Wampum the spoken language is. Records and treaties are kept in this manner, and individuals could write letters to one another in this way. Wampum belts were used as a memory aid in oral tradition, and were sometimes used as badges of office or as ceremonial devices in Indian culture such as the Iroquois. The 1820 New Monthly Magazine reports on a speech given by chief Tecumseh in which he vehemently gesticulated to a belt, pointing out treaties made 20 years earlier and battles fought since then. The National Museum of the American Indian repatriated eleven wampum belts to "Iroquois" chiefs
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