Art as National
Literature:
The Cherokee
Wampum Belt
The color white and the Cherokee
• White is a universal symbol of peace
• The traditional peace-pipe was made of white
stone
• The word for white is often found in sacred
formulas to mean peace and happiness
• In the Green Corn Dance, people are invited to
come along the “white path” and enter the “white
house of peace” to partake of the new “white
food” (Mooney, 494)
What is Wampum?
• Wampum is an Algonquian word that translates roughly
to white shell beads.
• Historical wampum are small, cylindrical, white and
purple beads.
• Historical wampum beads were used for decoration and
for trade by natives living in the coastal New England
region where the shells used for making the beads were
found.
• In the early 1600s European traders and settlers began
to use wampum beads as money. The shells replaced
European currency which required gold and silver not
readily available in “the New World”.
Trade and Negotiation: Wampum and the Cherokee
• The use of wampum as currency was spread through the fur
trade to the Iroquois in the northeast and the Creek and
Cherokee in the southeast.
• The word for money in Cherokee is atela/atsela/adela (dialectic
differences). This is also the word used for bead (Mooney,
488).
• Wampum was instrumental in diplomatic affairs. Native
confederacies, such as the Iroquois, the Creek, the Cherokee,
exchanged strings or belts of wampum to solidify negotiations.
• When Cherokee men visited other tribes such as the Iroquois,
they often took wampum belts made by Cherokee women as a
gift (and sign of peace) for the Iroquoian women (Perdue, 93).
Cherokee Lawgiver
by Cecil Dick
Courtesy of Rennard
Strickland
“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).
How do wampum belts function
as material rhetoric?
• Wampum belts continues to be used as
mnemonic devices, legal documents, and
historical communicative devices.
• Each belt signifies a particular event. The
beads convey a speaker’s words and can
be translated for a particular meaning.
How do belts communicate?
• The meaning of the belt must be
publicly performed in order for its
message to be properly
disseminated.
• Used outside an official cultural event,
negates the validity of a belt’s
message.
Keetoowah (Nighthawk) Society members with the historic wampum of the
Cherokees near Gore, Oklahoma, in 1916.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society
Transition to Writing
• By 1808 Cherokees were able to use Sequoyah’s
method of writing in syllabary to translate their laws into
a written and readable language.
• “In the ninety years between the adoption of the first
written law (l808) and the abolition of tribal courts (1898)
wampum was supplanted by more than a million pages
of legal transcripts and printed material. By 1896 the
Redbird Smith-Keetoowah movement of the Cherokees
acknowledged that understanding of the wampum had
been lost, and recovery of these ancient laws became
one of the cornerstones of [traditionalist] revival"
(Strickland, 103).
Citations for Power Point and
Lesson Plan
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Sources:
Duncan, Barbara. Living Stories of the Cherokee. Chapel Hill, NC: The
University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
Mooney, James. Cherokee History, Myths and Sacred Formulas.
Cherokee, NC: Cherokee Publications, 2006.
Perdue, Theda. Cherokee Women. Lincoln, NE: The University of
Nebraska Press, 1998.
Strickland, Rennard. Fire and the Spirits: Cherokee Law from Clan to
Court. Norman, OK: The University of Oklahoma Press, 1982.
Websites:
http://craftrevival.wcu.edu/
http://english.ttu.edu/KAIROS/3.1/features/smith/episodes/1789/comments/
Cher/wampum.html
http://www.history.org/Foundation/journal/Summer07/counterfeit.cfm