The Iroquois use wampum belts as covenants and petitions for understanding. Words spoken during an agreement are made into wampum to be used for ceremony, teaching, and reminders of law and values.

In the real world of seventeenth-century America, the European newcomers were outnumbered by the natives and dependent upon them for food, trade, and survival.

The natives understood themselves to be self-governing nations exercising sovereign authority over their people and territory, and with a far better claim to occupancy and long usage than any recent European settlement huddled on the coastline could muster. Accordingly, the indigenous nations signed numerous international peace and friendship treaties.

They granted rights of trade and use over some of their territory and agreed to co-existing or parallel sovereignty in other areas, and asserted, time after time, their inalienable sovereignty. The classic presentation of this view is in many of the treatise they signed with the Dutch, English and French nations. The First Nations represent it with a belt of two parallel rows of wampum

These two rows [of wampum] symbolise two paths or vessels, travelling down the same river together. One, a birch bark canoe, will be for the Indian people, their laws, their customs and their ways. The other, a ship, will be for the white people and their laws, their customs, and their ways. They chose to travel together, side by side, but in their own boat. With the understanding that neither of them will try to steer the other's vessel.

This view is the basis of all treaties the First Nations made with European governments and their descendants.

Are we so far detached from this history that it is no longer a possibility? Does one people’s rights and claims to a land supersede another? On what basis are such claims made?