Indigenous Currencies : Leaving Some for the Rest in the Digital Age / Ashley Cordes.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cordes, Ashley, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Indians of North America--Money.

Indians of North America.

Indigenous peoples--Money.

Indigenous peoples.

Money--History.

Money.

Cryptocurrencies.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (233 pages) : illustrations.

Edition:

First edition.

Other Title:

Leaving Some for the Rest in the Digital Age

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : MIT Press, 2025.

Summary:

"How Indigenous peoples have long been at the forefront of knowledge and innovation in currency and payment systems, inventing new methods to store memories, transmit trust, and create reciprocity"-- Provided by publisher.

How Indigenous currencies--including wampum and dentalium shells, beads, and the cryptocurrency MazaCoin--have long constituted a form of resistance to settler colonialism. Indigenous Currencies follows dynamic stories of currency as a meaning-making communication technology. Settler economies regard currency as their own invention, casting Indigenous systems of value, exchange, and data stewardship as incompatible with contemporary markets. In this book, Ashley Cordes refutes such claims and describes a long history of Indigenous innovation in currencies, including wampum, dentalium, beads, and, more recently, the cryptocurrency MazaCoin. By looking closely at how currencies developed over time through intercultural communication, Cordes argues that Indigenous currencies transcend the scope of economic value, revealing the cultural, social, and political context of what it means to exchange. The book's two main case studies, the gold rush and the code rush, frame a deep dive into how Indigenous ways of being have shaped the use and significance of currency and vice versa. Settler currencies, which have developed in the wake of wars and through massively scaled forms of material extraction, offer a very different story of the place of currencies within settler economies of dispossession. The second part of the study asks how contemporary cryptocurrencies may play a critical role in cultivating Tribal sovereignty. The author analyzes structural properties of the polymorphic blockchain to provide key insights into how emergent digital spaces, with their attendant forms of meaning and value represented by code, NFTs, and Web 3.0, are inextricably connected to Indigenous knowledges. The book cultivates a vision of currency in which the principle of leaving some for the rest establishes a way of imagining relationships of exchange beyond their enclosure within settler-capitalist parameters of extraction and into currents of deep reciprocity.

Contents:

Land Acknowledgment and Appreciation

Currencies

Land-Based Currency in the Rogue River War

Beading Worlds and Leaving Some for the Rest

Satoshi Nakamoto Is Part Snake : Tribal Legends and Bitcoin's Origin Story

Snake's Counterstory

Lives and Afterlives of an Indigenous Cryptocurrency

The Polymorphic Blockchain

Cryptocolonialism and Scyborgs Building Blockchain

Potlatch 3.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0-262-38336-5

0-262-38335-7

OCLC:

1468668046