Belts woven from cylindrical shell beads produced by the Haudenosaunee, the People of the Longhouse, known to European colonists as the Iroquois Confederacy, constitute the most sophisticated system of non-alphabetic political documentation and legal record-keeping produced by any indigenous culture in eastern North America. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, founded by the Peacemaker and his helper Aiionwatha, known in anglicized form as Hiawatha, originally comprised five nations: the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca, with the Tuscarora admitted as a sixth nation in the early 18th century. The Onondaga Nation, as Keepers of the Central Fire, holds custodianship of the Confederacy's wampum records. Individual wampum beads, called ote-ko-a in the Seneca language, are tubular in form, approximately 6.4 millimeters long and 3.2 millimeters in diameter in standard production, though a 17th-century Seneca belt documented in the literature featured beads reaching 65 millimeters in length. Two colors were produced: white, from the inner spiral of the channeled whelk shell, Busycotypus canaliculatus; and purple, from the edge of the quahog clam shell, Mercenaria mercenaria, where the deep purple pigmentation natural to the quahog is concentrated. White beads were more common, as the purple pigmentation occupies only a narrow section of the quahog shell. Purple beads were correspondingly more valued and carried associations with serious political or diplomatic content. The Hiawatha Belt, the national belt of the Haudenosaunee recording the founding of the Confederacy, contains 6,574 beads in 38 rows by 173 columns, of which 892 are white and 5,682 are purple. The longest surviving belt, the 1794 Canandaigua Treaty Belt, measures approximately 1.8 meters in length.
Material and Craftsmanship
Quahog and whelk shells were harvested from coastal waters, primarily in the region from southern Long Island Sound to the upper Massachusetts Bay, the geographic zone where the quahog produces its characteristic deep purple coloration. The Shinnecock, Wampanoag, Narragansett, Pequot, and Mohegan nations of coastal New England were the primary producers of wampum beads before and during the colonial period. The Haudenosaunee, whose territory was inland, obtained wampum through trade and tribute networks. After European contact, coastal tribes manufactured beads in industrial quantity for trade with the colonists, who adopted wampum as currency.
Bead production before European contact required stone and bone drills. The shell fragment was broken, then ground and rounded against an abrasive stone surface into a rough cylinder. A hole was drilled longitudinally through the center using a pointed bone or stone tool rotated between the palms. Iron drill bits introduced through European trade accelerated production dramatically, enabling the large-scale manufacture that sustained both indigenous ceremonial production and colonial currency demand simultaneously. The finished bead surface was polished against a flat stone. Each bead required individual processing from shell fragment through finished form, making large belt production a sustained collective effort over an extended period.
Belts were constructed on a loom by warp-stringing the beads across parallel fiber threads and weaving horizontal weft threads between them to lock the beads in position. The warp and weft threads were made from plant fiber, basswood bark, or deer sinew. Leather-wrapped edges, called selvedges, ran along both long sides of the completed belt, finishing the edges and providing structural reinforcement. Fiber tassels were braided into the short ends. The loom-woven structure created a flat, flexible textile of shell beads that could be worn across the body as a sash, carried in the hand, or stored rolled without damage. A documented NMAI belt under catalog number 14833 measures 124 by 8 centimeters, representative of the working belt format used for diplomatic and ceremonial exchange between nations.
Form and Features
Belts ranged from narrow message strings of a single bead width to broad formal treaty belts spanning 38 or more rows. The Hiawatha Belt is a broad dark belt of 38 rows composed predominantly of purple beads. Its design depicts five symbols joined by rows of white wampum: four squares representing the Mohawk, Oneida, Cayuga, and Seneca nations, and a central tree form representing the Onondaga Nation. Reading from east to west, the Mohawk square anchors the eastern end as Keepers of the Eastern Door. The Seneca square anchors the western end as Keepers of the Western Door. The Oneida and Cayuga squares flank the central Onondaga tree. The design was created at the founding of the Confederacy and has remained unchanged as the Confederacy's national emblem. It forms the basis of the Haudenosaunee flag, which is flown internationally by Haudenosaunee diplomatic delegations.
The Two-Row Wampum Treaty belt, known as the Guswhenta, records the 1613 agreement between the Five Nations and Dutch representatives. It consists of two parallel rows of purple beads running the length of a white bead ground. The two purple rows represent two vessels traveling the same river without merging: a Haudenosaunee canoe and a European ship. Each vessel carries its own people, laws, and customs. Neither interferes with the other. The Haudenosaunee oral tradition preserving the belt's meaning states the agreement's duration in three parallel conditions: as long as the sun shines, as long as water flows, and as long as grass grows green. The Canandaigua Treaty Belt of 1794, the longest known belt at approximately 1.8 meters, depicts thirteen human figures holding hands, connected to two additional figures and a house, representing the thirteen United States joined to the two Haudenosaunee delegates and the council house of the Confederacy.
Belts could additionally carry two meanings: one on the front face and one on the reverse. This documented quality established the belt as a layered document, capable of encoding parallel messages for different audiences reading the same physical object from opposite surfaces.
Function and Use
The core function of wampum belts in Haudenosaunee practice was legal ratification. An agreement spoken without wampum was not binding. An agreement spoken with wampum, accepted by the receiving party, was a legal instrument with the same force as a signed and witnessed written contract in European law. The belt transformed oral speech into durable record, because the belt itself could be consulted in the future by wampum readers who would recite the agreement it encoded for a gathered assembly, restoring the original words through the object's visual prompts. At special councils, trained wampum keepers recited the message or law associated with each belt to the assembled community.
