LITR 4326 Early American Literature Research Posts 2016 (research post assignment) Research Post 1

Ashley Cofer

American Indian Literature

          After reading the poem A New Story by Simon J. Ortiz, I became interested in learning more about the history of American Indians and how they were treated by white Americans. When I began researching the history and culture of American Indians, I came across this website: http://nativeamericanwriters.com/. I read that by writing, Native Americans expressed their struggles of feeling less than human and how they only wanted to find their own voice within the culture of America. After learning that they wrote about these things, I became curious about other things they wrote about. I decided to research the origin of American Indian literature. What other ways, besides writing, could they tell stories?

          While accessing the website for this course, I came across the word wampum. Wampum is a quantity of small cylindrical beads made by North American Indians from quahog shells, strung together and worn as a decorative belt or other decoration or used as money. The course website describes wampum as a representation of American Indians' nearest equivalent to writing or literacy. Using the school library, I found articles about wampum. In her article Wampum as Hypertext: An American Indian Intellectual Tradition of Multimedia Theory and Practice, Angela Haas offers another perspective on the use of wampum. She states that 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. This makes wampum more than just a form a literature; it is a type of unity. In the article, Studies of Wampum, J. S. Slotkin and Karl Schmitt present data to show that wampum was around long before the coming of the white man. They use archaeological and ethno-historical evidence to prove their claim. 

          Another term I came across on the course website was Lakota winter counts. Winter counts are pictorial calendars or histories in which tribal records and events were recorded by Native Americans in North America. Using the school library, I searched for more information on winter counts. In the article Lakota Winter Counts: An Online Exhibit, Danielle Moretti-Langholtz and Buck Woodard discuss some facts they learned from http://wintercounts.si.edu/. They explain that winter counts were pictographic symbols that served as mnemonic devices that recorded notable events in history. In another article, A Grammar of Time: Lakota Winter Counts, 1700-1900, Barbara Risch declares how there is much variation in the verbal translations of pictographic winter counts, which typically only name the winter and provide no apparent clue to the narrative substance of the event and its relation to other narratives. This shows that not all interpretations of the art will be the same. This can lead to very different literature deriving from the same work of art.

          Wampum and winter counts were used to represent literature visually. From these illustrations, many stories have been passed down orally through the Native Americans. Each creation of wampum and the messages in the winter counts can be interpreted differently depending on the observer. If I continued research on this topic, I would want to see how diverse or similar visual literature is among the different tribes. I am curious about how different tribes would interpret the same piece of wampum or decipher a winter count.

Work Cited

http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/terms/W/wampum.htm

http://nativeamericanwriters.com/

Barbara Risch. "A Grammar of Time: Lakota Winter Counts, 1700-1900." American Indian Culture and Research Journal 24.2 (2000): 23. Print. 

Haas, Angela M. "Wampum as Hypertext: An American Indian Intellectual Tradition of Multimedia Theory and Practice." Studies in American Indian Literatures 19.4 (2007): 77. Print.

Moretti-Langholtz, Danielle, and Buck Woodard. Lakota Winter Counts: An Online Exhibit. 95 Vol. Bloomington: Organization of American Historians, 2009. Print.

Slotkin, J. S., and Karl Schmitt. "Studies of Wampum." American Anthropologist 51.2 (1949): 223-36. Print.