For thousands of years, Indigenous people of America’s northeast region have crafted small, cylindrical beads called wampum from purple and white whelk and clam shells. Often woven into beautifully patterned belts, strings, necklaces or other adornments, using plant fiber or animal sinew, wampum served a multitude of purposes. It could serve as a visual memory aid, carrying stories that passed on community history and values. It could codify rituals, seal treaties or convey status. It could facilitate the process of mourning, be given as gifts by marriage suitors, or as prizes to winners in games or sport. It was sometimes used between tribal nations for trade, tribute or even ransom.

“It answers all occasions, as gold and silver doth with us,” wrote Daniel Gookin, a 17th-century British missionary to several New England Indian nations.

But Indigenous people didn’t view wampum as money. Because the process of cutting the brittle shells into small cubes, drilling holes into them and then filing them into cylinders—all without breaking them—required great skill and delicacy, wampum was indeed a highly prized commodity. Still, the idea of using it as a kind of hard currency did not emerge until European contact in the 17th century. (The Massachusetts Bay Colony, for one, officially recognized it as currency in October 1650.) Dutch and English colonists, seeing its desirability, found a way to quantify wampum’s value as a way to trade for furs and other goods with Indigenous people. To facilitate that trade, they also started manufacturing their own wampum, first at the cottage-industry scale and later in larger wampum “factories.”

By the time Europeans had arrived, Native people of the Northeast had made and used wampum for thousands of years, including woodland and coastal tribes such as the Narragansett and Algonquin (Long Island) and the Wampanoag (New England). The beads remain most closely associated with the Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois), a confederacy of six nations comprised of the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Oneida and Mohawk, all based along what is now the New York-Canada border.

“Wampum beads aren’t just beads, but they are devices by which the memory of our ancestors is passed on to the future,” says Rick Hill (Tuscarora), a cultural historian, archivist and longtime museum professional focused on recovering and interpreting Haudenosaunee material culture. “They’re considered sacred and powerful.” When someone holds a string of wampum, they are believed to be endowed with both authority and truth.

The Haudenosaunee often used wampum as a way to record historically significant events. One prominent example is the “George Washington Belt,” which commemorates creation of the 1794 Canandaigua Treaty. Considered one of the Iroquois Confederacy’s greatest feats of diplomacy, the friendship agreement fostered peaceful relations between the U.S. government and the Haudenosaunee.

The six-foot-long George Washington Belt—one of the longest wampum belts in the Confederacy—depicts 13 figures holding hands (a representation of the 13 colonies), at the center of which stand two smaller figures (signifying Onondaga Chief Tadodaho and George Washington) and a longhouse. Each year, Haudenosaunee leaders and clan mothers make a pilgrimage to Washington, D.C., bringing a reproduction of the ceremonial wampum belt in remembrance of the Iroquois leaders who, along with Washington, signed the treaty more than two centuries ago.

Almost two centuries earlier, another belt, the Two-Row Wampum-Covenant Chain Treaty, recorded the earliest known agreement between Indigenous people and European colonists in North America. After Dutch merchants and settlers began invading and settling Haudenosaunee land, the two sides came together in the early 17th century—the date is not recorded, but possibly as early as 1609 or 1613—to codify the rules of their coexistence.

The design, which includes two purple rows of beads separated by white rows, symbolizes two vessels—a Native canoe and a European ship—traveling on a river side by side, separate and autonomous. “It represents an agreement that we are going to co-exist on the river of life,” says Rick Hill, who has published the most comprehensive oral history of the Two-Row wampum belt to date, reflecting the Native tradition of passing down tribal history orally from generation to generation by elders, knowledge keepers and clan mothers. The two-row design reflects an even larger Haudenosaunee philosophical principle of maintaining harmony in any sphere of life through non-domination and balance.

As Haudenosaunee elders relate, wampum’s origins coincide with those of the six-nation Iroquois Confederacy itself—as reflected in the so-called Hiawatha Belt, which stands as the original record of the confederacy's founding. Below is a retelling of that history, summarized from the stories told by community leaders Peter Jemison (Seneca), Chief Oren Lyons (Onondaga) and Tom Porter (Mohawk):

Before the first Europeans arrived along the northeastern coast, the five tribes of the Cayuga, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca and Mohawk were at war. It was a time of great sadness. At this time, the Peacemaker, who had arrived in a stone canoe, came and met with Hiawatha, whose wife and daughters had been killed by the Onondaga leader Todadaho.

As Hiawatha walked along a lake, feeling great grief for the loss of his family, he saw birds (ducks or geese) fly away, revealing pure white shells that had been left behind, which were wampum. With these wampum, Hiawatha used the shells to bring forward a clear mind. Today, this is known as a condolence ceremony.

Hiawatha and the Peacemaker met with the five tribes, and one by one, they decided to unify, all except the Onondaga, due to Todadaho, a tyrant of a man who had killed Hiawatha’s wife and daughters.

The Peacemaker and Hiawatha met with a woman known as Jikonsaseh, who had learned a song from birds that she taught to the leaders. And as they all sang, Todadaho came out from the swamp and decided to accept the message of peace. Jikonsaseh placed an antler crown of authority on his head, and he became the council's highest chief.

The Peacemaker and Hiawatha then uprooted a great pine tree, and all of the chiefs placed their weapons of war in the hole and placed the tree back on top. The Peacemaker assembled all of the chiefs together. Each was holding their strand of wampum.

The Peacemaker wove all of the strands together into a belt, with the white tree of peace in the middle representing the Onondaga and the other four emblems representing the Seneca, Cayuga, Oneida and Mohawk. (Editor’s note: The Tuscarora did not join until later, in 1722.) The great belt represented the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and is still held and honored to this day.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy remains the world's oldest continuous democracy still in existence.