Topic: How To Invest

What is Pat’s commentary for the week of October 5, 2021

Article Excerpt

Recent news events remind me of what I learned in grade school about wampum, which I understood to be an early form of money used by Indigenous North Americans. Here’s an excerpt from Wikipedia.org on the subject of wampum: Wampum is a traditional shell bead of the Eastern Woodland tribes of Native Americans. It includes white shell beads hand fashioned from the North Atlantic channeled whelk shell and white and purple beads made from the quahog or Western North Atlantic hard-shelled clam. Before European contact, strings of wampum were used for storytelling, ceremonial gifts, and recording important treaties and historical events, such as the Two Row Wampum Treaty and Hiawatha belts. Wampum was also used by the northeastern Indigenous tribes as a means of exchange, strung together in lengths for convenience. The first Colonists mistook it for a currency and adopted it as such in trading with them. Eventually, the Colonists applied their technologies to more efficiently produce wampum, which caused inflation and ultimately its obsolescence as currency. This sounds a little…