “actual Indigenous people whose preexisting and evolving aesthetic practices contributed to American literary production and influenced Euro-American writing in precise ways” (2–3). In her pursuit of this project, Calcaterra looks to diverse forms of Indigenous aesthetics— as embodied in Chickasaw deerskin maps, Iroquois ceremonials, Mohegan woodsplint baskets, and more—to propose “new methods of reading the Indigenous content in American literature, methods attuned to Indigenous perspectives and the forms and sensibilities they enabled or disrupted” (7). The result is a suggestive and largely convincing alternative poetics of American literature that offers promising new directions for future research in the field. In each of her book’s five chapters, Calcaterra proposes an Indigenous aesthetic context for rereading the literature, Native and non-Native, of its time and place. Thus her first chapter pairs the deerskin maps of southeastern Indian peoples with William Byrd’s History of the Dividing Line to demonstrate how “Indigenous representational conventions intersected those of the colonists” in the early eighteenth century (18); she suggests [End Page 223] that the often-remarked incoherence of Byrd’s text can be traced to the complex and contested history of physical and aesthetic space in the colonial era, as “Byrd’s literary representation of place is pulled in many different directions by the Native narratives and spaces he encounters or describes” (18–19). For Calcaterra, the Byrd text offers a salient example of the ways in which the “place-based identities and authority” (28) of Indian peoples are encoded in American literary productions, which emerge from an array of local histories and geographies that belie any singular understanding of land, settlement, or story. As she sums up: “Indians were part of a dynamic process of history making, cartographic delineation, and literary formation on the North American landscape” (46). Calcaterra’s second chapter pursues this insight via an examination of the letters and other writings of Samson Occom and Joseph Johnson, the two best-known Mohegan Christian missionaries of the late eighteenth century. Here, Calcaterra situates missionary writing within the context of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) “expressive practice” (51–52), in particular the Condolence Ceremony so central to the Confederacy’s founding narratives and to ongoing intertribal as well as intercultural diplomacy. Perhaps because of the familiarity of the Condolence Ceremony and its associated materials, such as wampum belts, I find this chapter the least revelatory in the book; though Calcaterra claims that the significance of Haudenosaunee ritual to missionary activity and writing has been “largely overlooked” (50), such a claim itself overlooks a good quarter century of scholarship on just this connection (particularly in respect to the Jesuit missions to New France). Thus, though I find no fault with Calcaterra’s conclusion that Mohegan missionary writings “unite English letters and Haudenosaunee eloquence” to “create a literature grounded in Indigenous sacred, political, metaphorical, and material conventions” (75), I cannot help feeling that this claim does not significantly advance or complicate our understanding of an already well-documented material and aesthetic exchange. Much more illuminating are the three chapters that follow, each of which focuses on the continuing relevance of Indigenous aesthetics to the literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Calcaterra points out, the preponderance of literary scholarship on this period focuses on how “stereotypes and figures of Indians became detached from the particularities of . . . Indigenous aesthetic practice” (82); and, important though such scholarship remains, it runs the risk of validating Euro-American [End Page 224] discourse on Indian evanescence if it is not counterbalanced by an examination of...

What is a Guest? What is a Settler?

This article gathers together some Traditional Knowledge keepers’ understandings concerning the roles and responsibilities of Guests and Hosts. The responsibilities are mapped upon Wampum Belts and in this article include my understanding, as a Haudenosaunee woman. Through discussions with some Knowledge Keepers, examination of the relevant literature, and my own understandings of the issues, I look carefully, at the work of Tuck and Yang (2010) and Lawrence and Dua (2005). I continue with a synthesis of contemporary debates concerning, the underlying complexities of Guests/Settlers roles and responsibilities. I offer differentiations between the descriptive labels in conventional use. My intent is to engage and push non-Onkwehonweh people to challenge their ‘taken-for-granted’ understandings of their ‘rights’, and to encourage them to look with fresh eyes at their understandings of their attendant responsibilities.

What is a Guest? What is a Settler?

This article gathers together some Traditional Knowledge keepers’ understandings concerning the roles and responsibilities of Guests and Hosts. The responsibilities are mapped upon Wampum Belts and in this article include my understanding, as a Haudenosaunee woman. Through discussions with some Knowledge Keepers, examination of the relevant literature, and my own understandings of the issues, I look carefully, at the work of Tuck and Yang (2010) and Lawrence and Dua (2005). I continue with a synthesis of contemporary debates concerning, the underlying complexities of Guests/Settlers roles and responsibilities. I offer differentiations between the descriptive labels in conventional use. My intent is to engage and push non-Onkwehonweh people to challenge their ‘taken-for-granted’ understandings of their ‘rights’, and to encourage them to look with fresh eyes at their understandings of their attendant responsibilities.

