The beads of settler colonialism: Eric Daniel Johnson, Zoë Antoinette Eddy, ‘Beads of Settler Bafflement and Indigenous Futurity: White-Owned Wampum Factories and Native Baby Yoda’, American Anthropologist, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

The beads of settler colonialism: Eric Daniel Johnson, Zoë Antoinette Eddy, ‘Beads of Settler Bafflement and Indigenous Futurity: White-Owned Wampum Factories and Native Baby Yoda’, American Anthropologist, 2025

08Aug25

Abstract: Beads are a medium through which settlers and Indigenous peoples of North America shape the future. Here, we apply the analytic of futurity to examine two case studies of bead making and bead working across archaeology and cultural anthropology. Johnson examines The Mint at Pascack, a fictionalized account of the Campbell Wampum Factory. The Campbell Factory was a Euro-American-owned workshop in New Jersey that produced shell beads for export to Indigenous consumers throughout the 19th century. The Mint shows how settler futurity replaces histories of Indigenous dispossession and appropriation with futures of civilizational supremacy and Native elimination. Eddy considers the Native Baby Yoda phenomenon and adjacent uses of Disney to show how Indigenous beaders use popular media to claim space in new art movements. Beaders engage with long-term intergenerational futures while also contesting settler futurity through rupture, play, and reinvention. We argue that both Indigenous and settler futurities are made and contested through a creative combination of storytelling and transformations of material culture centered on youth. Where settler and Indigenous futurities collide, we observe the affect of settler bafflement, or the confused, sometimes humorous experience of being forced to recognize Indigeneity in ways that interrupt settler expectations and temporalities.

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