Art as National Literature: The Cherokee Wampum Belt

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Art as National Literature The Cherokee Wampum
Belt
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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)

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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.

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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).

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Cherokee Lawgiver by Cecil DickCourtesy 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).
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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 speakers words and can be translated
  for a particular meaning.

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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 belts message.

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Keetoowah (Nighthawk) Society members with the
historic wampum of the Cherokees near Gore,
Oklahoma, in 1916. Courtesy of the Oklahoma
Historical Society
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Transition to Writing

• By 1808 Cherokees were able to use Sequoyahs
  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).

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Citations for Power Point and Lesson Plan

• 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/e
  pisodes/1789/comments/Cher/wampum.html
• http//www.history.org/Foundation/journal/Summer07
  /counterfeit.cfm