By the end of this exercise, I can… 

• discuss how creation or origin stories tell us Chicago is a Native place
• describe how archaeological evidence confirmed that Chicago is a Native place

This exercise directly relates to:

• Native American societies before European contact (pre-1673)

History

• SS.9-12.H.5. Analyze the factors and historical context, including overarching movements, that influenced the perspectives of people during different historical eras.
• SS.9-12.H.10. Identify and analyze ways in which marginalized communities are represented in historical sources and seek out sources created by historically oppressed peoples. 

Abandoning the Bering Strait Theory

Native people have been here since time immemorial – a phrase that means before human memory, or the beginning of time. Each of the Native nations that has a historical connection to Chicago has their own unique creation or origin story that tells them how they came to be. These stories describe Native peoples’ relationships to their homelands and outline relationships between people, as well as plant and animal relatives. 

Native peoples’ teachings testify to their origins here in North America – this is what it means to be Indigenous. One way Indigenous peoples narrate their connections to lands and waters is through story. In Indigenous contexts, stories are not myths or legends – rather, they are complex teaching tools. In hearing the stories, listeners can pull out lessons that help them figure out how to live sustainably with each other and with lands and waters. Some Indigenous stories are creation or origin stories. These stories and other oral traditions contain information about ecology and ethnobotany, medicine, language, arts, history, and politics, among others. These stories often also teach us about civics – how we should treat one another to build sustainable, balanced, interrelated societies. We can look to Indigenous stories as historical texts that teach us about Native nations’ long-standing connections to the Chicago area.

In Indigenous communities, you might hear the same story many times throughout your life. As a listener, your job is to listen carefully each time you hear the story because you will hear something new based on where you are in your life at the time. Indigenous storytellers know how to shape the story based on what the audience needs. They might tell more or less detailed versions of stories based on the audience. They might also leave out certain information (especially if information in the story is considered sacred) because not everyone has a right to all information all the time within Indigenous storytelling. This is because in Indigenous contexts, knowledge is shared with you when you’re ready, when you need it, and/or when you can use it to help the community be well.

Creation or origin stories link Indigenous people to specific homelands, and they can also talk about journeys or migrations from one area to the next. Homelands can be a broad term that includes lands and waters across a large area. It is also common for Indigenous people from different nations to have overlapping connections to specific places! And while a story might link to one location at one moment, the Indigenous people of that nation might have long-standing connections with the broader region through seasonal trading, hunting, and fishing routes, among others. 

Anthropological Eras

You may have seen textbooks that use phrases like the Woodland Period, the Mississippian Culture, or Paleo Indians. Anthropologists and archaeologists invented these terms because they wanted to categorize large groups of Indigenous peoples over large periods of time. Contemporary Native nations do not use these terms to identify themselves or their ancestors. 

Most anthropology draws a boundary between “prehistory” and “history” at the invention of writing systems. Anthropologists made up this distinction to help organize their writing, but the distinction usually gets applied in a racist way that sees European writing as more advanced than the communication systems of other cultures. In North America, Native cultures have developed elaborate and sophisticated communication systems and technologies, including systems of writing, mapping, and memory-keeping. Early European and American anthropologists did not recognize the validity or complexity of Indigenous communication systems. This is because they were often looking for confirmation that Native people were “less civilized” or “more primitive” than Europeans. Europeans used these narratives of “civilization” to justify enslaving and dispossessing Native people. Narratives of Indigenous “primitivism” also help people believe that Native people are part of the past, rather than part of the present and future. 

These narratives also undermine the importance of oral traditions for Indigenous people. Oral traditions cannot be written off as simple or silly tales. Rather, these are complex stories that have been carefully passed down through generations. Unlike European memory keeping systems, which prioritize writing things down to remember, Native memory keeping systems often prioritize careful and deep listening to be able to retell a story accurately over time. While settler narratives cast doubt on the trustworthiness of oral traditions as sources, many Indigenous cultures around the world have documented traditions of keeping oral records that go back thousands of years. 

