Money is Not Territory

“Religious” Dimensions of Iroquois Wampum

On the “Freedom Trail”

Tourist Highlights

What Freedom?

Pilgrims on Cape Cod

First Theft

What is Religion?

• Exchange• Indigenous traditions challenge conventional

(i.e., Constitutional) understandings of religion

• Not strictly ideological--material• Status of researcher as a participant in

cultural critique and creation

Wampum

• Worked shell bead from the quahoag shell

Contemporary Wampum artistry

Wampum’s Value

• Purple (black) and white– Cosmological attributes

of Earth/Sky, Night/Day, Creator Twins

• Purity of intention– Living force of words

spoken into wampum and from wampum into speaker

Hiawantha Belt of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy

• Story of the Peacemaker and Hiawantha

• Condolence– Grief as a sudden

disjunction between humans and creation

– Wampum restores relations

Tsha’hon’nonyen’dakhwa’“Where they play games”

Wampum Belts

• “Two-Row Wampum”--Guswentha– Treaty between Haudenosaunee and Dutch 1613– Residence and exchange as equals

• Non-interference agreement– Dutch version discovered in 1968

• Emphasis on exclusivity of trade relationship

NOON campaign for 2013

• http://www.honorthetworow.org

European Wampum

• Wampum as Money– Tied to the Development of Colonial America

• Access to Beaver pelts– Basis of trans-Atlantic commerce– Creation of NYC (JJ Astor), Erie Canal

• Long Island factories– Last “wampum mint” closed in 1899– Reorganized worlds of Native and Europeans

• Exchange rate: 3 white/1 black to British penny

Wampum and Money: Expor-ations of Religion as Exchange

• For Haudenosaunee wampum is an expression of the cosmos– Extending the

Confederacy through Condolence

– Wampum as being• Indigenous phenomenon

• For Europeans wampum was the basis for trans-Atlantic trade– Extending colonial

empires through commerce

– Wampum as money• Immigrant phenomenon

Money and Native Americans

• Monetary exchange network (Global economy) has been the most detrimental to Native communities– Not religion, per se– Modern notion of

money derived from Christian worldview

Theodor de Bry, Las Casas, the Black Legend and GOLD

Money as Religion

• “Total fact” of modern existence– Everything is evaluated with respect to monetary

value• Symbolic, mythic, “faith based,”• Materiality of our current existence• Wampum clarifies religious nature of money– No joke

Theology of Money

• Sacred reality is removed from material life– Anthrocentric emphasis

• Everything is here for human beings

• God or Creator is “otiosus”– Sign of God in money– Removed from Creation

• Creates a dangerous world

Basic Call to Consciousness

What has befallen Native American people will befall us all

• Environmental degradation– Expressed in weather and sickness

• Loss of cultural identity• Not apocalyptic; no sense of optimism– Self-fulfilling prophecy of Religions which

emphasize the end

Native Nations and the UN

• World Stage that respects cultural differences• Since 1978 there has developed a Indigenous

peoples consultation– Lead by Oren Lyons of Onondaga– Haudenosaunee passports

• Quote page 90– World at a critical point

UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues

• http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/index.html

• Meeting at UN NYC every spring• Discussions of the Doctrine of Discovery as a

critical aspect of Indigenous survival