Forty porcelain bead necklaces, received according to the required protocols by members of the Kahnawake Longhouse even before the opening of the exhibition which was to present them to the public. This is how the McCord Stewart Museum introduced its exhibition Wampum: pearls of diplomacy, immediately reminding us that these objects are not relics but still living political instruments. For those interested in protocol, this museum precaution already says the essential: among the nations of the North-East Amerindian, Haudenosaunee, Wendat, Abenaki, diplomacy never separated the object from the words it conveyed.
A speech was only fully valid if it was accompanied by a wampum or a string of beads. The designs of the necklace served as a reminder of the message, and the quantity of beads signaled the importance of the understanding transmitted. It was not a simple exchange of gifts: it was an international protocol so firmly established that Europeans ended up adopting it in their own negotiations with indigenous nations, until the beginning of the 19th century.
The feast, in this context, cannot be isolated like a dinner in the sense of the European courts. It is part of a broader sequence: reception of delegates, advice, speaking in a recognized order, presentation of necklaces, formalized response, then circulation of donations and food in a gesture of hospitality. Precedence was not to be seen in a seating plan but in the authority of those who carried and presented the wampums, and in the recognition of the guardians of diplomatic memory. A study carried out in New France shows that the indigenous nations came to consider the annual distribution of gifts as a real diplomatic obligation of the French, proof that it was their logic of giving that was imposed on the new arrivals, and not the other way around.
No source allows us to reconstruct a detailed menu or a fixed placement for these meetings. Diplomatic memory favored the word, the necklace and the alliance rather than the culinary inventory.
This is a lesson in itself: the pomp of protocol is not always measured by the dishes placed on the table, it is sometimes measured by the symbolic density of an object capable, on its own, of carrying a word, a memory and proof of agreement.