False narratives like these are hard to undo, but archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and other researchers are working hard to recognize Indigenous expertise. Keep an eye on how they’re doing this in the sources in this module.

An Established Native Place

Before the city as we know it existed, the many Indigenous nations who lived and had long standing relationships with this place knew it as Zhegagoynak, Gaa-zhigaagwanzhikaag, Zhigaagong, Šikaakonki, Shekâkôheki, Sekākoh, and Gųųšge honąk, among other names. Mispronunciations and misspellings of these words as  “Checagou” or “Chicagua” appear often in early colonial maps. Indigenous languages reflect unique cultures and worldviews, and these Indigenous words for Chicago reveal important details about Native peoples’ relationships with and understanding of this place. It is a sign of respect to prioritize these words over French misunderstandings like Checagou or Chicagua. 

You might hear people say that Chicago is named after “the Algonquin name” for wild onion or a similar allium. This isn’t quite right: while several of the words above do translate to “place of wild onions” or something similar, there is no single Algonquin word for such a plant, because “Algonquin” refers to a large group of languages, including those of the Illinois Confederation, Neshnabék, Myaamiaki, Sauk, Meskwaki, and Menominee, among others. In other words, there are many Algonquin words for the place we now call Chicago. 

As Indigenous names for Chicago show us, many wild onions, or ramps, grew in Chicago for generations. These plants served as an important form of sustenance for the Native peoples of this region. Ramps are hard to grow and easy to overharvest. That ramps grew here in abundance for generations tells us that Native people were carefully stewarding the land and the plant population. 

The Chicago landscape made it a welcoming area for people, plants, animals, birds, and insects to live. The marshes and oak savannas had lots of animals, birds, fish, and plants to eat. It’s also a unique ecosystem, since it provides a transition between the Great Plains and the forests around the Great Lakes. The landscape also made transportation convenient. The waterways and portages connect Lake Michigan and the other Great Lakes to the Illinois River, the Mississippi River, and eventually the Gulf of Mexico. Chicago’s location and its abundant food sources have made it a desirable place to live, trade, and gather. Indigenous people had long treated Chicago as a crossroads where many Native people from different cultural and political backgrounds came together (for more on this, see the Convergence module!).

Chicago was also important as an intersection of several waterways, and its rich landscape drew many Indigenous peoples to the area. Each Native nation had (and has!) its own language, government system, set of spiritual or religious teachings, and systems for food production, land management, transportation, architecture, and many more. Native people throughout the Great Lakes also had established kinship networks and protocols for relationality, which included relationships for family, trade, diplomacy, ceremony, and mutual protection with other nations. It is a myth that Indigenous people lacked boundaries before colonialism. Indigenous people had long-standing ways of recognizing territorial boundaries between Native nations for governing, hunting, farming, and other needs. The agreements that outlined how Native nations shared or divided space were not one-time papers like the treaties that would come later. Instead, these agreements were rules and protocols for relationships that needed to be renewed on a regular basis. This helped to make sure that the agreements still met everyone’s needs and that everyone knew what they were agreeing to. For Indigenous people before colonization, making agreements with other tribes was a way of ensuring sustainable, healthy, peaceful coexistence through relationships and respect.

These negotiations for shared place made it possible for some Indigenous people to live in Chicago full time, while others passed through Chicago as part of seasonal rounds. These rounds were annual patterns of coming to a particular place at a particular time. Indigenous people developed these cycles based on the growth cycles of plants and migrations of animals. Many Indigenous people lived this way before colonization because it was a sustainable way of life. These seasons followed a predictable pattern for planting, hunting, fishing, and harvesting. Moving this way allowed for communities to regularly renew their connections to each other. In Chicago, some examples of seasonal activities include (among others): 

• Spring: Collecting sap from maple trees to make sugar and syrup, harvesting spring plants like ramps (similar to a green onion) which grow along streams, planting vegetable gardens
• Summer: Fishing for sturgeon, whitefish, trout, walleye, and other fish in the lakes and rivers, tending to vegetables like corn, beans, and squash
• Fall: Hunting migrating birds like ducks and geese, harvesting wild rice in marshes and small lakes, harvesting remaining vegetables grown over the summer 
• Winter: Hunting muskrats, otters, and beavers in marshes, deer in forested areas, and bison on the prairie

Sources

Augustine, Stephen J. “Oral Traditions.” Indigenous Foundations, indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca. 

