Seeing Through Translation: Haudenosaunee Wampums and Jesuit Conversions in 17th Century New York

Woven belts of luminescent shell beads – wampums—provided a critical site of material and ideological exchange in northeastern North America during the seventeenth century. This lecture explores the deployment of wampum by Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) and Jesuits as each struggled to convert the other to its own regimes of value, politics, and spirituality. I attend to the period- specific conceptual frameworks of art and materiality invoked by Indigenous and French historical actors to enable a process of cross-cultural translation through a shared visual culture.

Ruth B. Phillips is Canada Research Professor and Professor of Art History at Carleton University in Ottawa. Her research focuses on the Indigenous arts of North America and critical museology. She is the author of Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums (2011); Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast (1998); and Representing Woman: Sande Masquerades of the Mende of Sierra Leone (1995); and co-author, with Janet Catherine Berlo of Native North American Art (2nd edition, 2015);. She has served as director of the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology and president of CIHA, the International Committee on the History of Art. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Date
Thu November 8th 2018, 5:00 - 6:30pm
Location
Archaeology Center
Event Sponsor
Archaeology Center
Contact Phone Number
Speaker
Ruth Phillips