Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 31, Number 11, 1 November 2014 — Contemplating wampum [ARTICLE]

Contemplating wampum

By Lurline Wailana McGregor As an exhibit on treaties begins its four-year run at the Nahonal Museum of the Ameriean Indian, a new book will be released this fall on wampum among the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) people. In her book Reading the Wampum, author Penelope Myrtle Kelsey refers to the "visual code" of Haudenosaunee - written as Hodinōhsō:ni' - as "a set of mutually understood symbols and images that communicate culturallyembedded ideas to the viewer." In this case, visual code is based primarily on intricately woven belts named for the shells from whieh they were made - wampum. The belts, whieh could be used as currency, primarily served to record andpreserve for future generations significant events in the lives of the tribespeople, such as weddings and treaties. The messages and symbology encoded in these ancestral belts are still used today by Iroquois artists in their artwork, including traditional and contemporary art forms. Iroquois oral traditions trace the first use of wampum back to Ha:yēwēnta', or Hiawatha. While grieving the loss of his three daughters and wife, a large body of birds that had been floating on the lake in front of him arose at onee, and the force of their wings drove the water from the lake, revealing the wampumon the bottom. Hiawatha strung the shells onto cord, whieh cleared his grief and allowed him to bring the message of peaee and power to the Iroquois people. Wampum belts possess personal and eommunal power for the Iroquois peoples, and were used for many purposes long before Western contact, including the Women's Nomination Belt that codified the rights of elan mothers, and the Adoption Belt, whieh was used ritually in the adoption of a non-Iroquois person into a nation and elan. The Two Row Wampum Belt, whieh dates from the 17th century, records the first treaty agreement between the Five Nations and the Dutch, and pledges perpetual friendship between them. The Canandaigua Treaty Belt, dated 1794, and currently on display at the NMAI exhibit, records a treaty made between the Six Nations and the newly formed United States. It is a friendship belt depicting the 13 colonies as figures holding hands with two Iroquois figures. The wampum belts were so powerful that in the 1800s, the United States, Canadian and New York state governments tried to acquire and even ban the belts in order to take from the Iroquois their intellectual traditions and political power and thereby disrupt their self-determination. Reading the Wampum: Essays on Hodinōhsō:ni' Visuaī Code and Epistemoīogicaī Recovery is a collection of aeademic essays by Kelsey that examine the wampumtradition in selected contemporary Iroquois writers', artists' and Almmakers' aesthetic and poetic decisions. Through these essays is an in-depth discussion of the role of wampum, past and present, in the Iroquois collective memory, thought, aesthetics, narrative, history, protocol and treaty rights. Understanding such traditions as the wampum belts offer the reader valuable insights not only into Iroquois perspectives, but into the broader reasons for why Native American traditions continue to inform and perpetuate Native intellectual eonsciousness. (200 pages, Syracuse University Press, $29.95) ■