Wampum Was Never Money: The Sacred Beads Colonists Turned Into Cash

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Textbooks tend to describe wampum as a kind of early money. For the peoples of the northeastern woodlands who made it, that misses nearly everything. White beads came from the inner spiral of the channeled whelk and dark purple ones from the quahog clam, each drilled by women artisans using a wooden pump drill tipped with quartz, then strung and ground smooth with sand and water. As anthropologist David Graeber put it, wampum was used to rearrange relations between people. Belts recorded treaties, strings served as a chief's or clan mother's certificate of office, and a name string laid on a successor's shoulder passed on a dead leader's title and obligations.

Europeans saw something scarce and prized and made it currency. This episode follows that hijacking, from legal tender in New England between 1637 and 1661 to counterfeit dyed beads, a fur trade bought with hoarded shells, and factory output that inflated it into worthlessness. It ends with the belts coming home and with Native artists making wampum again on their own terms.

• The Two Row Wampum shows two purple lines on a white field: a Native canoe and a European ship traveling side by side, neither steering the other.
• The Dutch set eight white or four purple beads to one copper coin, and counterfeiters soon dyed white beads dark to double their value.
• John Campbell opened a wampum factory in New Jersey in 1746. At its peak, from about 1835 to 1866, the family turned out a million black beads a year.
• In 1989 the National Museum of the American Indian returned 11 wampum belts to Haudenosaunee chiefs at the Onondaga Longhouse after more than a century away.
• The Unkechaug Nation built its own wampum factory on Long Island in 1998 to supply Native artists such as Ken Maracle and Elizabeth James-Perry.