Bauer, William. “Oral History,” in Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies, ed. Chris Andersen and Jean M. O’Brien (New York: Routledge, 2017). 

Mahuika, Nepia. ReThinking Oral History and Tradition: An Indigenous Perspective. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 

Nelson, John William. Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago’s Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023). 

Tanner, Helen Hornbeck. Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History. 2nd edition. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987). 

Note to teachers: We invite you to use the components of the Indigenous Chicago curriculum that best align with the needs of your classroom. The following suggested steps can be modified as needed, and we invite you to use the teacher’s history brief to inspire new exercises that best meet the needs of your students. Please note that we suggest shortening, rather than modifying, the language of historical sources to best reflect the original source’s context, intention, and voice.  

1. Review the information in the Background section above. What do you now know about the value of oral tradition? 

2. To prepare for the primary sources you’re about to look at, create a chart like the one below (adapted from Nokes, 2022, p. 130):

3. Watch Source 1, a 4-minute version of the Myaamia origin story from ciinkwia (Jarrid Baldwin, Miami Tribe of Oklahoma) and the Myaamia Center. Baldwin tells the story first in the Myaamia language and then in English here. Even though you may not understand the Myaamia language, listen to its rhythm and sounds. After the video, read a written version of the story from George Ironstrack (Miami Tribe of Oklahoma) here. 

• What does this story tell you about Myaamia connections to this region?
• What do the two versions of the story tell you about Myaamia connections to other Native nations in the area?
• Reading this as a historical source, what does it teach us about Myaamia history?

4. Now, explore Source 2, these four videos from the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and Source 3, an excerpt from The Mishomis Book by Ojibwe educator Edward Benton-Banai. 

• First, view these three creation story clips: Creation (~1m), Original Man Walks the Earth (~2m), and the Great Flood (~2m30).  
  • What do these stories tell Citizen Potawatomi people about who they are?
  • How do they offer guidance on how to live a good life?

• Then, view this 2-minute clip with Kelli Mosteller and Blake Norton about who the Neshnabék are (0:26-2:15). This clip is part of a longer interview about the creation of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation Cultural Heritage Center. 
  • What does this story tell us about how the Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Odawa are related? About where they’re from? 

• Read the captions for each of the generational fires in the 360 exploration of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation Heritage Center here alongside Chapter 14 (p. 94-103) of Ojibwe teacher Edward Benton-Banai’s Mishomis Book here (available digitally from the Internet Archive, with printed or e-book copies available at many libraries). 

• • What was the instruction of the prophecy? What is a megis shell?
  • Where did Neshnabék leave from when they began their journey? 
  • What did they find that signaled an end to their journey?
  • What do these stories tell us about Neshnabék and their history?
  • What do they tell us about Indigenous histories in the Chicago region?

5. Evidence from archaeology is increasingly confirming Indigenous oral histories. As you read in the Background section, the Bering Strait theory has been proven untrue, as archaeologists find evidence of Indigenous life in North America dating back over 20,000 years ago. Read Source 4, an excerpt of an interview from Edge Effects between Turtle Mountain Ojibwe researcher Becca Dower and Menominee forester Jeff Grignon. You can also listen to the full interview here (the interview excerpts are printed at the end of this document). 

