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 significant, and it is the two-row wampum that is understood to represent this conception most powerfully, with two rows of purple wampum beads against a background of white beads, each row representing a parallel river, down which the respective vessels of each people travel, independently but in mutual support of each other. The question of what materials — wampum or otherwise — were exchanged at the initial negotiations of the treaty cannot be answered definitively. While it is possible that a two-row wampum belt featured in the initial treaty negotiations, there is no documentary evidence to support this claim. There