Wampum (Haudenosaunee Confederacy)

This is the Haudenosaunee Confederacy's own institutional page on wampum, published on the Confederacy's official website. As read, the page carries no stated publication or revision date. It states that Haudenosaunee warriors of exceptional skill were given training to interpret the wampum belts, and that the Onondaga Nation, as Keepers of the Central Fire, was trusted with the task of keeping all wampum records. For the narrow claim this atlas cites it for, who within the Confederacy is entrusted to keep and to read its own wampum, the Confederacy's own statement about its own internal assignment of that office is the primary and, by the nature of the claim, the only kind of source that could establish it: an outside ethnography could describe wampum from without, but only the Confederacy can state who it has itself entrusted with keeping and reading its own record. That is the same reasoning the atlas already applies to the Lakota Summit V declaration and to Arvol Looking Horse's public statement, both cited elsewhere in the atlas as the holders' own account of what they themselves permit, forbid or entrust. It is cited here only for that custodial and interpretive structure and not as a source for the Great Law's own content, which the atlas does not attempt to reconstruct from wampum or otherwise.