Native American Oral Evidence: Finding a New Hearsay Exception

The Federal Rules of Evidence’s hearsay rules unjustifiably exclude legitimate and trustworthy evidence that support many Native American legal claims. Native American communities traditionally were not literate and rarely recorded the treaties, contracts, and other legal instruments they drew up or honored in any kind of written format, oftentimes recording their histories and diplomatic events in other ways; take for example wampum belts used by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, among others. While the U.S. legal system presupposes that evidence in written statements provides a greater assurance of accuracy and truth than oral statements, this is not always the case. Writing is as susceptible to forgery, revision, manipulation, and misinterpretation as oral knowledge. Traditional Native American accounts of past experiences and realities are not honored in the courtroom, which strips authority from the robust institutions Native Americans employ in order to pass down and collectively maintain their own bodies of knowledge. This is a serious problem in Native American jurisprudence today. This article compares the American legal system’s treatment of oral evidence and history with its treatment in the legal systems of Canada, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and Norway. Each of these legal systems has developed methodologies that enable it to admit oral evidence in ways that respect the unique circumstances that often characterize disputes arising between indigenous and non-indigenous people. Canada, for example, has broadened its rules of evidence to admit First Nation (Canadian Native American) oral histories and cultural knowledge at times, so that they may be evaluated on par with Eurocentric written evidence. The Inter-American Court similarly admits oral histories from indigenous parties, expert witnesses, and anthropological studies, if it finds them legitimately probative in the context of a legal dispute. Norway’s highest court, the Hoyesterett, critiqued its own historical treatment of legal disputes involving Sami land and cultural rights and began adopting Sami-centric approaches in its jurisprudence that reference Sami lifestyle and custom. Canadian, Inter-American, and Norwegian legal practices may have persuasive value in U.S. courts deciding how to approach cases involving Native American parties who seek to introduce knowledge and expertise that has not traditionally been admitted in state and federal court systems. Failure to accommodate these parties not only violates the trust doctrine that federal and state governments are responsible to uphold for their relationship with sovereign indigenous nations, but also perpetuate cycles of injustice Native Americans have endured for the last 400 years. In the spirit of increasing access to the courts and advocating for equal justice, U.S. jurisprudence should evolve to consider the evidentiary value of modes of knowledge that many indigenous societies historically developed and preserved to this day.

European conceptions of ‘exotic’ writing systems in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

In this paper, I present a brief overview of conceptions of ‘exotic’ writing systems in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with particular emphasis on ‘exotic’ forerunners of writing (such as the Peruvian quipus or the wampum belts of the Iroquois) and Egyptian hieroglyphs. The history of writing was often conceived of as a gradual development with a growing degree of complexity by authors like Antoine-Yves Goguet, Jean-Jacques Rousseau or William Warburton. Their description of ‘exotic’ writing systems generally reveals a euro-centric perspective as well as a sometimes inadequate knowledge of the true nature of different writing systems. After a description of several ‘exotic’ forerunners of writing, conceptions of Egyptian hieroglyphs are subjected to a more detailed examination. Given their enigmatic character, hieroglyphs seemed particularly well adapted for use in universal language schemes. In the last part of the paper, I will establish a link between non-alphabetical writing systems and ‘real characters’ to show how much the latter are indebted to the model of non-European scripts.

Maintaining and Sharing a Haudenosaunee Identity: Onondaga Collective Memory and Social Media

ABSTRACTIn this article, I survey the Onondaga Nation's social media outlets in the light of collective memory theory. The article identifies several core topics of the nation's identity narratives which, all together, are perceived as an expression of Onondaga functional memory. The role of wampum belts as medial cues to that memory is highlighted as well as the role of social media in the struggle against the negative effects of native media invisibility.

