The Menominee, Ho-Chunk, and the Land Before the Forts

Long before any European set eyes on this bay, two distinct nations occupied its shores. The Menominee, whose name derives from the Algonkian word for wild rice, a food so central to their lives it defined them, have lived in what is now Wisconsin for thousands of years, by their own oral traditions and by archaeology. Their origin stories locate them here, at the mouth of the Menominee River and along the western shore of Green Bay, for thousands of years.

The Ho-Chunk, or Winnebago, maintained their own ancient relationship with this landscape. Thunderbird clan oral traditions specifically name Red Banks on this bay as the place of Ho-Chunk origins. When Jean Nicolet arrived in sixteen thirty-four, he found both nations thriving, the Menominee as gifted fishers and wild-rice harvesters, the Ho-Chunk as a powerful confederacy that commanded the Fox River valley.

Both nations would negotiate, under pressure and often under duress, the treaties that allowed New York tribes to resettle here in the early eighteen hundreds. They believed those treaties granted residency rights, not land cession. The United States government interpreted them differently.

The Menominee retained a reservation in central Wisconsin after decades of resistance to removal. The Ho-Chunk were pushed out of Wisconsin in stages after the treaty of eighteen thirty-seven, first to Iowa and then to Minnesota, and in eighteen sixty-three were forcibly relocated to South Dakota, and many escaped again, and ultimately a portion returned and purchased land in Wisconsin, where their descendants remain today. The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay formally acknowledges both nations in its land acknowledgment as the original peoples of this ground.