• • What sources does Jeff Grignon use to learn about the past?
  • How do the trails connect to Chicago?
  • The location of these trails overlaps with homelands for many other Native people, including the Myaamia and Neshnabék you learned about earlier. What do you infer about what this means for relationships between these Native nations?
  • How is Grignon and his team working to steward the lands that Menominee people are in relationship with? What does this tell you about Indigenous relationships with their homelands?

Video:

The Myaamia Center is a partnership between Miami University and the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma. In this video, Myaamia language programmer ciinkwia (whose English name is Jarrid Baldwin) narrates the Myaamia origin story. ciinkwia tells the story first in Myaamia and then in English. The video is available here. 

Blog:

The Aacimotaatiiyankwi blog is a  project of the Myaamia Center at Miami University. George Ironstrack is a citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and Assistant Director of the Myaamia Center. He is an educator and a historian, with a Master’s degree in History from Miami University.

A Myaamia Beginning

Posted by George Ironstrack on August 13, 2010

mihtami myaamiaki nipinkonci saakaciweeciki
at first the Miamis came out of the water

It is with these words that the very first Myaamia story begins. This story describes our emergence as distinct and different people onto Myaamionki, our traditional homelands.[1] In this story, our people emerge from the waters of Saakiiweesiipiwi (St. Joseph River near South Bend, Indiana) at a spot we call Saakiiweeyonki (the Confluence). Our history as people began here, but this emergence was not easy. The people had to struggle out of the water as they grasped and pulled their way onto the bank. This struggle at the river’s edge marked the end of an undescribed, but likely challenging, journey. Based on cultural clues, it seems as though our people came from lands north of the Great Lakes, where we split off from some unknown, but related, group.[2] Our emergence at Saakiiweeyonki, was likely the end of a long journey southward on Lake Michigan. While we know the specific place where we emerged, it is difficult to put a specific date on this journey. We know that our people were living in Myaamionki for many generations before the disruptions caused by the Beaver Wars (around 1650). You can watch Myaamia language teacher and storyteller Jarrid Baldwin recount this story of Myaamia emergence in Myaamiaataweenki and English here.

In this story, we built our first village at Saakiiweeyonki, but we apparently did not stay there very long. We know from other stories that after leaving Saakiiweeyonki, our people built numerous villages along the Wabash River Valley starting near contemporary Ft. Wayne, Indiana and running at least as far south along the Wabash as the current city of Vincennes. As each village grew in size, the group would divide and a new village would be formed downstream. Just as we likely split off from our unknown relatives in the north and journeyed to Saakiiweeyonki, our younger siblings, the Waayaahtanwa (Wea) and Peeyankihšia (Piankashaw) split off from us.  In the 1800s, the Waayaahtanwa and Peeyankihšia confederated together with the Peewaalia (Peoria) to form the contemporary Peoria Tribe of Oklahoma.[3]

Our story of emergence concludes with a Myaamia man making a return journey to Saakiiweeyonki. When he arrives, he is startled to find other people living there.  To his great surprise, they speak the same language as his people. Was this group another branch of our unknown relatives from the north? We don’t know, but it seems possible. It will be difficult to ever know for sure because the people, who the Myaamia man names, “Old Moccasins,” disappear from our history, at least in name, following this story.

This story is important to us today for many reasons.  It establishes our roots in Myaamionki, our traditional homelands. It also stresses the importance of language to our group identity. The end of the story demonstrates how groups were perceived through the lens of language. Those who spoke our language (Miami-Illinois) or closely related languages, like Ojibwa, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, and Fox, were usually friends, allies, and relatives. Those who didn’t were often viewed as foreigners.  The story is also the source of many contemporary Myaamia people’s given names. These names build off of one of the central themes of the story: the struggle to survive and pull our way forward in the world. When someone gives one of the names from this story to a Myaamia baby, they are reminding us of our beginning as a people, the place from where we come, and the difficult struggles our ancestors endured so that we could be here today.

