In refusing an infrastructure of objectifying and selling relatives, whether in the textual or non-alphabetic form of wampum, these texts can, as Correa relates, "fragment and shatter" the story of commodification.

In Keeler's paper abstract, she tells us: "This presentation traces land's agency across Mohegan and Haudenosaunee narratives and Samson Occom's writing and compares the Indigenous relationships therein to land's commodification in colonial legislation and literature," explaining "how land structures Haudenosaunee and Mohegan legislation and society in creation story and law," particularly in her examination of the Mason Case. It is a paradox that just as settler colonial forces worked to destroy Indigenous culture in Hawai'i, these same forces produced a veritable explosion of commercial representations of Hawaiianness. "In Studying this paradox, they engage Anthony Banua-Simon's 2020 documentary film Cane Fire to "illuminate how Indigenous thinkers in Hawai'i have already theorized the commodification of Hawaiian music and performance by colonial forces. Just as Walter Benjamin theorized capitalist culture as a dreamworld from which the masses must be awakened, Cane Fire—along with the writings of Teves and Silva—reveals the dreamworlds in which settler colonialism attempts to encase us, pointing to the power of literature, performance, and film...". Our third panelist further examines a relationship between land and politics in the "wampum belt, the Neyuheruke Wampum, [which] was part of a larger commemoration of the 300th anniversary of the Battle of Fort Nooherooka in Snow Hill, North Carolina, in which the Tuscarora were attacked by settlers and other regional tribes." The panelist will examine an elevn year history of using wampum to teach and "discuss these rhetorics of wampum belts broadly, including reciprocal expectations... then turn specifically to the case study of East Carolina University's Neyuheruke Wampum, interpreting its meaning as a non-alphabetic text based on evidence from its ceremonial transfer; exploring its position as an archival artifact; and postulating possibilities for its classroom". Our fourth paper, "details a collaboration between 2021 and 2023 at the New York Historical Society to create a museum display centered on the 1839 "Act of Union Between the Eastern and Western Cherokees" and raise questions about "Indigenous texts and languages" and how they "might be presented to public audiences using ethical research methods that foreground tribal nations' interpretations of their own histories." The papers in this panel tackle such rearrangements through the early beginnings of US capitalism in the seminal writings of Samson Occom and the later imaginings of Kanaka Maoli' Aina to the coming together in contemporary museum settings. Our concluding paper combines text and physical items that enacted the story in everyday acts of asserting Cherokee being. By examining the process and meaning of the 1839 Act of Union, wampum belts, and historic montages, this panel provides us ways to think not only about the relationship between objects and the stories we tell but also prompts us to ask: what does it mean to situate them in the continuum of the present? Ultimately, all four papers present aesthetic assertions of sovereignty and landed well-being.