Wampum Wampum Wampum is a traditional shell bead of the Eastern Woodlands tribes of American Indians. It includes the white shell beads fashioned from the North Atlantic channeled whelk shell and the white and purple beads made from the quahog or Western North Atlantic hard-shelled clam. It was used by the northeastern Indian tribes as a form of gift exchange, and the colonists adopted it as currency in trading with them. Eventually, the colonists developed more efficient methods of producing wampum, which caused inflation and ultimately its obsolescence as currency. Wampum was often kept on strings like Chinese cash. Before European
Two Row Wampum Treaty is no expectation that early belts should have survived had they in fact been exchanged in the early seventeenth century. In any event, by 1870 the image of the two-row wampum belt had come to symbolize for the Haudenosaunee their ongoing treaty and "kaswentha" relationship with the Dutch crown. Diana Muir Appelbaum has written that: Indeed, no documentary evidence (including wampum, which is very fragile) survive from the original treaty negotiations of 1613. But, as Parmenter points out: Onondaga leaders state that the oral tradition which accompanies the wampum belts is evidence that an agreement was made in 1613. Andy