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 tradition records not only the existence of a treaty, but its specific meaning, in the form of a Haudenosaunee reply to the initial Dutch treaty proposal: The treaty is considered by Haudenosaunee people to still be in effect. The Haudenosaunee tradition states: Wampum belts of the two-row style are merely one of many methods of representing in physical form the diplomatic and economic agreements implicit in the "kaswentha" relationship. There is clear evidence of Haudenosaunee use of wampum for diplomatic functions during the pre-contact period, while the post-contact period saw "increasing significance of wampum as a material form to facilitate