Negotiating Between Shell And Paper: Wampum Belts As Agents Of Religious Diplomacy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In a dialogue between the material and the textual, can objects speak over texts? This project examines nine devotional wampum belts produced as cross-cultural mediators between Catholic ecclesiastics and Indigenous people in northeastern North America between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Following Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat, Abenaki, and Anishinaabe epistemologies, wampum belts have been considered as both symbols of Native American and First Nations sovereignty, and as non-human beings doted with agency and willpower. When Indigenous Christians sent wampum belts to religious communities in France, Belgium, and Italy, these objects embodied diplomatic requests presented to Christian saints worshipped at these sites. Did these wampum belts function as independent diplomatic agents, without the presence of Indigenous interpreters? If so, what were these belts meant to do? I suggest that there may be heretofore unexamined messages, embedded in the material and documentary record, that reveal the agency and potency of these objects. Closer engagements with wampum materiality can offer insights that are missing from earlier historical studies of missionary-Indigenous relations. To discern this, I examined construction techniques that may reveal Indigenous makers’ agency in articulating political demands. I conducted archival research and re-examined historical translations, while consulting with the Indigenous communities in Canada who created these wampum belts, to assess how wampum messaging impacts the consciousness of humans around it. These diverse sources illuminate the transfers of agency that take place during wampum diplomacy, showing the embodied innovations and continuities that allowed these materials to "speak" across space and time. These wampum belts constitute an alternative archive of both Indigenous and missionary strategies. The objects and associated papers show savvy Indigenization of Catholic stories and practices to secure new alliances and territories, at the same time that religious orders recorded different understandings of these relationships in French colonial archives. When these belts and papers have survived side by side in collections, they have continued to mediate various relationships, the most significant being between generations of Indigenous peoples who relate to their ancestors through them.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".