Wampum at the Onondaga Longhouse Six Nations Reserve in New York. These belts dated to the late 18th century and are sacred to the Longhouse religion. They had been away from their tribes for over a century. The Seneca Nation commissioned replicas of five historic wampum belts completed in 2008. Artists continue to weave belts of a historical nature, as well as designing new belts based on their own concepts. 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
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