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

• 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
• ISSN: 0730-3238; 1548-9590; 1548-9590
• DOI: 10.1353/ail.2008.0005

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.