Mashantucket Pequot Museum Visit and the Hunt for Purple Wampum!

On Easter sunday, Anne and I took a vigorous ramble along the rocky coastline of Beavertail State Park in picturesque Jamestown, RI, hoping to find some interesting ocean curiosities washed up by the recent storms (below):



I was excited to find a lobster buoy and a "mermaids purse" (an empty skate egg sac), though there wasn't much else to speak of. Driving back to Providence, we pulled over to examine Mackerel Cove beach and Sheffield Cove, where we became enamored of the rich, purple-hued pieces of quahog clam shell that dotted the shoreline at low tide. We eagerly picked up as many specimens as we could hold before hunger and fatigue forced us back along our journey home.



I didn't have any particular project in mind for those lovely purple quahog shells, though I was aware that some of the coastal Native American tribes fashioned the shells into tubular purple beads that became valued as a form of currency often referred to as "wampum". Well, as luck would have it, I was treated to all sorts of great information on wampum, and every other aspect of the lives and culture of the local Mashantucket Pequot Indians at the amazing Mashantucket Pequot Museum yesterday!

I had heard great things about the museum, and was excited to finally make the one hour drive down to the Pequot reservation in Connecticut to visit; boy, were we surprised and delighted with what we found! Opened in 1998, the museum is huge, with beautifully designed exhibits, dioramas, films, interactive elements and immersive environments that cover seemingly every aspect of life as a Pequot from the ice age to modern times. By the time we had taken in the ice-age caribou hunt, the life-sized mastadon, woodland foraging displays and a peek at life under the Mashantucket rock shelter, we were starting to feel some serious museum fatigue. A stroll through the gift shop and subsequent cookie break rejuvenated us nicely, though, and it's a good thing, because the most astonishing experience was still to come!

(image courtesy of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum)

The Pequot Village is a stunning, immersive environment that recreates, down to the minutest detail, life in a Pequot village. A hand-held audio phone allows the participant to punch in numbers to access spoken descriptions of some 35 different scenes or activities while wandering through the village. I always love those miniature dioramas of life in Native American villages you see at some museums; this is kind of like one of those, except it is all life-sized and totally realistic: there is steam billowing out of the top of the sweat lodge, you can walk right inside and explore the sachem's (chief's) wigwam, or peer into the medicine man's wigwam, where a healing ceremony is taking place! Oh, and I know what to do with my purple quahog shells now... make wampum!

(image courtesy of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum)

In one part of the village, a family sat around a fire enjoying a meal of succotash and mussels, while dad cut up quahog shells to make purple wampum beads!!!

above: strings of wampum beads from the collection of Harvard's Peabody Museum of Anthropology.

There was only an hour and a half left until closing time; we could easily have spent twice that exploring the village! Beyond the village are films depicting various aspects of the Pequot experience, and exhibits detailing the changes that Pequots faced after the arrival of the europeans. Although we made one last stop at the gift shop to pick up some well crafted beaded items, the best souvenir of all was the newly learned appreciation for the local Pequot history and culture that we took away from our visit to this fine museum!

I will do a follow-up post if I manage to produce some wampum beads from my quahog shells (I say "if" because it doesn't look easy to do)! I'm really glad to have learned more about quahog wampum... I hope you will click here to learn more about the role that wampum played in Pequot life! Below is an image of some wampum beads in a partially finished state, courtesy of the National Museum of the American Indian:


Time to go make some wampum! Thanks for joining me!