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
Beadwork five centuries in the Americas. Today a wide range of beading styles flourish. Alongside the widespread popularity of glass beads, bead artists continue incorporating natural items such as dyed porcupine quills, shell such as wampum, and dendrite, and even sea urchin spines in a similar manner as beads. Wampum shell beads are ceremonially and politically important to a range of Eastern tribes, and were used to depict several important treaties between the Native peoples and the colonists, as in the case of the Two Row Wampum Treaty. In the Great Lakes, Ursuline nuns introduced floral patterns to tribes who quickly