According to Penn family accounts, Tamanend, a Lenape leader from the Falls of the Delaware, gave this ceremonial belt to William Penn to mark the occasion of the Treaty of Shackamaxon in 1682. Perhaps the maker of the belt intended the linked hands of the two figures—the taller Lenape figure and the smaller European figure—to commemorate a moment of peaceful coexistence. The violence and displacement suffered by the Lenape people in the decades that followed the treaty complicate its legacy.
See this belt on view in our New Early American Galleries.
"Wampum Belt," around 1682, likely by Lenape women artists (Temporary loan from the Board of Trustees of the Atwater Kent Museum (Philadelphia History Museum) Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection)
