Tangled Memories of Wampum Diplomacy in Philadelphia

Throughout North America, Indigenous Native American and First Nations histories are often presented as fragments of a broken past. Isolated objects, historical markers, archaeological sites, lost memories, curious folklore, and uninhabited places evoke memories of something that happened long ago, to someone else, in another time. The influential tribal individuals and nations who shaped and experienced those events are often depicted as tangential to the narrative of the emerging American nation, and imagined to have vanished from the scene. Yet, Indigenous histories are best seen as part of an on-going stream of events that are never entirely past, even (especially) when they are inextricably entangled with American and Canadian histories. Native histories are sometimes recoverable if one knows how to read past the stories in stone.