In this part of our web guide, our focus will be on the American Indian people known as the Menominee, currently represented as the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin.

The historic territory of the Menominee people included about ten million acres in what is now Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The Menominee are the only current Wisconsin tribe whose origins place them in Wisconsin.

It's impossible to determine the beginnings of the Menominee people, but the indications are that they were in Wisconsin before Columbus, and they were there before Caesar ruled Rome.

In their own language, they knew themselves as Mamaceqtaw, which means "the people." The name they are most often known as is the Ojibwe word for "wild rice people," which is manomin or manoominii, as they were known for cultivating wild rice as an important staple in their diet. Menominee is sometimes spelled Menomini or Menominie.

The Menominee are descendants of the Late Woodlands Indians, who inhabited the land once occupied by the Hopewell Indians, the earliest inhabitants of the Lake Michigan region. Ethnically, the Menominee are a Northeastern Woodlands tribe, closely related to the Potawatomi, the Ojibwe, the Fox, and the Kickapoo. The traditional customs of the Menominee people are similar to those of the Ojibwe, another Algonquian people. Historically, the Menominee maintained peaceful relations with other tribes.

Besides wild rice, which they cultivated and gathered, the Menominee traditionally made use of a wide variety of edible plants and animals, with wild rice and sturgeon being among the most important. Other traditional foods included ramps, or wild garlic.

Prior to European colonization, the Menominee people lived in permanent villages consisting of dome-shaped homes made from poles and bark. Menominee women wove colorful mats to cover the interiors of the homes.

French fur traders and explorers encountered the Menominee in the 1630s. In 1634, the Menominee and Ho-Chunk people and a band of Potawatomi who had recently moved into Wisconsin met Jean Nicolet at Red Banks, near where Green Bay, Wisconsin, now is. Nicolet was seeking a Northwest Passage to China and may have thought that he had found it, as he was wearing a silk Chinese ceremonial robe.

The Saint Francis Xavier Mission of the Roman Catholic Church was active among the Menominee people from 1660 to 1765. Catholic churches were eventually built in 1877 and 1908, and are still active today.

During the French and Indian War, the Menominee people sided with the French, with whom they had enjoyed a long relationship. However, when it became clear that the French were losing, they switched their tentative support to the British. The Menominee were allied with the British during the American Revolution, although they didn't take a significant role in the conflict. They were generally peaceful toward American settlers and maintained ties to French and British traders in Canada even after the Americans were victorious.

During this period, due to the added demand for resources, such as their wild rice areas, there were some bitter conflicts between the Menominee and neighboring Algonquian tribes.

Initially neutral during the War of 1812, the Menominee people eventually allied with the British and Canadians, helping to defeat the Americans in the Battle of Mackinac Island.

Encroachments by new American settlers increased considerably during the 19th century. In the 1820s, the Menominee shared a portion of their land with the Christianized Stockbridge-Munsee Indians, who had originated on the East Coast.

In a series of treaties, the Menominee were compelled or coerced to sell much of their lands in Michigan and Wisconsin. While Wisconsin campaigned for statehood, the U.S. government wanted to move the Menominee people west. Menominee Chief Oshkosh went to look at the proposed site on the Crow River, but rejected the offered land, saying their current land was much better for hunting and game. The Menominee retained lands near the Wolf River in what would later become their current reservation. The tribe originated in Wisconsin and still inhabits a portion of their traditional homelands.

The Reservation is in northeastern Wisconsin, sharing a boundary with Menominee County and the City of Menominee, Michigan. The reservation was created in an 1854 treaty in which the Menominee relinquished all claims to the lands held by them under previous treaties, and were assigned 432 square miles on the Wolf River in Wisconsin. An additional treaty, in 1856, carved out the southwestern corner of this area for a separate reservation for the Stockbridge and Lenape (Munsee) tribes, recognized as the Stockbridge-Munsee Community.

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