Haudenosaunee bound a treaty in a wampum belt

When Dutch traders moved up the Hudson River into Haudenosaunee territory around 1613, the two sides needed to establish binding terms for how they would coexist, but the Haudenosaunee had no alphabet-based writing system, and neither side had reason to simply trust the other's account of what had been agreed once the negotiators present were no longer around to confirm it. A spoken agreement alone, with no durable record either side actually trusted, risked being reinterpreted or denied entirely once the individuals present at the negotiation were gone.

The Dutch proposed recording the agreement with pen and paper, their own trusted method — but that method meant nothing evidentially to the Haudenosaunee, who had their own established, culturally authoritative way of creating binding, durable records. Simply adopting the other side's record-keeping method would have made the agreement legible to only one of the two parties who needed to trust it equally.

Wove the terms into a wampum belt's pattern, read back by trained orators on both sides, giving each side its own trusted path to the same binding meaning.

The belt's pattern encoded the terms visually, so meaning didn't depend on either side's writing system.

Both sides helped design the belt, so each recognized it as authoritative.

Trained orators on both sides could read the pattern back into exact spoken terms, preserving the agreement.

The belt's durability and the living interpretive tradition let the agreement survive the original negotiators.

For an agreement to outlive its makers, encode it in a durable artifact both sides can interpret, and keep a trained tradition to read it.

The Two Row Wampum (Guswenta) became the founding template the Haudenosaunee applied to subsequent treaties with European and North American governments, including the 1677 Covenant Chain with the British and the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua with the United States, and the Onondaga Nation continues to serve as the belt's designated keeper.