ellauri079.html on line 137: Wampum is a traditional shell bead of the Eastern Woodlands tribes of Native Americans. It includes white shell beads hand fashioned from the North Atlantic channeled whelk shell and white and purple beads made from the quahog or Western North Atlantic hard-shelled clam. Before European contact, strings of wampum were used for storytelling, ceremonial gifts, and recording important treaties and historical events, such as the Two Row Wampum Treaty or The Hiawatha Belt. Wampum was also used by the northeastern Indian tribes as a means of exchange, strung together in lengths for convenience. The first Colonists adopted it as a currency in trading with them. Eventually, the Colonists applied their technologies to more efficiently produce wampum, which caused inflation and ultimately its obsolescence as currency.
ellauri079.html on line 139: the Iroquoians (Five Nations and Huron alike) shared a very particular constitution: they saw their societies not as a collection of living individuals but as a collection of eternal names, which over the course of times passed from one individual holder to another. The names were coded into chains of wampum beads.
ellauri079.html on line 141: The introduction of European metal tools revolutionized the production of wampum; by the mid-seventeenth century, production numbered in the tens of millions of beads. Dutch colonists discovered the importance of wampum as a means of exchange between tribes, and they began mass-producing it in workshops. John Campbell established such a factory in Pascack, New Jersey, which manufactured wampum into the early 20th century. Pascackpa hyvinkin.
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