Making Wampum Our people have made shell beads for thousands of years, wearing them as decoration, using them in ceremonies and rituals, and sometimes trading them or giving them as gifts to seal friendships or political alliances. Recently, we've acquired metal drills from the Europeans, which enable us to make tiny cylindrical beads, much smaller and finer than we could make before. We call these valuable new beads wampum. We use two types of shells to make the wampum. The white beads we make from the stem of the conch shell; they're the yellowish, spiral-shaped shell pieces on the flat rock. The purple beads come from part of the shell of the quahog, or hardshell clam. We break the shells into small pieces, use a coarse stone to grind each piece into a cylinder, and then finally drill the hole so the bead can be strung. The finished bead is tiny, only about a quarter of an inch long, so the man uses the tool beneath his foot to hold the bead steady while drilling with both hands. It takes as much as half an hour to make a single bead, so you can imagine how long it takes to make an entire wampum belt. You can see a wampum belt behind you, outside the door of the wigwam across the way. Behind the Scenes with Museum Educator Trudie Lamb Richmond I can't say how wampum became sacred, or important. I just know that that was something that was passed on to me, too, as a Native person. Wampum did not begin as Indian money. Wampum represented a contractual agreement between people, that the wampum was a symbol of your word. An exchange of wampum, this was a bond between us. It was also an agreement between you and the spirit world, the Creator. And to some, it represented status. The more wampum you wore, it meant you were a person of status. We've learned that sometimes a lot of wampum was buried with a person, especially with children. Maybe that's because wampum was precious, and our children were precious, too. I like to wear wampum today for a number of reasons. Wampum in southern New England is representative of who we are; it's like turquoise for Native people in the southwest. Native people there, like the Navajo, see turquoise as being sacred.