Description
Reading the Wampum: Essays on Hodinöhsö:ni’ Visual Code and Epistemological Recovery by Penelope Myrtle Kelsey, professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is the 2014 publication in the Syracuse University Press series, The Iroquois and Their Neighbors. Reading the Wampum offers an academic consideration of the ways in which these sacred belts are reinterpreted into current Haudenosaunee tradition. While Kelsey explores the aesthetic appeal of the belts, she also provides insightful analysis of how readings of wampum belts can change our understanding of specific treaty rights and land exchanges. Kelsey shows how contemporary Iroquois intellectuals and artists adapt and reconsider these traditional belts in new and innovative ways. Chapters include: Two Row Wampum in James Thomas Stevens’s A Bridge Dead in the Water and Tokinish; The Covenant Chain in Eric Gansworth’s Fiction, Poetry, Memoir, and Paintings: The Canandaigua Treaty Belt as Critical Indigenous Economic Critique; Tribal Feminist Recuperation of the Mother of Nations in Shelley Niro’s Kissed by Lightning; Kahnawake’s Reclamation of Adoption Practices in Tracey Deer’s Documentary and Fiction Films: Reading the Adoption Belt in a Post-Indian Act Era; and Wampum and the Future of Hodinöhsö:ni’ Narrative Epistemology. The book contains 24 black-and-white illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index.