Videos
This video on the care of wampum belts was filmed with Amanda McLeod (Sagkeeng Anicinabe Nation) and belts at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., and the NMAI Cultural Resource Center in March 2025.
Hidden Stories Traditional Care Practices series: "Traditional Care of Wampum Belts" (full length - 14 mins.)
Amanda McLeod (Sagkeeng Anicinabe Nation)
The video is part of the Hidden Stories series on Traditional Care Practices of books and book-adjacent belongings. The series aims to share knowledge about community care of belongings in order to improve their care while they are living in museum and library spaces outside of their communities. For more videos and more about the series, visit the Traditional Care Practices page here.
“Beaverskin and Birchbark: Community-led Research on Indigenous Books from Turtle Island” (50 mins.)
Ian McCallum (Munsee-Delaware Nation), Melissa Moreton and Suzanne Conklin Akbari (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton)
This presentation traces the careful community-led approach to the study of a unique book connected to Lunaape communities, and explores its almost 400-year history. Printed in Basel in 1645 and bound in blind-tooled leather, a copy of Buxtorf’s Hebrew Lexicon made its way to the Americas, where it was eventually owned by preacher David Brainerd (d. 1747) and used as a source for sermon-writing. Brainerd lived among the Lunaape (Lenape or Delaware) communities in what is today New Jersey. When his well-used book broke some time in the early 1740s, it was repaired, likely by Lunaape women, who covered it with a brain-tanned and painted beaverskin overcover which has stabilized it to the present day.
Speakers Ian McCallum (Munsee-Delaware Nation/ OISE, University of Toronto), Melissa Moreton & Suzanne Conklin Akbari (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton) share ongoing work around this belonging - which is both a settler colonial object as well as an Indigenous belonging. Now in the collection of Princeton University Libraries Special Collections, the book has been visited annually by Munsee Delaware (Lunaape) community members in an ongoing, shared process of learning about its history and its relationships to that community. These collaborations have also facilitated work in progress with Anishinaabe communities on a birchbark book, which will be described in brief. This lecture provides a methodological overview of the collaborative approach to research on Indigenous books from Turtle Island (North America). The presentation was recorded on January 17, 2025, as part of a Bookbindings Academy series, organised by the Belgisch - Nederlands Boekbandengenootschap and the Consortium of European Research Libraries.
“The Book as Living Relation: Collaborative Study of Lenape (Delaware) Belongings with Indigenous Communities of Origin” (52 mins.)
Suzanne Conklin Akbari (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton)