Tribal Histories

Menominee History

[music]

[singing in Menominee]

– I’m David Grignon, tribal historic preservation officer for the Menominee tribe. We have had a lot of community support with this museum. A lot of people wanted to help any way they could. We said we wanted a facility that looked like the Grand Medicine Lodge of the Menominee people. As you can see, that’s the way it looks today.

Because we believe that bringing the things back that were sacred to us when our people made everyday things. There was a ceremony that went along with that. They didn’t just go ahead and do it, they offered their tobacco and they asked the Creator for help to build the things that they did. Getting this together was something that we knew that had to be done. We had to properly display and bring forth Menominee culture and the language here to the Menominee people. We just saw the kenew flying over there, the eagle. He came by and said, you guys are doing a good job.

At this time…

I just want to say posoh to everyone, on this special day of our people. –.

[applause]

– Menominee History was funded in part by Irene Daniell Kress, the Evjue Foundation, a charitable arm of the Capital Times, Ron and Patty Anderson, the estate of Dale Druckrey, the Wisconsin History Fund with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.

[music and rushing water]

[speaking in Menominee]

My name is Dave Grignon. My Menominee name is Nahwahquaw, which means, when the sun is at mid-sky, or noon. I was given that name by one of our elders of the tribe about seven years ago. I’d like to speak about the Menominee people today, who we are, and why we’re here. Menominee is an Algonquin word. The full word is Omeahnomenewak.

It’s People of the Wild Rice. At the time of creation the creator gave us two special gifts so that we would always have that. Those two gifts were wild rice and maple sugar. Throughout the years after that the Menominee were always in the midst of wild rice. It would seem like, wherever we travelled, the rice would be there. If we left that area, the rice would follow us. So the neighboring tribes gave us that name, Menominee, People of the Wild Rice, which we still have today. Our people have another name for ourselves as Kiyeas Mamachitawuk. That means, the Ancient People, because we’ve been here so long. We don’t have a migration story.

We are the original inhabitants, the ancient people, of this land, what is now Wisconsin and Upper Michigan. The Menominees were created about 60 miles east of here at the mouth of the Menominee River. It was here that our creation story started, our origin story. It was said that over 10,000 years ago, we were created at this spot in minekanee, it’s called, and it was here the Great Bear came out of the mouth of the Menominee River. He didn’t want to be alone. He saw the eagle flying above. He said, “Brother eagle, come down! Be my brother.” The eagle descended and walked with him up the river. As they continued to walk, they encountered a moose, wolf, and crane.

These were the first five clans of the Menominee people. This is who the Menominee descended from. The Menominees, for centuries, lived off the environment, always making sure that we only took what we needed. But we always gave back in forms of ceremonies, prayers and offerings, asking the creator and thanking him for the good life that we did live in this area. Our people were called dreamers also. When I say that, is that we could foretell the future in the dreams that we had. One of the dreams was that living down in the Green Bay area, there would be a huge wooden boat that would come into the bay. Soon after, this boat did come into bay, and in this boat was Jean Nicolet. He was the first European to come into Menominee territory. It’s interesting to note that the Menominee say that we discovered him on our shores, but the history books say that Nicolet had discovered the native peoples.

The Menominees occupied ten million acres of land, which is now the upper peninsula of Michigan and most of Wisconsin. Within this land, we’ve lived for centuries and called our home. We are the hunters and gatherers. We did occupy certain areas of that ten million acres at one time or another. We were not a sedentary people. We went where the fish was. We went where the deer and the bear were, that things of that sort. In certain seasons, we had to do things. In the spring, we had maple sugar, so we had our sugar camps. In the summer, we had fishing and growing small gardens.

In the fall, we had wild rice. Then wintertime was a time of fishing again, and doing hunting. We followed the seasons here in this ten million acres of land. Or course, the Europeans wanted this land to live on as they migrated from the east coast. Not only Europeans were coming, but also the eastern tribes were being pushed westward into Menominee territory. Our people didn’t have no concept of selling or buying, or things of that sort. We had no word in our language for boundaries. We didn’t know what that was. One of the things they wanted us to do was set our boundaries. Within this territory we were free to hunt, fish and gather.

