Description
Book SynopsisSince the fourteenth century, Eastern Woodlands tribes have used delicate purple and white shells called ""wampum"" to form intricately woven belts. In
Reading the Wampum, Kelsey provides the first academic consideration of the ways in which these sacred belts are reinterpreted into current Haudenosaunee tradition.
Trade ReviewPenelope Kelsey's approach to wampum is a welcome and much-needed addition to scholarship on these instruments of Haudenosaunee diplomacy and broader questions of literacy and textuality in the Indigenous Americas. Those who, like me, are impressed by her first book will be delighted to find even more depth and erudition here.|Reading the Wampum engages a tradition of Indigenous visual code not simply as primary theme but as methodological apparatus for the analysis of Indigenous self-representation, across contemporary genre and media. This exciting, generative work propels us into the next phase of Indigenous literary and cultural studies: the full reactivation of Indigenous aesthetic and intellectual systems.|
Historians and anthropologists of Native America have long recognized--even if we have not always fully understood--the significance of wampum, especially in intercultural diplomacy. Reading Wampum offers another approach, focusing on the works of contemporary Haudenosaunee authors, artists, and film makers to demonstrate the enduring relevance of wampum traditions and teachings.
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Reading the Wampum, and the work of Stevens, Gansworth, Niro and Deer, deserves the careful attention of literary, media, rhetoric, post-colonial and theory scholars around the world.
