Beads used as a form of exchange, mnemonic devices, and guarantees of promises by certain Iroquois-speaking North American Indian groups, and later in trade with Europeans. They were made of bits of seashells cut, drilled, and strung into belts or strands.
Wampum, is a string of white shell beads fashioned from the North Atlantic Whelk shell also known as the Knobbie and is traditionally used by Indigenous Americans, First Nations peoples, Native Americans, hobbyists, business people, traders, who regard it as a sacred and/or money object. Wampum beads(white) are made from the Whelk Shell.
Description
Wampum is the Algonquian word for White. Wampum beads are traditionally made by rounding small pieces of the shells of quahogs and whelks, then piercing them with a hole before stringing them. Wampum belts are used as a memory aid in Oral tradition, badge of office, and ceremonial device of indigenous cultures such as the Iroquois. When Europeans came to the Americas, they realized the importance of wampum to Native people, but mistook it for money. Soon, they were trading with the native peoples of New England and New York using wampum.
In the area of present New York Bay, the clams and whelks used for making wampum were found only along Long Island Sound and Narragansett Bay.
Post-colonization wampum
In 1609, Henry Hudson received wampum as a gift from upriver Indians. The first European credited with discovering the significance of wampum was Jacob Eelkes, a Dutch fur trader in the New Netherland colony. The sachem gave Eelkes wampum of over 840 feet in length, which Eelkes discovered would command many more pelts in trade among the Indians than European-made goods. The Dutch began both accepting and distributing wampum as a currency at their trading stations. They began an aggressive campaign of buying as much wampum as possible from coastal Algonquians and transporting it up the Hudson Valley, where it was scarcer, to trade for pelts among the Mahicans.
Word of the value of wampum was spread to English settlers in Massachusetts by Isaak de Rasieres, the chief commercial agent of the Dutch West India Company, who informed Governor William Bradford of the Plymouth Colony of the significance of the belts.
The system of wampum trading did not survive long after the arrival of Europeans. The Europeans introduced metal tools, specifically rasps and steel drills, that greatly reduced the labor needed to manufacture wampum. Additionally, the English in the Massachusetts Bay Colony began to manufacture wampum on their own.
In 1746, John Campbell established a wampum factory in what is now Park Ridge, New Jersey. The manufacture of wampum was a seasonal occupation which arose out of the need for establishing closer trading ties to remaining Native American tribes in the Pascack Valley region.
Wampum as transcription
"The weaving of wampum belts was a sort of writing by means of belts of colored beads, in which the various designs of beads denoted different ideas according to a definitely accepted system, which could be read by anyone acquainted with wampum language, irrespective of what the spoken language was.
William James Sidis, The Tribes And The States: 100,000-Year History of North America
Modern References
Musician Tori Amos composed a short song entitled "Wampum Prayer" on her Scarlet's Walk album, which is thematically very Native-oriented.
Also, Comedian Mitch Hedberg referred to wampum during his "Three Easy Payments" joke, shouting "That last payment must be made in wampum!"
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