Alternate Histories of Hypertext

"Wampum strings and belts served to engender further diplomatic relations, and their presentation was a gesture that required reciprocity on the part of the recipient. Consequently, accepting a gift of wampum meant that the recipient accepted its implied message and responsibility. Wampum records are maintained by regularly revisiting and re-"reading" them through community memory and performance, as wampum is a living rhetoric that communicates a mutual relationship between two or more parties, despite the failure of one of those parties to live up to that promise (which we know was the result of most wampum treaties with the colonists; see fig. 4). Thus wampum embodies memory, as it extends human memories of inherited knowledges via interconnected, nonlinear designs {81} 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." (Wampum as Hypertext An American Indian Intellectual Tradition of Multimedia Theory and Practice ANGELA M. HAAS SAIL Ser.2 19.4)