[1]The version of this story that we use today, was told by Waapanaakikaapwa (Gabriel Godfroy) to J.P. Dunn in the early 1900s. David J. Costa, ed., myaamia neehi peewaalia aacimoona neehi aalhsoohkana – Myaamia and Peoria Narratives and Winter Stories, (Miami; Oklahoma: Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and the Peoria Tribe of Oklahoma, 2010), 52-53.

[2] Many of our stories have parallels with Cree speaking peoples in the north. In addition, our constellations seem to have a northern focus and indicate that our people spent many generations living north of Lake Michigan.

[3] For more on the Myaamia and our younger siblings, see Charles Christopher Trowbridge, Meearmeear Traditions, 2, 8-13. In 1721, Charlevoix claimed that the Illinois describe a shared point of origin with the Miami. However, the location he describes is different than that described by Waapanaakikaapwa and Trowbridge.  (Charlevoix XVIII part 2, p 227). For more on a history of the Confederation that led to the contemporary Peoria Tribe of Oklahoma, see http://www.peoriatribe.com/history and Dorris Valley and Mary M. Lembcke, eds. The Peorias: A History of the Peoria Indian Tribe of Oklahoma, 60-61.

Source citations: Baldwin, Jarrid. “Where the Myaamia First Came From.” Myaamia Center, youtube.com; Ironstrack, George. “A Myaamia Beginning.” Aacimotaatiiyankwi, Miami Center, Miami University, aacimotaatiiyankwi.org/. 

Source citations: Citizen Potawatomi Nation. “Creation.” CPN Hownikan, youtube.com; Citizen Potawatomi Nation. “Original Man Walks the Earth.” CPN Hownikan, youtube.com; Citizen Potawatomi Nation. “The Great Flood.” CPN Hownikan, youtube.com; Mosteller, Kelli and Blake Norton. “Seven Fires – Gallery 1.” CPN Cultural Heritage Center, youtube.com. 

The nationally recognized Citizen Band Potawatomi Cultural Heritage Center documents and teaches about Potawatomi culture, language, and history. The following videos and 360 exploration are part of the museum exhibit at the Heritage Center.

Dr. Kelli Mosteller is a citizen of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a former Executive Director of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation Cultural Heritage Center. She is also a former Executive Director for the Harvard University Native American Program. She holds a Ph.D. in Native American History from the University of Texas at Austin.

Blake Norton is the current Director and Tribal Historic Preservation Officer at the Citizen Potawatomi Nation Cultural Heritage Center. He holds a Master’s degree in Museum Studies from the University of Oklahoma. 

Watch the videos at the links below:

Creation

Original Man Walks the Earth

The Great Flood

Seven Fires

Edward Benton-Banai was an Ojibwe educator and co-founder of the American Indian Movement. He was born and raised on the Lac Courtes Oreilles reservation in what is currently Wisconsin. He published The Mishomis Book in the 1970s, and it has become a much-used source for Ojibwe stories and history.

Read the book in its entirety here.

Source citation: Benton-Banai, Edward. The Mishomis Book: The Voice of the Ojibway. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 

You can see the article here and listen to the full interview here.

Source citation: Dower, Becca. “The Land is a Teacher: A Conversation with Jeff Grignon.” Edge Effects. November 19, 2019, updated October 12, 2020, edgeeffects.net.  

Jeff Grignon is a citizen of the Menominee Nation. He has decades of experience in forestry, fire management, and cultural resource protection. He currently works as a consultant for the Menominee Nation on environmental and cultural resource protection initiatives. Dr. Becca Dower is a descendant of the Turtle Mountain Ojibwe. She is a researcher and postdoctoral fellow with a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. She interviewed Jeff Grignon in 2019 for Edge Effects, a digital magazine from the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Culture, History, and Environment. 

The Land Is a Teacher: A Conversation with Jeff Grignon

BY  BECCA DOWER · PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 19, 2019 · UPDATED OCTOBER 12, 2020

This is the third piece in a series on Indigenous lands and waters in the Americas, inspired in part by the 2019 place-based workshop Changing Landscapes of Indigeneity organized by the Center for Culture, History, and Environment in Wisconsin. The series shares work that addresses Indigenous movements for sovereignty and self-determination as well as issues of environmental and social justice.

