This is the last of several parts on the long beaded belt of white wampum with two parallel lines of purple beads, the Gä•sweñta’.
A Canadian art museum site says the original Gä•sweñta’ exists today only in memory and reproduction. From what they say, one is left to speculate. Perhaps it is in the man cave of a Silicon Valley billionaire. Maybe it is in an oil lawyer’s private office on the 200th floor of a Dubai skyscraper. Perhaps it was on a wall of one of Saddam’s palaces before it was bombed, or in a private collection in ill-fated Fallujah or Mariupol.
Fortunately, we need not speculate. The Joseph Brant Grand River band took both the Two Row Belt and the Friendship Belt with them to Canada in 1783 to establish the Nations’ Council there following the Treaty of Paris. In 1843, Chief John Buck, holder of the Onondaga Wolf Clan title Skanawati, became the Grand River wampum keeper and, until his death in 1893, preserved some 22 important belts and their messages. Historian Kathryn Muller writes:
It is crucial to understand that these belts belonged to the League as a whole, serving as mnemonic devices to preserve political transactions and creation stories for generations to come and…
