The white and purple shells, threaded to make “wampum strings” among the eastern woodlands Indians, had both ceremonial and commercial uses. Hendrick Aupaumut, in his history of the Mohicans, mentioned that there was a custodian of the wampum strings brought by embassies from other tribes. It was his responsibility to remember the messages represented by these symbols and also to keep track of similar communications that had been sent out by the Mohicans sometimes as far as to their relatives, the Miamis, in Ohio. In Aupaumut’s phrase, an important message without a wampum string to ratify it was “an empty word.”

The sequence of white and purple beads was different in every string and served as a mneumonic aid in remembering what was represented. In colonial times when the beads became standardized in shape and size they could be woven into belts which would depict messages by stylized figures in the design.

There is still a ceremonial use of wampum strings among the Iroquois Indians of new York and Canada. When an important leader dies there is a Condolence Council to mourn his passing and to “raise up” a new chief. A part of the mourning ritual is the Requickening Address to remove the various kinds of pain caused by the death. The first “word” is “the Eyes,” and refers to eyes that are weeping. The speaker mentions the sorrow and gives a wampum string to the mourners, saying, “The tears are wiped away.” This string, eighteen beads long, has an alternating design of one purple for every two white beads. Other presentations refer to the ears, the throat, the blood stains on the mat, and the loss of the sun from the sky, caused by the death. To restore the sun in the sky a string of three purple beads followed by twenty‐one white ones is presented.

It used to be that wampum strings were used for other kinds of compensation. In 1636 when Captain John Oldham was killed by the Indians on Block Island, an expeditionary force form Massachusetts bay Colony demanded an indemnity of 1,000 fathoms of wampum. In 1645 the Narragansetts paid the English 2,000 fathoms “for their misbehavior.”

Among the Iroquois, in the case of a murder, the bereaved family would be consoled with ten strings of wampum if the victim was a man, or twenty if a woman had been killed. For an

additional ten string the family would spare the life of the murderer. In the restitutive, that then punitive law practiced by the Indians, it sometimes happened that the murderer would be adopted into the bereaved family to replace their loss. The Shawnees fixed the indemnity for murder at 60 fathoms for a man and 150 for a woman. The strikingly higher valuation on the life of a woman should help refute the Anglo‐American folklore that women occupied a position of low status in American Indian life.

David P. McAllester (1916‐2006), a one‐sixty‐fourth Narragansett, was a Navaho scholar and professor of anthropology and music at Wesleyan University. Living in Monterey, Mass., he wrote Indian Notes for the monthly Monterey News from 1981 to 1994. This essay originally appeared in the newsletter August 1984.