Menominee People are Indigenous to and have lived in present-day Wisconsin for thousands of years. Through cultural ways of understanding, keen environmental observation, and intergenerational knowledge shared via oral tradition, they live in balance with the environment and its natural cycles. Although disrupted by colonization, including a period of tribal status termination at the hands of the federal government from 1954 to 1973, the tribe has maintained their stories, language, and traditions. Jeff Grignon, Menominee forester and community knowledge holder, carries these teachings in his work to connect the Menominee way to contemporary land and forest management.

We met for a conversation at the College of Menominee Nation’s Sustainable Development Institute, where Menominee culture and values are integrated into a variety of sustainability projects. In our October 2019 conversation, Jeff explained his current project of researching ancient archeological sites located on the reservation and the related trail system that stretched far beyond the reservation, and even the Wisconsin border. Guided by Menominee teachings, Jeff has been a consultant in developing the local phenology trail and other environmental projects. Rebecca Edler, Menominee Sustainability Coordinator at the Sustainable Development Institute, also joined our conversation to explain the phenology trail and educational opportunities it has offered the community.

Interview highlights: These highlights have been edited for length and clarity.

Becca Dower: To start off, could you tell us about the work you do for the Menominee Nation?

Jeff Grignon: I’m formerly a Forest Regeneration Forester for Menominee Reservation. I was in that position for over 20 years, and I worked for the forestry for over 31 years. Part of my job description is cultural resource protection, which means finding archaeological sites, identifying, inventorying, and mapping them, and then protecting them from any harvest operations on the forest. I’ve been doing that in and around these sites for 48 years now. It was kind of a calling. Being a Menominee tribal member, I was connecting with the cultural past and drawn to it. I’ve also had 20 years of western and southern fire experience on different reservations, including in Canada and Alaska.

BD: What are some of those archaeological sites, and how has mapping them impacted how forestry is conducted on the reservation?

JG: From the evidence that I’ve seen and my own personal experience, the sites date back to 16,000 to 20,000 years ago, up through the present. I’ve mapped over 1,200 sites on the reservation that run the gamut of that timespan.

In order to understand the sites, you have to understand the geological activity and glacial action that happened during the last glacial episode, roughly 30,000 to 12,000 years ago. Everything we do in forestry and in finding these sites is directly tied with what happened with the movement of ice long ago. Roughly 30,000 years ago, glacial ice came down from the north through what is now Lake Michigan and moved westward, expanded over the reservation completely to the western side of the reservation, then receded back, and then re-advanced to a point roughly three-quarters of the way through the reservation. Then it backed off in steps, advancing and retreating back and forth, and exited on the east side of the reservation before it readvanced and formed the Legend Lake area. And then it was gone.

I always try to orient people about that glacial action because that’s where all the sites are located, that’s where different habitat types exist on the reservation. It gives the reservation the diversity that makes it special. The sites where there’s a lot of glacial action are where most of the older prehistoric areas were, because roughly 16,000 years ago they were actively managing the land. It wasn’t a pristine natural setting. It was actively managed in a way where my Menominee ancestors were able to integrate themselves with the communities of plants and soil communities, and become an active member of those communities. They were able to integrate themselves the way nature would want humans to integrate, because they were listening to nature and learning from the land. 

The land is a teacher and we are students, yet as a species right now we don’t quite know how to integrate ourselves like my ancestors did. We need to learn how to redevelop that sensitivity we had long ago to the environment and our place within it.

BD: What can the archaeological sites teach us about getting back to those ways?

