Language affects the way history is written

I’ve decided to make a series of many describing the many misconceptions in art history and how it all boils down to language. This post is about the misunderstanding about wampum. It is commonly thought of as the Indigenous Americans’ past currency, even though it is actually a shell mainly used in jewelry by several Indigenous tribes.

Language is how we communicate with each other. It is the reason why societies exist. Nonetheless, when dealt with accordingly, conflict can occur. This can be anything from a simple misunderstanding among friends to the final cause of why a person is fired. Miscommunication in language can even explain the flaws in one’s shared knowledge of history. 

For example, it is widely thought that many tribes in North America formerly used “shells” (wampum) as their form of currency. However, this was not the case. To give more context, when the Europeans first landed in the Americas, they encountered the Indigenous Americans and quickly realized they were different. For starters, they did not speak nor understand each other’s language. The Indigenous Americans spoke different languages based on their tribe, while the Europeans spoke English. This caused several misunderstandings, one of them being the shell incident. The Europeans believed that, to exist, every society must have a form of currency, and they couldn’t accept that the Indigenous Americans didn’t have such a thing. Of course, people would trade among each other for the goods they needed, but there wasn’t an official form of money or anything of that sort. Additionally, due to the language barrier, discussing the differences between the cultures was exceptionally difficult. Nonetheless, due to the knowledge of the following historical events, it is unknown whether the Europeans wanted to understand the culture of the many Indigenous tribes. It seems as if the Europeans were mainly focused on colonizing. 

However, one cannot change the past. It is impossible to know what the outcome would have been if the circumstances were different. Perhaps if the Europeans were more understanding, and there was a common language among the Indigenous tribes and the Europeans, history would not be how it is currently. Misunderstandings like such that are constantly fed to the ordinary citizen would be cleared up, and our knowledge would hold more clarity.