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.

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.

“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)

In the spring of 2024, as a visiting scholar at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) in Hamburg, Suzanne Conklin Akbari delivered a lecture discussing the community-led approach to gathering around Indigenous books and book-adjacent objects (such as wampum), currently residing in museum and library collections in North America and Europe. Akbari’s talk offers methodological insights concerning collaboration, relationality, and the status of the book that inform the Hidden Stories project as a whole.