JG: What it’s taught me is to redevelop that sensitivity with the land. Each of us had that sensitivity as children, that sense of wonder as you’re exploring the world. Our formal schooling steers us away from growing outward into nature. We recede back into ourselves as we become more educated to the system, and the living reality of the world is no longer within us. Take learning the scientific name or the common name of a plant. Once you learn that common name, you shut off and stop learning about that plant, while a child will continue to learn and develop a sensitivity with the plant. Each one of us has that young version within us that can come back out. It’s finding ways to help people recognize that they do have that ability to go back to those childhood thoughts and processes.

I like to talk about that sensitivity as being a library of feelings. You have your basic feelings—mad, glad, sad, happy. But there are other shades of feelings within those, and communicating with the environment develops those different shades of senses or feelings. As you become more sensitive to the environment, what it’s trying to teach you, you develop a library of those feelings.

There was an ordinance passed roughly twenty years ago that we were required to protect these sites. There had to be a buffer zone put around each cultural site, and it had to be avoided during harvest operations here on the reservation. At the time, I had about 700 sites archaeological sites all over the reservation from different time periods: 16,000 years ago up to 1950, roughly. I’d seen bits and pieces of old trail in these sites. Listening to the sites, what they were trying to tell me is: you need to track the trail system in order to truly understand what these sites are about.

I actively started tracking the trail system 10 years ago. There’s a main trail system that runs from south of Chicago through Green Bay, Wisconsin up through the reservation up to the west side of Lake Superior. Then it meets up with another trail system north of Lake Superior. There’s a second trail system that runs on the east side of the reservation, runs up through the Saint Lawrence, enters Canada, and then hooks into that main trail system. So, we have two main trail systems on the reservation, and there’s a third one now that I’m tracking that runs west through a lot of the archeological sites, up to the northwest corner of the reservation, and most likely heads towards the Dakotas.

Once I had that main trail system, I laid it down on the map with all the cultural sites on the reservation and lo and behold, the context or the story of every site came into focus. The trail system on the west side of Lake Superior is the oldest, because if you follow it all the way up Lake Superior it doesn’t go to the present shoreline of Lake Superior, it goes to the shoreline of the glacial Lake Duluth and then it turns and goes up into Canada. Glacial Lake Duluth existed roughly 16,000 years ago, so put two and two together and you know that trail system is most likely at least 16,000 years old.

BD: It’s so important to understand places in geological time. Were these trail systems were used to connect different nations to each other? 

JG: Definitely. We have areas on the reservation that were recognized as stopping points on the trail system through the stories of the elders. These stopping points are underground storage pits, like a refrigerator. Imagine an hourglass shaped hole in the ground, lined and stored with food. It was a stopping point not only for the Menominee but for other tribes that traveled through the area. These storage pits were like a convenience store on the highway, but it was provided as goodwill from the local people to those traveling through. If the Menominee are providing food for travelers, the travelers are most likely providing knowledge back—it’s a give-and-take trade system—trading seeds, trading knowledge, trading stories, trading news.

Every time a person lives in a site they leave their imprint on that site. If you develop that sensitivity, the sites will teach you. Every time I go back to a site, I learn something new.

The stories of the elders talk about the layout of the land, where the different types of trees are laid out for a purpose because of what the entire ecosystem needs in the area. You have heavy maple trees on the west side of the reservation—sugar maple and their plant communities. The east side of the reservation is mostly white pine. As I said earlier, long ago the glaciers came from the east and moved onto the reservation, to the west side, and then back. The white pines that are on the east side are culturally significant to the Menominee. We are identified with the white pine as well as the wild rice. The reason we identify with the white pine is that the stories talk about how the Menominee were right on the leading edge as the ice advanced from the east to the west. We were right in front of it, trying to slow it down and stop it. I have archaeological sites with stone platforms on hilltops, with one single burial mound associated with that platform. The only way I can interpret that is, because it’s on the edges of north-facing hills, they were praying to the north where the ice came from to slow the ice down. And apparently in that area they did the job, because the ice did stop just before it got to the burial mounds, and then receded.

