LETTER: Menominee people, admired for their forestry, are thriving

To Ozaukee Press:

We appreciate your printing of our letter to the editor related to Indigenous Peoples Day in Ozaukee Press. However, we are concerned that the chosen headline, “Remember Menominee tribe, the original Ozaukee settlers,” is misleading and is harmful to the Menominee Native people we were trying to honor.

First, the Menominee people are very much alive in Wisconsin and are widely known for their sustainable forestry practices. To “remember” them suggests that they are gone and part of the past, rather than the present.

Second, the Menominee people do not claim to have settled in this part of Wisconsin. Nor do we. Their oral history places them at the mouth of the Menominee River (current day Marinette, Wis., and Menominee, Mich.), not far from their current reservation (Menominee County). They have archaeological evidence of sacred cultural sites and unique raised agricultural beds in this Menominee River area.

Their economy was based on hunting and fishing and thus they sustained themselves in the heavily forested parts of southeast Wisconsin and along Lake Michigan.

        Louise Mollinger and David Franks

Port Washington

Editor’s note: The headline was suggested by this sentence in the earlier Mollinger-Franks letter: “We especially honor the members of the Menominee tribe, who ceded the current Ozaukee County land to the U.S. government as part of the 1831-32 Treaty of Washington.”