The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Menominee

(Menomini), an Algonquian-speaking Indian tribe in North America, numbering approximately 4,000 persons (1970, estimate).

Before the colonization of America, the Menominee lived in the Great Lakes region and engaged in fishing, hunting, and wild-rice gathering. In the second half of the 17th century, the Menominee, who had been drawn into the fur trade, abandoned their settled way of life and became wandering fur trappers. The commercial fur trade caused the disintegration of the Menominee maternal clan structure. In 1854, the Menominee were settled on a reservation within their former tribal territory (Wisconsin, USA).

The Menominee work as hired laborers, farmers, and wild-rice gatherers. By 1961, the Menominee had been deprived of most of their lands as a result of government acts; many of them were forced to move to cities in search of work. The Menominee are Catholics.

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References in periodicals archive

The Menomini are being rapidly made over into the cultural type of the uneducated white American; of that European-American culture which, with its art and science, is worthy to stand beside their own and perhaps above it, they know nothing.

(69) Keesing and his wife, Marie, studied the tribe and prepared a two-volume manuscript, which they originally titled "The Changing American Indian: A Study of the Menomini Tribe of Wisconsin." Volume 1, a historical view of the results of Menominee-white contact, was published in 1939 as Felix Keesing's The Menomini Indians of Wisconsin: A Study of Three Centuries of Culture Contact and Change.

From these visits he wrote two major ethnological works in 1951 and 1952: one on the Native American Church, entitled Menomini Peyotism, and one on the Dream Dance or Drum Dance, or Menominee Powwow, which he subtitled A Study in Cultural Decay.

(82) In 1971 they combined their observations in Dreamers without Power: The Menomini Indians, a book published in a series intended for college undergraduate classroom use.

By the time they coauthored Dreamers without Power they assumed that "there are, in the Menomini community, five major cultural divisions." (91)

(5.) Walter James Hoffman, M.D., "The Menomini Indians," in Fourteenth Annual Report of the U.S.

Hoffman, "The Menomini Indians," 79, 86-92, 96-102, 137.

(13.) Hoffman, "The Menomini Indians," 137-38, 109.

(25.) Leonard Bloomfield, Menomini Texts (New York: G.

(35.) Alanson Skinner, "Collecting among the Menomini," Wisconsin Archaeologist, n.s.

(38.) Alanson Skinner, Material Culture of the Menomini, vol.

(42.) Alanson Skinner, Medicine Ceremony of the Menomini, Iowa, and Wahpeton Dakota, with Notes on the Ceremony among the Ponca, Bungi Ojibwa, and Potawatomi, vol.

Collecting among the Menomini: cultural assault in twentieth-century Wisconsin