These burial mounds must have been generations of medicine people on these platforms, praying through their lifetime as the ice advanced. Once their lifetime is done, they’re buried in that burial mound and the next generation steps up to stop that ice. Because it’s thousands of years for the ice to move. Those sites in front of the ice are probably the oldest sites we have.

BD: Is this trail system that you’ve been working on related to the phenology trail system here on the reservation? 

Rebecca Edler: We decided we were going to locate our phenology trail along an existing trail on campus called the Learning Path. We ended up with 12 stations we call phenology stations. Jeff helped us gain a deeper understanding of the Menominee way of thinking about each plant and the knowledge that’s associated with that plant. We have a series of videos that go into detail about the Menominee significance of the plants. The next step was learning how to observe, because this data goes into this nationwide network called Nature’s Notebook.

BD: Can you talk about the Menominee forest and what the forest means to Menominee people?

JG: It’s best to go all the way back to the ancient garden areas. A key part of searching out these cultural sites has been to find these ancient garden areas called the Three Sisters Gardens that are linked to our oral stories collected over the years. The stories talk about how the Menominee observed the ancient garden areas and realized that the corn was the elder of the community. They took that knowledge, and they applied it to the forests and the prairies. They were able to understand what was going on in the forests and the prairies by using that concept of the elder plant that controls the community and determines where and how things grow and what they produce.

The easiest concept is to look at old-growth trees which are the elders of their own plant communities. Probably the greatest teaching I had was one elder who told me to pick out an elder community in the forest when I was very young, and keep going back to it every year, as often as you can, to observe and let it teach you. I’ve been doing that for almost 50 years on this one plant community. I was able to watch the interactions within that community and how over the span of 10-15 years the inner edge plants will shift back and forth depending on the environment disturbance. All these plants are working medicines within the plants of that community and sharing with the other communities. That’s what gives this reservation its strength, because we have these intact elder plant communities that are not only the plants above ground but everything below ground. The forest has these unique characteristics because we haven’t run plows through it and disturbed the soil.

Towards the end of my forest regeneration work, I was replanting those elder plant communities within sites that had to regenerate. I was picking out the elder plant, a climate hardy species, and then direct seeding the herbaceous plants and the grasses, and trying to develop that underground community for that type of elder plant for the future. It wasn’t viewing what I was planting above-ground, it was using that cultural teaching and trying to regenerate the below-ground environment. The elders talked about certain areas having their own type of song, just as a certain plant has a certain song. When you combine plants together, they form a certain song for an area that can be heard if you’re sensitive enough. What I was trying to do in these areas was put it together much like a song, with the plants and the below-ground environments creating their own unique melody, rather than just trying to stick different diverse species together and have them grow. It’s crafting a melody for that one particular area which will add to the melody of the greater ecosystem.

Featured image: Wolf River on the Menominee Reservation. Photo by Chris Ford, November 2009. Podcast music: “Gloves” by Julian Lynch. Used with permission.

Jeff Grignon is a Menominee tribal member and worked as a Forest Regeneration Forester for Menominee Nation for over 20 years. His work focuses on cultural resource protection, and over the past 50 years he has identified and mapped over 700 archaeological sites on the reservation to protect them from harvest operations on the forest. His current project is to put together a GPS map of archaeological sites along an ancient tribal trail system to use as an educational tool for the public. 

Rebecca Edler is the Sustainability Coordinator at the Sustainable Development Institute at the College of Menominee Nation. Working with recruitment, admissions, and advising at the College for five years before moving into this position, she is familiar with various aspects of higher education, primarily Student Services. Rebecca brings her experience of working in research and development to the Sustainable Development Institute as well as her passion to strengthen American Indian families. Contact.

Becca Dower, Turtle Mountain Ojibwe, is a graduate student in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research explores First Nations Food Sovereignty initiatives across Turtle Island. Currently she is working with Nations to develop a digital intertribal trade network of foodways, knowledge, and skills as a tool in achieving food sovereignty in Native communities.