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"Wampum"
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Wampum and the origins of American money
\"Wampum has become a synonym for money, and it is widely assumed that it served the same purposes as money among the Native Algonquians even after coming into contact with European colonists' money. But to equate wampum with money only matches one slippery term with another, as money itself was quite ill-defined in North America for decades during its colonization. Fledgling colonial currencies assimilated much more from Native American trading practices than they imposed on the locals, so much so that colonists regularly expressed fears of \"becoming Indians\" in their widespread use of paper money, a novel economic innovation adapted from wampum. In this stimulating and intriguing book, Marc Shell illuminates the context in which wampum was used by describing how money circulated in the colonial period and the early history of the United States. Wampum itself, generally tubular beads made from clam or conch shells, was hardly a primitive version of a coin or dollar bill, as it represented to both Native Americans and colonial Europeans a unique medium through which language, art, culture, and even conflict were negotiated. This wide-ranging exploration of economics, literature, and racial and ethnic imagery throughout American history is extensively illustrated with more than a hundred images of documents, artworks, and artifacts, including numerous depictions of Native Americans on paper money.\"--Jacket.
Book
Indigenous works and two eyed seeing: mapping the case for indigenous-led research
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore Indigenous Works’ efforts to facilitate Indigenous-led research that is responsive to the socio-economic needs, values and traditions of Indigenous communities.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper is grounded in an Indigenous research paradigm that is facilitated by Indigenous-led community-based participatory action research (PAR) methodology informed by the Two Row Wampum and Two-Eyed Seeing framework to bridge Indigenous science and knowledge systems with western ones.
Findings
The findings point to the need for greater focus on how Indigenous and western knowledge may be aligned within the methodological content domain while tackling a wide array of Indigenous research goals that involve non-Indigenous allies.
Originality/value
This paper addresses the need to develop insights and understandings into how to develop a safe, ethical space for Indigenous-led trans-disciplinary and multi-community collaborative research partnerships that contribute to community self-governance and well-being.
Journal Article
From shell to glass: how beads reflect the changing cultural landscape of the seventeenth-century lower Potomac River valley
This article examines over 7,500 beads from eight Native archaeological sites located in the lower Potomac River valley in order to understand how changes in bead assemblages between AD 1300 and 1712 expressed an ever-evolving Chesapeake cultural landscape. This analysis demonstrates clear differences in the types and distributions of beads from mortuary and domestic/nonmortuary contexts. Ossuary contexts contained the highest frequency of beads with the number of beads increasing over time. Following the arrival of English settlers in the 1620s, glass beads begin to appear in ossuary contexts. Beads from domestic or nonmortuary contexts are fewer in number, and those present were manufactured using local materials, including bone and clay, as well as shell. However, after 1680, there is a shift from shell beads being predominate on Native sites, to sites containing exclusively glass beads, red and black glass beads in particular. Post-1680 sites appear to reflect Piscataway displacement and the disruption of indigenous trade routes, leading Natives to obtain beads from colonial vendors. The distribution of bead color, an important attribute for communicating Native states of being, also shifts after 1680, with assemblages once dominated by white shell beads now dominated by black and red glass beads.
Journal Article
From Locke to Slots: Money and the Politics of Indigeneity
With ongoing consequences for American Indians, the New World Indian has been a pervasive figure of constitutive exclusion in modern theories of money, property, and government. This paradoxical exclusion of indigenous peoples from the money/property/government complex is intrinsic to, and constitutive of, modern theories of money. What is more, it haunts the cultural politics of indigenous peoples’ economic actions. In Part I, I establish that, and how, indigeneity has been constitutively present at the foundation of modern theories of money, as Europeans and settlers defined indigenous peoples in part by the absence of money and property (of which money is a special form). In turn, and more to the point here, they defined money and property in part as that which modern non-indigenous people have and use. These are not solely economic matters: the conceptual exclusions from money/property were coproduced with juridical ones insofar as liberal political theory grounded the authority of modern government in private property (and, in turn, in money). To show how this formation of money and indigeneity has mattered both for disciplinary anthropology and for American public culture at several historical moments, Part II traces how the dilemmas expressed by these texts haunt subsequent debates about the function of wampum, the logic of potlatch, and the impact of tribal gaming. Such debates inform scholarship beyond the boundaries of anthropology and, as each case shows in brief, they create harms and benefits for peoples in ways that perpetuate the (il)logics and everyday practices of settler colonialism.
Journal Article
Emotion work and the archaeology of consensus: the Northern Iroquoian case
In archaeology, emotion has often been thought to lie beyond the reach of responsible materialist scholarship. However, this study illustrates the central role of emotion in the formation of consensus-based political systems. In the Late Woodland longhouse societies of north-eastern North America, political alliance-building depended on emotion work - elaborated interpersonal attentions in the form of grooming, bodily adornment, smoking and gift-giving that were intended to shift the affective character of relationships and satisfy deep personal desires. Emotion work depended heavily on material things - especially wampum beads and smoking pipes - that connected individual bodies with the body politic. A crucial part of the process of building and maintaining grassroots social collectives, emotion work produced historically particular forms of power and political subjectivity. These practices can be understood as a kind of corporeal politics, one with lasting consequences for indigenous sociopolitical development in eastern North America.
Journal Article
Navigating across anthropological and Haudenosaunee knowledge: Co-developing research using CBPR and Kaswenta (Two-Row Wampum) principles in partnership with Six Nations of the Grand River
As part of the Ohneganos research project, funded through the Global Water Futures (GWF), we document the ways we worked across Haudenosaunee and anthropological knowledge to assess the impact of water insecurity on holistic maternal health. This research was led by the Six Nation Birthing Center (SNBC), inspired by Haudenosaunee Kaswenta treaty principles. We utilized community-based participatory research (CBPR) and Indigenous research methods (IRMs), such as storytelling, to find common ground of dialogue and reciprocity. In doing so, this research goes beyond traditional anthropological ways of data collection and fieldwork and highlights the importance of active community direction and participation. We argue that different knowledge from the researchers does not need to be ignored or reduced to one singular perspective to work across worldviews. Instead, acknowledging and highlighting the differences will lead to innovative methods and scholarship. This paper contributes to the literature of research methods and policies and will be helpful to Indigenous communities and non-Indigenous researchers working together.
Journal Article
Bridging Parallel Rows: Epistemic Difference and Relational Accountability in Cross-Cultural Research
To what extent are non-Indigenous researchers invited to engage the knowledges of Indigenous peoples? For those working within a western paradigm, what is an ethical approach to traditional knowledge (TK) research? While these questions are not openly addressed in the burgeoning literature on TK, scholarship on Indigenous research methodologies provides guidance. Reflexive self-study - what Margaret Kovach calls researcher preparation - subtends an ethical approach. It makes relational, contextual, and mutually beneficial research possible. In my work on contested fisheries knowledge and decision-making systems in Ontario, Canada, a treaty perspective orients my mixed methodological approach. It reflects my relationships to Indigenous lands, peoples, and histories, and enables an ethical space of engagement through which relational accountability and respect for epistemic difference can be realized.
Journal Article