Wampum as Hypertext: An American Indian Intellectual Tradition of Multimedia Theory and Practice: ANGELA M. HAAS
counterstory to Western claims to the origins of hypertext and multimedia by remembering how American Indian communities have employed wampum belts as hypertextual technologies
wampum has the potential to re-vision the intellectual history of technology, hypertext, and multimedia studies, and thereby American Indian studies?and such a re-visioning calls for a responsibility to digital and visual rhetorical sovereignty.
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.
wampum embodies memory, as it extends human memories of inherited knowledges via interconnected, nonlinear designs with associative message storage and retrieval methods. And it is this complex rhetorical functioning that first engaged my thoughts on how Indians have always been hypertextual
1st hypertextual concept: the Memex was imagined as a device that would allow for an associative system for indexing, storing, retrieving, and delivering of memories
"history" of hypertext is a Western frontier story, a narrative that most often begins with the exploration of the land of Xanadu and the Memex and eventually leads to the trailblazing of the World Wide Web
both Western and wampum hypertexts employ digital rhetoric to communicate their nonlinear info\
"digi tal" refers to our fingers, our digits, one of the primary ways (along with our ears and eyes) through which we make sense of the world and with which we write into the world--- never heard of this explanation before
Besides encoding information, both technologies also employ systems of nodes and links that form information structures vis-a-vis associative indexing
In order to retrieve the encoded communication, an individual must be a part of the community with the cultural context for accurate retrieval of that information
The organization of nodes and links forms a nonlinear, or webbed, network of information in both wampum and Western rhetorics
wampum is a hypertext of communicative modes?all of which contribute to cultural knowledge production and preservation
the legacy of colonization based on rhetorical modes of naming and claiming (which have ties to identity and literacy) to promote the importance of rhetorical sovereignty, or the claiming of "the inherent right and ability of peoples to determine their own communicative needs and desires in this pursuit [of agency, power, and community renewal], to decide for themselves the goals, modes, styles, and languages of public discourse”
resist the dominant notions of what it means to be technologically "literate" or "advanced"
Such a hypertext will facilitate a dynamic discussion between these stories on hypertext that will destabilize the current hierarchical information structure in place that insists on stabilizing the origins of hypertext