Photographs (left to right): All Mohave Desert, California/Nevada

Wampum Belt Archive

 

Wabanaki Chief Mourning Belt

Speck (1915), Plate 24, Figure E.

Description:

Speck reported:

"Upon the death of the Penobscot chief, and the same is true of the other three tribes, the people went into mourning for a year, after cutting down and burying the flag pole that stood in front of the council house symbolizing the chief's office. t the end of the year of mourning the council of the bereaved tribe would send messengers to the other allies inviting them to come and raise up a new chief to fill the place of the deceased. The whole ceremony was a lengthy and formal one attended by reception rites, dancing and feasting, which have been described in full in my other work. To repeat a few essential details here, the Penobscot, when calling upon the other allies, sent two chiefs as messengers, wearing a black diagonal bar of paint across their faces, and carrying wampum as a sign of mourning and summons. These messengers proceeded by canoe first to the Passamaquoddy, resting at the village near Princeton, then went to the tribal headquarters at Pleasant point. The wampum they carried was either in the form of the Wabanaki alliance belt, the dark one with four white triangles (pl. xiv, fig. a), or one more specially symbolical. The latter as a mourning belt was smaller than the rest, about twelve inches long, mostly white with a section of blue in the center representing the dead chief, and flanked by two blue crosses denoting the second chiefs or captains in mourning (pl. xiv, fig. e)."

Reference:

Speck, Frank G. 1915. The Eastern Algonquian Wabanaki Confederacy. American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 17, No. 3, July-Sept., pp. 492-508.