Toward an Indigenous Feminine Animation Aesthetic

Toward an Indigenous Feminine Animation Aesthetic Channette Romero (bio) Indigenous women’s animated films are emerging as some of the most engaging contemporary digital media. Unfortunately, much like women’s animation in general, this growing body of work has garnered sparse critical attention. This essay seeks to call attention to the growing field and to prompt increased study of its aesthetics. Analyzing works by better-known filmmakers/artists like LeAnne Howe, Diane Obomsawin, Lisa Jackson, and Heid E. Erdrich alongside less well known filmmakers Alethea Arnaquq-Baril and Gyu Oh, I hope to highlight the range of innovation in Indigenous women’s animation, as well as its political motivations. Examining Howe’s Noble Savage Learns to Tweet (2015), Arnaquq-Baril’s Sloth (2011), Obomsawin’s Walk-in-the-Forest (2009), Oh’s I Am but a Little Woman (2010), Jackson’s The Visit (2009), and Erdrich’s Pre-Occupied (2013), I demonstrate some of the field’s most prevalent formal characteristics: frequent use of flat design, growing popularity of cutout collage animation, reclamation of Indigenous domestic arts and crafts in the digital realm, privileging of spatial relations, connective aurality, and the emergence of hybrid cinematic-literary films that attempt to contribute to real-world activism. I contend that these six aesthetic strategies are employed in an effort to raise viewers’ political consciousness in the service of Indigenous rights. Calling attention to the ways that mainstream animation’s stylistic conventions work to “naturalize” imperialism, Indigenous women’s formal experimentations with animation seek to disrupt deep-seated settler ideologies. These films blend the genre’s conventional techniques with Indigenous designs and domestic arts in an effort to assert the ongoing vitality of Indigenous women’s art and storytelling traditions. Actively situating themselves and their viewers within arts traditions that historically [End Page 56] helped humans negotiate their interdependent place within the natural world, Indigenous women’s animation shows how the digital realm is yet another of the dynamic communication networks Indigenous peoples in the Americas have long navigated with alacrity and complexity. Exploring films digitally produced and distributed, I argue that Indigenous women’s innovations in the animation genre work to bolster tribal political, cultural, and spiritual sovereignty. Increasingly cheaper digital technology has led to an exponential growth in Indigenous women’s animation, with many films digitally produced and then distributed and viewed globally online. While digital cameras, computers, and the Internet are all obviously newer technology, multimedia production is not new to Indigenous peoples; it fits within a long tradition of sophisticated communication networks. Trade routes, well traveled by Indigenous peoples in the Americas, historically utilized nonlinear designs and infographics to pass messages long distances within and between tribes. These complex informational networks joined other messaging systems like wampum belts, petroglyphs, symbols, traps, and monuments, all based on interactive mnemonics between visual design and oral storytelling. Because the messages required audience interpretation, Matt Cohen contends, “something like multimedia literacy” characterized “communications norms” (2). Cherokee scholar Angela Haas asserts that Indigenous peoples are “the first known skilled multimedia workers and intellectuals in the Americas” (78). Returning to the earliest definition of “digital” as literally referring to fingers, digits, that code information, whether in computer languages or wampum, Haas demonstrates Indigenous peoples’ “long-standing intellectual tradition of multimediated, digital rhetoric” (94).1 Mohawk-Jewish multimedia artist and scholar Steven Loft argues that Indigenous peoples “have always ‘mapped’ our environments” through storytelling and signage; multimedia has continuously functioned as “a spiritual, cosmological, and mythical ‘realm’” that “provided a direct link between the past, present, and future” (174–75, 178). While Indigenous peoples and their communication networks have obviously changed over time, their long-standing storytelling, design, and networking traditions provide a strong basis for contemporary digital multimedia. The lack of oversight online also offers a space for highly political commentary, providing a freedom of expression that might not be possible in more established filmmaking, publishing, and museum venues. As Joanna [End Page 57] Hearne notes in her introduction to this volume, “digital platforms for aesthetic production and activism, such as social media networking, low-cost independent short-form film and animation production, and web-based distribution systems, are far more available to Indigenous women...

