[music] In the centuries before European settlement The Wabanaki nations forged alliances, resolved disputes and negotiated peace through diplomacy.

Their agreements were not written on paper.

They were carried in memory.

They were carried in ceremony and they were carried in wampum.

To the Wabanaki, A wampum belt was far more than decoration.

Each bead held, meaning each pattern told a story.

Each belt preserved an agreement between nations.

In the Penobscot language a wampum bead is animate.

It possesses spirit.

These were not simply objects.

They were living reminders of promises made.

A council fire burns.

Diplomats from different indigenous nations gather around A powerful spiritual leader sits at the center.

He lights his ceremonial pipe as he inhales, drawing the fire into the tobacco.

Something extraordinary happens.

From his breath, from his chest, from the spirit within him as he speaks wampum beads emerge.

They fall from his mouth one by one.

Once transformed, these beads were woven into belts.

They were not simply records.

They were sacred, living texts carrying the weight of promises between nations.

The survival of communities could depend upon these promises.

To enter into a treaty was to enter into a relationship.

You trusted your ally to honor their word, and you were expected to honor yours.

The wampum belt was the document of that trust.

Not just a symbol, but a sacred commitment.

Wampum belts helped bind together nations across Wabanaki territory and beyond.

They recorded agreements between sovereign peoples.

They represented trust, and trust was essential for survival Then another world arrived.

A world of paper, ink, signatures and seals.

To Europeans, agreements were preserved in written documents.

The authority was not in the spoken word.

It was what was written on the page.

But these documents were about more than recording agreements.

They were tied to land, resources and wealth.

For colonial governments and settlers, land was something to be owned, divided and sold.

Forests became timber.

Rivers became routes for trade.

Animals became commodities.

The earth itself became a source of profit.

Treaties written in ink and sealed on paper became tools for securing access to these resources.

Lines were drawn where none had existed before.

Territories were measured.

Boundaries were fixed.

What had once been shared landsc became parcels of property.

When these two worlds collided, they often understood the same agreement very differently.

To the Wabanaki, treaties established relationships and responsibilities between nations.

To colonial governments, treaties often became instruments for defining ownership, territory, and control.

One negotiation could produce two very different understandings.

What one side understood as a promise to coexist, the other could interpret it as a transfer of land.

What one viewed as a sacred relationship the other recorded as a legal transaction.

And as these differences deepened.

Something else began to fade.

When agreements are no longer guided by shared values, respect, responsibility, and balance, it becomes harder to know where justice lies.

And when those markers disappear power can take their place.

The power of money.

The power of expansion.

The power of taking more than what was given.

Without a shared understanding of justice.

Agreements can become tools of imbalance.

Relationships become transactions.

But the spirit of the wampum belts endures.

They remind us of a time when agreements were measured not by ownership, but by obligation.

Not by possession, but by relationships, Not by profit, but by responsibility to one another and to the land itself.

[music]