University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Department of Anthropology Papers Department of Anthropology 3-2018 Broken Chains of Custody: Possessing, Dispossessing, and Repossessing Lost Wampum Belts Margaret Bruchac University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/anthro_papers Part of the Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Bruchac, M. (2018). Broken Chains of Custody: Possessing, Dispossessing, and Repossessing Lost Wampum Belts. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 162 (1), 56-105. Retrieved from https://repository.upenn.edu/anthro_papers/179 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/anthro_papers/179 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Broken Chains of Custody: Possessing, Dispossessing, and Repossessing Lost Wampum Belts Disciplines Anthropology | Social and Behavioral Sciences This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/anthro_papers/179 Broken Chains of Custody: Possessing, Dispossessing, and Repossessing Lost Wampum Belts MARGARET M. BRUCHAC Assistant Professor of Anthropology Coordinator, Native American and Indigenous Studies University of Pennsylvania Introduction In the spring of 2009, two historical shell bead wampum belts1—iden- tified as “early” and “rare” and valued at between $15,000 and $30,000 each—were advertised for sale at a Sotheby’s auction of Amer- ican Indian art objects2 belonging to the estate of Herbert G. Welling- ton.3 One belt, identified as having been collected by Frank G. Speck from the Mohawk community in Oka (Kanesatake, Quebec) before 1929, was tagged with an old accession number from the Heye Foun- dation/Museum of the American Indian (MAI; MAI #16/3827). The second belt, collected by John Jay White from an unknown locale before 1926, was identified as Abenaki; it, too, was tagged with an old MAI number (MAI #11/123; Figure 1).