UMass public historian Samuel J. Redman reexamines a collection of Native American peace medals to reveal the stories they tell about culture, colonialism, and historical memory in his new book, Tarnished Promises: Indian Peace Medals in North America (University Press of Colorado). Peace medals, though wielded as tools of colonialism, were also adopted by Native people in North America in ways that reveal agency, resistance, and adaptation in the face of the threats of colonialism. Peace medals have long interested scholars, but this is the first monograph to consider these significant objects through an anticolonial lens.
“Indian peace medals have long held a powerful allure—tangible symbols of diplomacy that also carry the weight of war. In Tarnished Promises, Samuel J. Redman pairs the beauty of these objects with equally elegant storytelling. Deploying deft, nuanced analysis, Redman transforms a world-class museum collection into a powerful lens on the cultural collisions between Native Americans and European settlers. A singular and compelling contribution.” —Chip Colwell, Wenner-Gren Foundation
The book details the unique individual histories behind each medal and their significance to different groups throughout time, as well as the broader history of Indian peace medals from 1670 to the present. The thirteen peace medals featured in the book come from the collection of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, and provide a rich text of material culture. Tarnished Promises is copublished with the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and will appeal to scholars and the general public interested in numismatics, American history, Indigenous studies, and museum collections.
Redman, the director of the Public History Program at UMass Amherst, is the author of three previous books, including Prophets and Ghosts: The Story of Salvage Anthropology, which also examines the fraught relationship between Indigenous history and museum practices.