Historical wampum is small (1/8 inch to 1/4 inch long by 1/4 inch wide), usually cylindrical, white and purple beads, hand-polished, drilled, and strung into strings or woven into belts. Geometric figures were sometimes, not always, woven into the belts.
Early, disc-shaped wampum beads were used for decoration and for barter by Long Island and New England natives living on coastal bays where the whelks and clams used for making the beads were found. (Similar uses and materials have been identified on the Carolina coast and on the California coast.)
After contact with natives in the early 1600s, European traders and settlers coast adopted wampum beads for use as money. Colonial legislators set legal standards of value for wampum as currency, for example, six white beads or two purple beads to the penny. The Dutch introduced mass production of the beads using steel awls for faster drilling and whetstones for faster polishing. (Bartering natives reportedly rejected mass-produced beads as inferior.) Used as currency in the fur trade, wampum spread to the inland Iroquois; the Creek and Cherokee; Ohio river tribes; and Missouri and Columbia river tribes. (Lewis and Clark gave wampum as 'rememberance' for diplomatic agreements made during their explorations, thereby introducing a new use to tribes who already used it for decoration.)
Thus, Euro-americans adopted wampum for use as money. They bartered with wampum. Native Americans absorbed this practice, along with the underlying concept 'money.' However, natives used wampum for other purposes, too, for which they needed a ready supply. Hence, they bartered for wampum. They decorated clothing with it. They used it as sacred symbol in practices of religion and as official symbol law and governance. "Wampum was the material object necessary for the successful functioning of [native] political, social, and religious councils" (Fenton, 473).
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Cherokee Lawgiver by Cecil Dick. |
In towns of the Cherokee confederacy people gathered annually to hear the tribal orator, a priest who was sometimes called 'the beloved man' recite the common law of the confederacy. "When the orator spoke the law, he was reading the meaning of history and tradition contained in the tribal wampum. He held the ancient and sacred wampum belts in his hand" (Strickland, 11). |
Other major confederacies--the Iroquois, the Creek--also used wampum as protocol for international diplomacy. Strings or belts of wampum were exchanged to mark diplomatic agreements. Without wampum, positions and agreements were not official; without exchange, they were not received and acknowledged. Three examples from the collection given by Onondaga chiefs in l898 to the New York State Museum as keeper of the wampum illustrate belts used in Iroquois diplomacy.
Native nations, with a long history of negotiating among themselves, taught Euro-american colonial and later United States negotiators treatying procedure, including wampum protocols. For natives, tangible objects other than beads--sticks, cloth, pipes--could substitute as wampum in negotiations when necessary. Euroamerican negotiators followed the wampum protocols while, at the same time, also recording and ratifying agreements in writing.
In summary, wampum was culturally configured. Euro-americans used it, and native Americans used it, but they used it differently. It is, thus, material cultural history for both native Americans and Euro-americans on the North American continent from the 1600s through the early 1800s. It is also material history of interaction between their cultures. Relating wampum use to object-orientation is this shared, key principle: re-usability, re-configurability, ease of substitution when prior values are satisfied. Observing that commonality, I will, now, pivot to characterize wampum belts explicitly in the terms of object-orientation. My intent is to identify wampum use as object-oriented and, with that identification, to affirm my hunch that orality underlies both. Then, I will make that recognition relevant for understanding WWW rhetoric historically.