Every chief and every clan mother in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy held a personal string of wampum serving as their certificate of office. When a chief died or was removed, the string passed to their successor. The transfer of the wampum string was the legal transfer of the office. A messenger carrying communications between nations was required to present wampum confirming their authorization to speak on behalf of their nation. Without it, the message was not officially received. The belt, in this context, functioned as diplomatic credential: without it, the message carried no institutional authority.
Wampum governed the transfer of names, which in Haudenosaunee culture carried the histories and obligations of previous holders. When a person of high office died, a wampum inscribed with their name was laid on the shoulders of the designated successor. The successor could physically reject the transfer by shaking it off. Accepting it meant accepting the name, its history, and its obligations, which could include the duty to avenge the previous holder's death in war, or to care for their family. The name lived in the wampum, and the wampum transferred the name.
Cultural Context
Wampum's adoption as colonial currency was not a Haudenosaunee practice. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy's own documentation explicitly distinguishes between wampum's sacred uses and its use as a medium of exchange: the Haudenosaunee Confederacy website states that wampum was first used as currency by the American colonists rather than by indigenous peoples, who used it for sacred and political purposes. Wampum was legal tender in New England from 1637 to 1661 and in New York until 1673. The colonial rate established by New Jersey set six white beads or three black beads equal to one penny. The European practice of dyeing white beads to pass as black debased the colonial currency system and contributed to its eventual abandonment by colonial authorities. The Haudenosaunee continued to use wampum for its original political and ceremonial purposes throughout and after the colonial currency period.
The introduction of European iron drills reduced bead production time sufficiently to supply the colonial currency market alongside indigenous ceremonial demand, but this same increase in production reduced wampum's relative value in colonial exchange markets by the late 17th century. As colonial authorities ceased accepting wampum as legal tender, Haudenosaunee communities continued to use it in contexts that had no commercial dimension.
Anthropologist David Graeber, in his work on the origins of money, placed pre-contact wampum in a category of culturally valued objects used primarily to rearrange relations between people rather than to facilitate exchange of ordinary commodities. This analysis aligns with the Haudenosaunee account: wampum documented relationships, transferred authority, confirmed agreements, and bound obligations between people and nations. Its material value was entirely subordinate to its relational function.
Discovery and Preservation
The earliest documented mention of a wampum belt in Plymouth Colony sources appears in 1623, when Ousamequin, known as Massasoit, attended the wedding of William Bradford wearing a belt of wampum beads approximately nine inches wide across his waist, described by Emmanuel Altham in a letter to his brother in England. Fifty years later, Metacom, known as King Philip, wore a broad belt of wampum curiously wrought with black and white in figures of birds and beasts during a state visit to Boston. At his death in August 1676, Captain Benjamin Church received Metacom's wampum belt as a spoil of war. Its current location is unknown. The disappearance of Metacom's belt is described by Mashpee Wampanoag historian Paula Peters as one of American history's significant cultural losses.
The Hiawatha Belt was acquired by Henry Carrington from Thomas Webster, an Onondaga, in 1891 and purchased by John B. Thacher in 1893. It passed to the New York State Museum through the bequest of Emma T. Thacher in 1927. The Onondaga Nation pursued its return for decades. The New York State Museum repatriated the Hiawatha Belt to the Onondaga Nation in 1989, alongside ten additional wampum belts that had been held away from their communities for over a century. The repatriation occurred the same year the National Museum of the American Indian Act was passed by Congress, making it one of the first major wampum repatriations in American legal history. In 2017, a belt purchased by anthropologist Frank Speck in 1913 was returned to Kanesatake, where it is used in cultural and political events. The Seneca Nation commissioned replicas of five historic belts, completed in 2008 and made by Lydia Chavez of the Unkechaug Nation using beads manufactured on Unkechaug territory on Long Island.
The Onondaga Nation currently holds the living wampum records of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and continues to use wampum in the ceremony of raising up a new chief and in Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving ceremonies. Significant institutional holdings remain at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, the New York State Museum in Albany, the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, the McCord-Stewart Museum in Montreal, and the Bank of Canada Museum in Ottawa.
Why It Matters
Iroquois wampum belts constitute the only pre-contact North American indigenous recording system in which specific object-encoded information could be read by any person trained in wampum language regardless of their spoken tongue, functioning as a genuinely trans-linguistic documentary medium rather than a mnemonic aid restricted to speakers of a single language. The Hiawatha Belt's continuous function as the Haudenosaunee Confederacy's national emblem from the founding of the League through its adoption as the basis of the Haudenosaunee flag flown internationally today establishes a documented continuity of political identity encoded in a single material object across a span of centuries. The Two-Row Wampum Treaty's diplomatic principle, that two peoples can travel the same river in separate vessels without interference in each other's governance, has been cited by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy as the foundational framework for all their subsequent treaty relationships with European and American governments, making a belt woven in 1613 an active legal reference document in 21st-century indigenous sovereignty arguments. The colonial adoption of wampum as legal tender from 1637 to 1661, and its subsequent abandonment as colonial authorities debased the medium through dyeing and mass production, is the most precisely documented case of a sacred indigenous object being simultaneously converted into a commercial instrument and destroyed as that instrument through the same economic processes that appropriated it.