Wampum consisted of traditional shell beads created by Native American tribes in the Northeast that early European colonists aggressively adopted as official legal tender because…

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Wampum consisted of traditional shell beads created by Native American tribes in the Northeast that early European colonists aggressively adopted as official legal tender because they literally ran out of metal coins to use for trade. The colonizers quickly realized they could just industrially manufacture their own beads using superior metal tools, flooding the fragile local economy with massive amounts of counterfeit currency and heavily devaluing the wampum. It was essentially the 17th-century equivalent of printing endless amounts of fiat money to artificially inflate a market, utterly destabilizing the trade networks that the indigenous populations had carefully maintained for generations. Europeans basically showed up on a new continent, looked at a deeply meaningful cultural artifact used for diplomacy, decided it was cash, and then completely ruined its value through sheer capitalist greed within a few decades