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This essay argues for the study of histories that are executed in graphic registers other than alphabetic writing, specifically histories that are painted, knotted, and threaded. As the products of the recording systems of the indigenous people themselves, they are inherently closer to indigenous epistemology than are alphabetic documents. They reveal the indigenous framework for conceptualizing and recording the past. As objects, they are the sites of discourse about the past, and they convey the authority of that past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In May 1988 a ceremony was held to celebrate the return of eleven wampum belts to the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy in Grand River, Canada. Another commemoration took place in October 1989 when twelve wampum belts were returned to the Onondaga Nation in New York. They are the results of a long process of Native American activism that emerged in the 1960s and culminated in the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990. The repatriation movement has not been without conflict. Questions about ownership, chain of custody, theft, responsibility, access and economy have been raised and remain unresolved. These same types of questions apply to the repatriation of Native American materials in archives. The archival community must address problems such as the following: Who owns and cares for the archival materials concerning Native Americans that are now scattered across institutions in this country? Under what circumstances were they collected? Who now determines access policies to these sensitive materials? The Protocols for Native American Archival Materials from 2007 presents guidelines regarding some of these issues. Using the return of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy and the Onondaga Nation wampum belts as case studies, this paper will examine some of the ethical issues involved in the repatriation of archival materials and how these issues are treated in the Protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Canada and the United States the transformative value of a photograph was quickly recognized for nation building, and this new invention soon served a purpose in public memory. Its uses expanded from surveying lands to promoting population growth, tourism, artistic expression and to imagining virtual communities. Photography's narrative, however, offers readers a commentary on knowledge, identity and memory within an interactive space that is a dialogue between subject and photographer and a visual ‘writing the body’. A subject's presence and intentionality through this ‘writing the body’ is a significant locus for knowledge and alterity - the construction of cultural otherness. Indigenous people viewing early photographs of family members may glimpse past a genre's rhetoric and actually experience their people in a lived historical moment. This essay examines the genre rhetoric of E.S. Curtis's photographs and Indigenous ‘writing the body’ as a source of mnemonic knowledge. Photography addresses our senses and extends them while it gives form to a knowledge of being in a photographic hypertext that evokes public memory and references the personal, social and political. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the origins of hypertext and multimedia through tracing how the American Indian communities have made used of wampum belts as hypertextual technologies. It notes wampum belts as something which have extended human memories of inherited knowledges by way of nonlinear designs, interconnected and associative storage and retrieval methods before the discovery of Western hypertext.

This article considers the histories of two wampum belts of the Haudenosaunee League of Five Nations. The belts were used as metaphoric representations and mnemonic aids to record the treaties between the Haudenosaunee and the Europeans. The Friendship Belt represents the Covenant Chain, establishing the alliance between the Haudenosaunee and the English in 1677, calling for an eternal peace between brothers. The Two Row Wampum is said to predate the Covenant Chain alliance and is meant to assure a parallel, nonconfrontational course for the Haudenosaunee and the Europeans. The meaning of the Two Row Wampum is uncertain; the belt is possibly a later representation of a presumed agreement between the Haudenosaunee and the Europeans.

The article focuses on wampum, native-made shell beads of roughly standardized size and shape. The central region of wampum production was around Long Island Sound, while the principal area of wampum belt use was up the Hudson River and into Canada. True wampum was used primarily among the peoples of the Iroquois and the Huron confederacies. Ecclesiastical belts occupy a second category of wampum use, with belts of special design being made by religious converts to Catholicism for presentation to other Native congregations or as gifts to ecclesiastical bodies in Europe.

Discusses the repatriation of eleven wampum belts, belts designed with shell beads, on May 8, 1998 to the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy on Grand River, Canada. Significance of the wampum belts to Iroquois tradition and culture; Reference to an article on the return of the belts in the text `Ethnohistory,' by William N. Fenton; Details on a ceremony staged at the Onondaga Longhouse on the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario; Factors which prompted the belt's return.

Examines the return of wampum belts by the Trustees of the Museum of the American Indian to the Six Nations Confederacy on the Grand River in Canada in 1988. Case study in the repatriation of a museum collection, illustrating the ethnohistorical research prerequisite to a decision to return objects to the heirs of the original owners; Legal and ethical issues entering the decision; Iroquois sense of appropriate behavior on such an occasion and the mutual satisfaction of both parties to the transaction.

A list of the figures used in the book "The White Dog Sacrifice: A Post-1800 Rite With an Ornamental Use for Wampum," by Marshall Joseph Becker and Jonathan C. Lainey is presented, including marine shells used to make wampum beads, a map of the Core Area of wampum use and a wampum belt.

The article presents the author's views on a survey wampum belts in museum collections conducted by an archaeological research team directed by archaeologist Margaret Bruchac. She opines that holding precious information often not relayed on paper, the wampum belt itself is an archive. She comments on complexities of handling sensitive cultural objects.