Symbols of Sovereignty and How They Speak to Us: Reading Contemporary Wampum Artwork in New York State Museums

Contemporary Haudenosaunee artworks in exhibit spaces across New York State are bringing cultural information and counter-historical narratives to the public that they might not encounter otherwise. Artwork that includes wampum depictions or materials has heuristic qualities that can engage viewers with Haudenosaunee ways of knowing and relating. Wampum heuristics and Haudenosaunee scholarship are employed to interrogate how wampum materials were collected, categorized, and researched by the New York State Museum during the salvage anthropology era. The narratives embedded in wampum artworks are traced from this salvage era history, throughout the century between the salvage era that began at the end of the 19th century and the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990, up to the early 21st century, in which artworks incorporating images or themes of repatriated wampum are increasingly displayed in museum spaces. Museum professionals and Haudenosaunee artists collaborate on efforts to decolonize museum spaces by revisiting and reframing how Native American people, history, and material culture have been represented in Western institutions of learning. Within these efforts, there are many success stories but also a variety of tensions and problematic tendencies towards centering whiteness in cross-cultural environments, resulting in the Native American partners bearing an inequitable amount of the emotional and at times antagonizing strain of bringing about meaningful change. Examples from the lived experience of museum professionals, artists, and researchers demonstrate how epistemologically structuring relations around treaty frameworks can redress the traumas and inequities of our shared past, present, and future.