Wampum as Hypertext: An American Indian Intellectual Tradition of Multimedia Theory and Practice

Dating back one thousand years, wampum and other material components (e.g., bark fibers, sinew, hemp fibers, string-or other weaving materials) have been used by Woodlands Indians for ceremony and as records of important civil affairs (e.g., alliances, treaties, marriage proposals, ceremonies, wars,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Studies in American Indian literatures 2007-12, Vol.19 (4), p.77-100
Main Author: HAAS, ANGELA M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Alliances
American Indians
Death
Design
Electrical engineering
English language
Essays
Government (Administrative Body)
Hyperlinks
Hypermedia
Hypertext
Indexing
Memory
Multimedia
Multimedia materials
Native Americans
Peace treaties
Research and Development
Rhetoric
Scientific Research
Semiotics
Technological change
Treaties
Tribes
Vision
Visual rhetoric
War
Writing
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Summary:Dating back one thousand years, wampum and other material components (e.g., bark fibers, sinew, hemp fibers, string-or other weaving materials) have been used by Woodlands Indians for ceremony and as records of important civil affairs (e.g., alliances, treaties, marriage proposals, ceremonies, wars, etc.) by stringing the wampum beads together on individual strands or weaving them into belts, as pictured in contemporary contexts in figures 2 and 3.3 Thus wampum serves as a sign technology that has been used to record hundreds of years of alliances within tribes, between tribes, and between the tribal governments and colonial government. Interestingly enough, the Memex was described in Bush's 1945 Atlantic Monthly article as an instrument designed to extend human memory by allowing us to associatively store and retrieve memories through nonlinear trads, or a webbed network, of interconnected scientific knowledge and data.4 Distinguished professor of electrical engineering at MIT, cofounder of Raytheon Corporation (a high-tech company), and director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development for the Roosevelt administration (i.e., director of war-related research for the U.S. government during World War II), Bush credited science with providing the swiftest of communication between individuals.
ISSN:0730-3238
1548-9590
1548-9590
DOI:10.1353/ail.2008.0005