It was a hard concept for us to imagine. But we did enter into these agreements, and through this series of several treaties we had to sell most of our land. There’s documentation that several of our chiefs were reluctant to do so, but did do so to fulfill our peace and friendship with the United States government. In this time also, Wisconsin was a territory and the Menominees had the remaining lands that was needed to become a state. So the American government came to us again in 1848 and asked us to cede our remaining lands in Wisconsin and move to Crow Wing, Minnesota. Our chiefs were very suspicious of this treaty. They said that we had to look at this Crow Wing country, some 600,000 acres of land. After a party of chiefs went over to look and inspect the Crow Wing country, led by Chief Oshkosh, Oshkosh came back with the chiefs and reported to the Menominee people that he didn’t like that land over there. The government said it was full of wild rice, fish and game. When our chiefs got over there to inspect that land it wasn’t what the government had said.

There was two warring tribes. The Sioux and Chippewa were in that area, plus there was not as much wild game and wild rice that we needed to live on. With that, Oshkosh and a number of Menominee chiefs went to Washington to talk to the Great White Father. At that time it was President Fillmore. Oshkosh is quoted to have said that, “The poorest land in Wisconsin was better than that of Crow Wing. Please let my people stay in Wisconsin.” Because it was our ancestral territory. Oshkosh had told the president, he said, I know an area that is considered a wilderness where no one wants to live. Let me move my tribe there. The president listened and let the Menominee people stay in the Wolf River area.

That brought about the Treaty of 1854 that established the Menominee Indian Reservation. The wilderness that they were talking about was the forest and the rivers and streams that you see today. This area that our people had cherished for thousands of years was established as a reservation for us, some 276,000 acres of land. Like I said, we were hunters and gatherers, and we had to make do in this land, to live, hunt, fish, and gather. If you can imagine, we had bands of Menominees that had to follow the rules of the treaty and come to this reservation from the Menominee River, from the Green Bay area, from the Milwaukee area, all the way down into Chicago, up over into Eau Claire, and points in between. All these bands had to move here to the reservation and start a new life in this territory.

During this time there were several changes that took place amongst the Menominee people. And there was always attempts by the missionaries to convert the Menominee people to Christianity. But there was a traditional community at Zor that kept on and clung to the old ways of the medicine lodge, and later the Dream Dance, or the Big Drum, which is still with us today. Our people started to realize there is value to this land besides cultural and spiritual value.

There is economic value also. This brought about, they started cutting some of the forest, the dead and downed trees, to process that for lumber for our cabins, for our homes. But then we had asked if we could start cutting some of the white pine and send them down to the mills off the reservation. Our chief said that if we do this right, if we cut this forest in a fashion that it will always be here, let’s do that. Chief Oshkosh came up with the concept of saying, if we cut the mature trees, start on the east part of the reservation. By the time we get to the west side of the reservations, it will be time to start over. That set up the concept of sustained yield, which is a modern forestry practice today. After realizing the value of what we had here, the Menominees started becoming financially secure in the things that we needed at that time, up into the early 1900s. During this time there was a huge blow-down, a tornado, that came to the reservation. It blew several hundred thousand trees down.

That needed to be harvested before it rotted. Our people had this idea to process our own logs here. We asked the government if could do that, to use our own money to set up a saw mill.

In this time there was a lot of attempts of assimilation by the government on the Menominee people. There were the boarding schools of course, where the Menominees were taken off the reservation into a boarding school setting and were not allowed to come back home for long periods of time. The idea was to take the culture away, take the language away. We had two boarding schools right on the reservation. One was operated by the government. The other one was operated by the Catholic Church. There was another attempt to take our culture away called relocation.

They would send our families off to cities all across the country and promise them jobs and work, and things of that sort. But when our families, say, got to Chicago, or Denver, or New York, of course they all had a hard time. Coming from the reservation and trying to live in a city. And the jobs that were promised weren’t there. They had to try to live by any means in the city. Most of them came back. Through all that, the Menominee people endured, kept our stories, things that were passed down from generation to generation, and the sacred Menominee language that we still speak amongst our people. Through probably about a hundred years, we were called one of the most successful tribes in the United States. There was a lot of people that didn’t like that from the government side, because we were doing so well. We still had a huge land-base here on the reservation.

We’re also managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, our forest was, but we always kept a good watch on them. In their management practices, they had over-cut a lot of our timber and our people knew that. We hired lawyers with the money that we had to sue the federal government for the damages to our forest. This was done in 1934, and it took almost 20 years, up until the 1950s, that we won the case. We won the huge lawsuit against the federal government to the tune of $8.5 million. At that time, that was a lot of money. Besides winning this lawsuit, we had built up a huge amount in the treasury and we were really doing well. There was talk of a senator in Washington that wanted to terminate our tribe because we wanted some of that award money from the lawsuit, and we wanted to distribute that to the tribal membership. He said if the Menominees want to do that, than they should go on their own, be set free from federal supervision. So our tribal leaders found a way to form a government much like the other counties in the state.

