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Indigenous Currencies

Leaving Some for the Rest in the Digital Age

Author Ashley Cordes
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Paperback
$35.00 US
The MIT Press
On sale Apr 22, 2025 | 226 Pages | 9780262552530
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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.
Preface: Land Acknowledgment and Appreciation
Introduction
Part I
1 Currencies
2 Land-Based Currency in the Rogue River War
3 Beading Worlds and Leaving Some for the Rest
Part II
4 Satoshi Nakamoto Is Part Snake: Tribal Legends and Bitcoin’s Origin Story
5 Snake’s Counterstory
6 Lives and Afterlives of an Indigenous Cryptocurrency
7 The Polymorphic Blockchain
8 Cryptocolonialism and Scyborgs Building Blockchain
Epilogue: Potlatch 3.0
Notes
Index
"…[C]ryptocurrency, and digital currency broadly, continue creating shifting circuits of transactional culture. A sort of code rush4 is taking place, in which various digital forms of currency prevail over conventionally tangible, visible forms.
In earlier times, and especially during the US gold rush, a transaction for an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century settler or Indigenous person might be paid for using a combination of currencies: gold (in its many forms), dentalium and olivella, fur pelts, beads, baskets, turquoise, blankets, copper, ooligan grease, woodpecker scalps, specie (metal coins), and ledgers, to name a few. While Indigenous trading is still very much a living practice, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, most payments look a bit different. It is likely that we pay with a singular transfer of digital numbers representing money, using a bank account and a plastic card, or a phone app like Apple Pay or Google Pay. We could open our purses and wallets and find a mixture of currencies to pay with: gift cards, crumpled dollar bills and stray coins, certificates, and plastic cards that afford credit through debt or debit our accounts automatically. Or, we could transfer one of a plethora of cryptocurrencies to someone on the other side of the globe in a matter of minutes, even if cryptocurrency is currently treated as more of an asset than a day-to- day currency. Today, someone could offer as money nothing but the perceived magic and social guarantee of digital data and still acquire most goods and services. These forms of payment compete just as gold and shells did in the 1850s, but today’s shift to a digital world is also shifting humanity’s relationship to money."

4. The cryptocurrency code rush is my play on words, acknowledging the gold rush of the mid-nineteenth century. I want to suggest that cryptocurrency is a popular resource that, once “discovered” in 2009, attracted mass interest and cultural shifts. Its mining practice reflects its connection to mining gold (and other minerals). See also Bill Maurer, Taylor C. Nelms, and Lana Swartz, “‘When Perhaps the Real Problem Is Money Itself!’:The Practical Materiality of Bitcoin,” Social Semiotics 23, no. 2 (March 2013): 261–277.
Copyright © 2025 by Ashley Cordes. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Ashley Cordes is Assistant Professor of Indigenous Media at the University of Oregon and a recent American Council of Learned Societies Fellow. She is an enrolled citizen of the Kō-Kwel/Coquille Nation and has served as Chair of the Culture and Education Committee.
Ashley Cordes View titles by Ashley Cordes

About

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.

Table of Contents

Preface: Land Acknowledgment and Appreciation
Introduction
Part I
1 Currencies
2 Land-Based Currency in the Rogue River War
3 Beading Worlds and Leaving Some for the Rest
Part II
4 Satoshi Nakamoto Is Part Snake: Tribal Legends and Bitcoin’s Origin Story
5 Snake’s Counterstory
6 Lives and Afterlives of an Indigenous Cryptocurrency
7 The Polymorphic Blockchain
8 Cryptocolonialism and Scyborgs Building Blockchain
Epilogue: Potlatch 3.0
Notes
Index

Excerpt

"…[C]ryptocurrency, and digital currency broadly, continue creating shifting circuits of transactional culture. A sort of code rush4 is taking place, in which various digital forms of currency prevail over conventionally tangible, visible forms.
In earlier times, and especially during the US gold rush, a transaction for an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century settler or Indigenous person might be paid for using a combination of currencies: gold (in its many forms), dentalium and olivella, fur pelts, beads, baskets, turquoise, blankets, copper, ooligan grease, woodpecker scalps, specie (metal coins), and ledgers, to name a few. While Indigenous trading is still very much a living practice, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, most payments look a bit different. It is likely that we pay with a singular transfer of digital numbers representing money, using a bank account and a plastic card, or a phone app like Apple Pay or Google Pay. We could open our purses and wallets and find a mixture of currencies to pay with: gift cards, crumpled dollar bills and stray coins, certificates, and plastic cards that afford credit through debt or debit our accounts automatically. Or, we could transfer one of a plethora of cryptocurrencies to someone on the other side of the globe in a matter of minutes, even if cryptocurrency is currently treated as more of an asset than a day-to- day currency. Today, someone could offer as money nothing but the perceived magic and social guarantee of digital data and still acquire most goods and services. These forms of payment compete just as gold and shells did in the 1850s, but today’s shift to a digital world is also shifting humanity’s relationship to money."

4. The cryptocurrency code rush is my play on words, acknowledging the gold rush of the mid-nineteenth century. I want to suggest that cryptocurrency is a popular resource that, once “discovered” in 2009, attracted mass interest and cultural shifts. Its mining practice reflects its connection to mining gold (and other minerals). See also Bill Maurer, Taylor C. Nelms, and Lana Swartz, “‘When Perhaps the Real Problem Is Money Itself!’:The Practical Materiality of Bitcoin,” Social Semiotics 23, no. 2 (March 2013): 261–277.
Copyright © 2025 by Ashley Cordes. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Author

Ashley Cordes is Assistant Professor of Indigenous Media at the University of Oregon and a recent American Council of Learned Societies Fellow. She is an enrolled citizen of the Kō-Kwel/Coquille Nation and has served as Chair of the Culture and Education Committee.
Ashley Cordes View titles by Ashley Cordes

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FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Ashley Cordes’s Indigenous Currencies

This book explores how Indigenous currencies—including wampum and dentalium shells, beads, and the cryptocurrency MazaCoin—have long constituted a form of resistance to settler colonialism.   “…[C]ryptocurrency, and digital currency broadly, continue creating shifting circuits of transactional culture. A sort of code rush is taking place, in which various digital forms of currency prevail over conventionally

Read more

FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Ashley Cordes’s Indigenous Currencies

Business & Economics History Sociology
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