In the Neighborhood: Women’s Publication in Early America by Caroline Wigginton

Reviewed by: In the Neighborhood: Women’s Publication in Early America by Caroline Wigginton Paula Loscocco (bio) In the Neighborhood: Women’s Publication in Early America CAROLINE WIGGINTON Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016 223pp. Caroline Wigginton’s fine study of eighteenth-century American women’s cultural productions and their multimedia publication begins by setting the idea of an uneasily mixed neighborhood of black, white, and native populations against that of a unified nation or virtuous republic. The book’s goal is to peer beneath constructions of national unity in order to trace how women drew on the particularities of lived experience and affiliation—embodied as these were in unequal bonds of race, class, gender, and religion—to represent, reimagine, and transform their local communities. Distancing itself from both “republican print” (1) and “belletristic” writing (4), In the Neighborhood considers a wide array of cultural artifacts, from baskets and dresses to performances and estate records. It then [End Page 801] explores how women publicized these artifacts through a practice of interpersonal exchange or “relational publication” (6). Wigginton offers two vivid examples to define relational publication. One is a Lenape woman who made and sent a wampum belt to the leader Manawkyhickon in 1728, for him to read and resend to others on her behalf to mobilize their community to avenge her son’s murder. The other is Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, whose 1768 manuscript poem “The Dream” has a resurrected William Penn hand a scroll to the Patriot writer John Dickinson, who reads it aloud to others to foment rebellion. Both the Lenape belt and the imagined scroll involve transmission of a cultural artifact through sequential exchanges and by means of multiple technologies in order to “realign . . . communal affiliations and partitions, local and transnational” (3). Wigginton insists on the element of change here: relational publication drew on the intimacy of local experience specifically to “revise and reimagine the neighborhood” and to “advance [its] communal visions and desires” (12–13). Neighborhood, particularity, relational publication, and transformation: these are key concepts in Wigginton’s study, and as she defines each of them in her introduction, two things become apparent. One is the extraordinary depth of her research, both primary and critical. Her copious and detailed notes represent a remarkable database of early native, black, and colonist women’s productions and communications, all of which she scans with a keen literary (and storytelling) eye, and with full command of recent developments in early American and native studies, as her study’s generic inclusiveness and grasp of nontraditional and multimedia forms of cultural publication make clear. “In the Neighborhood compiles its archive from the publications of early American women of diverse racial, spiritual, and social backgrounds,” Wigginton notes. “It examines letters but more often other kinds of communications and performances, public rituals, material objects, occasional verse, legal and diplomatic documents, commonplace books, and diaries” (23). The second overall observation emerges from reading both the introduction and afterward. Wigginton takes pains to set female relational publication apart from more traditionally belletristic texts and print publication. That said, she does in the end turn to a number of more traditionally literary works—notably Hannah Webster Foster’s 1797 The Coquette, but also Annis Boudinot Stockton’s “late-night musings” on Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication in her 1793 letters to her daughter (136), Emily Dickinson’s [End Page 802] poetic fascicles, Ann Plato’s 1841 Essays, and Frances E. W. Harper’s 1892 Iola Leroy. Wigginton is persuasive in arguing that these writings all derive from, depict, include, and participate in the cultural traditions of relational publication that this book explores. Her reading of The Coquette, for example, is brief but brilliant in its characterization of Peter Sanford as a man who refuses the particularities of relational publication: “When juxtaposed with the rich manuscript culture to which it refers, Foster’s epistolary novel reads as an anxious meditation on relational publication’s possible supercession [sic] by republican print and the concomitant ruptures in women’s neighborhood particularity and bonds” (137). This reader for one will welcome the author’s future work at this intersection of belletristic and relational publication. The main task of In the Neighborhood, however, is...

Unsettled borders and memories: a “local” indigenous perspective on contemporary globalization

This article provides a case study of decolonial counter-memory in contemporary indigenous artist Alan Michelson's 2009 Third Bank of the River. Installed inside the lobby of the tri-national border station between the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation, Canada, and the United States—the most legally disputed territory in North America—Michelson's artwork recovers the seventeenth-century Two Row wampum belt as model for reforming relationships at the border. This wampum belt memorializes a commitment between the Haudenosaunee and European settlers to co-exist in balanced interdependence and remains a key touchstone in indigenous political philosophy and activism. Interpreted in the post-9/11 build-up of state power at the disputed border zone, Third Bank proposes a model of international dialogue and nation-to-nation diplomacy that contrasts with the ongoing conditions of settler colonialism. It thus stands out as an important indigenous perspective on the widespread interest in memory in global contemporary art, in which artists are recovering a new viewpoint on contemporaneity through the reconceptualization of historical pasts.Mark Watson is an assistant professor of Art History at Clayton State University in Atlanta. He received his PhD in modern American art history from Columbia University in New York in 2012. His research interests include contemporary art and theory, modern American art, Native North American art, and the relationship of art to countercultural social movements. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in American Art, Art History, Third Text, and the edited volume, West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965–1977 (University of Minnesota, 2011).

The Meaning of Kaswentha and the Two Row Wampum Belt in Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) History: Can Indigenous Oral Tradition be Reconciled with the Documentary Record?

This essay analyzes the colonial era documentary record for corroboration of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) oral tradition regarding the kaswentha (as currently understood and represented in the form of a Two-Row wampum belt). Eighteen different recitations of the tradition appear in documentary sources from 1656 to 1755. These findings demonstrate substantial convergence and complementarity between two perspectives on the past and suggest that the comparison and integration of indigenous oral tradition and documentary research may yield a more robust understanding of the past than would be the case of either undertaken alone.

Wampum, Tawagonshi, and the Two Row Belt

This essay outlines the early history of wampum, explaining its origin, its value to Native Americans, and its first observations by Europeans. It then considers how wampum, as it existed in the 1610s, fits the role of wampum as described in the Tawagonshi document and fits with its manifestation in the Two Row Belt. The essay argues that key elements in the Tawagonshi document and the Two Row Belt itself are inconsistent with wampum use as recorded in archaeological, documentary, and visual sources. This finding does not discount the possibility of a Dutch-Native agreement similar to the one recorded in the Tawagonshi document that included wampum rituals and the creation of a wampum belt such as the Two Row Belt.