The Menominee Reservation was terminated in June of 1954, however termination didn’t take effect until May of 1961. Within this time the Menominee people lost a lot of our funds we had in the treasury. Individual Menominees had to buy their own land. There were attempts at that time to take the forest away from us. Our leaders formed a corporation, the Menominee Enterprises, Inc., to help keep this land intact, which they did. But we were told that we were not a tribe no more. A lot of our people did not want to teach the language to the younger ones no more. There was economic loss and cultural loss. There was this huge tax base we had to pay on the forest, and we had to find ways to come up with that.

We still had the saw mill, but the sales from the mill itself didn’t cover the property tax. So what the board of directors came up with was the idea of selling land again. On the southeastern side of the reservation were nine spring-fed lakes that they wanted to turn into a lake development, and sell these lots to outsiders, to come in and build large homes on these lots. They would pay taxes to Menominee County, and therefore help pay the tax on the forest. The lake development was created, what is now Legend Lake. But this idea of selling land again, the Menominee people did not like it, because not more than a hundred years before we had to sell most of our land through the treaties. Why do we have to do this again? A group of Menominees got together and said, this shouldn’t be. Why do we have to sell land? Why do we have to be terminated?

Termination is totally against the trust responsibility that the government had to us as Menominee, as a sovereign tribe. Tribal members like Ada Deer, and Jim Washinawatok, Sylvie Wilber, just a number of Menominees got together and said we don’t have to accept this. Let’s form a group called Drums, Determination, Rights, and Unity of Menominee Stockholders. Let’s form this group and fight this lake development. Let’s fight for restoration. Let’s restore the tribe the way it was before termination. Within that time, the lake was developed, sales had started, several hundred lots were sold. So there was protests by Drums at the land sales office at Legend Lake. They got an injunction with a judge to stop the lake development. In the meantime, they were lobbying with senators and congressmen in Washington, and also at the state level in Madison, to repeal termination.

A federal bill, called the Menominee Restoration Act, was brought forth by Senator Proxmire. The bill was passed in December, 1973 to get restored as a sovereign tribe once again.

They said we were not a tribe anymore when we were terminated. But that didn’t stop our language to be spoken. Our elders still spoke the language. Unfortunately, a lot of them didn’t teach the younger ones, but we’re getting that back today. There’s a lot of us in the middle-aged group that are speaking now. Our language is taught in the schools, K-12, and at the College of Menominee Nation. Our culture is still intact. One of the reasons our chief said, let us live in this land, where you think it’s worthless, is because of the Wolf River.

It was here, for thousands of years, the sturgeon would come up the river each spring to spawn at Keshena Falls. Sturgeon is culturally and spiritually significant to us. In 1892 the dams were built at Shawano that prevented the sturgeon to come to the reservation. We were out this cultural resource for a hundred years, up until 1993. Then a group of Menominees got together and said, we want the sturgeon to come back, because we feel it’s a cultural loss. There are ceremonies that we have to do because our ancestors told us to do them with sturgeon. We can’t do them if we don’t have them. So a group of our young people, including myself, wanted to go to the Shawano dam and take sturgeon. We thought it was our cultural right, and treaty right. They said we’ll get arrested if we do that.

Well, that’s the chance we’ll have to take. We need these sturgeon to fulfil these ceremonies that we have to do, that were done for centuries before. The tribal government said, no, you’d better not do that. You’d better let us talk to the DNR to see if there’s some way they can bring some up to us. The DNR finally agreed to provide so many a year for us to have a sturgeon feast and celebration. Our people still have that sense of it was something we had to do. We believe we were looking to the seven generations of those unborn. We’re keeping this land for them. Were keeping this river for them. We’re keeping the language.

We’re keeping the culture. We’re keeping the concept of being Menominee people, a sovereign nation. That’s who we are as Menominee people. That’s who we’ll be into the future.

[music]

– To learn more about the sovereign Indian nations in Wisconsin visit wisconsinact31.org. To purchase a DVD of this and other Tribal Histories programs visit wpt.org or call 800-422-9707.

Menominee History was funded in part by Irene Daniell Kress, the Evjue Foundation, a charitable arm of the Capital Times, Ron and Patty Anderson, the estate of Dale Druckrey, the Wisconsin History Fund with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.