Main entry:

Cordes, Ashley, author.

Title & Author:

Indigenous currencies : leaving some for the rest in the digital age / Ashley Cordes.

Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2025]

Description:

viii, 217 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 169-204) and index.
Preface. Land acknowledgment and appreciation -- Introduction -- 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 -- Epilogue. Potlatch 3.

Summary:

"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."-- Provided by publisher.

ISBN:

9780262552530 (paperback)
0262552531 (paperback)
(epub)
9780262383356
(pdf)
9780262383363

Subject:

Indians of North America Money.
Indigenous peoples Money.
Money History.
Cryptocurrencies.
Cryptomonnaie.
cryptocurrencies.

Form/genre:

Informational works.
Documents d'information.

Added entries:

Leaving some for the rest in the digital age

Holdings:

Location: Library main 321515
Call No.: 321515
Copy: 1
Status: Available