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berries, and a site for cultural practices. Some Menominee say that if the forest were
gone the Menominee would no longer exist as a people. Hunters often express a
sense of awe when they note that their ancestors hunted on the very same ground
where they are hunting now. We once asked a Menominee hunter what he thinks
about when he is hunting and his answer was, “I pray.”
The Menominee relationship with the forest has not been free of the history
of America and the majority culture domination of Indigenous people. Since the
present boundaries of the reservation were established in 1856, the tribe has strug-
gled with outside interests and the federal government. The so-called “Pine Ring”
attempted to steal Menominee timber and to gain control of and clear cut the
Menominee reservation. Newman (1967) estimates that about 1 million board feet
of timber were stolen from the reservation between 1871 and 1890.
The struggle has been even more protracted and multifaceted (Grignon et al.,
1998). In 1871 Secretary of the Interior agreed that the Menominee be allowed to
cut and sell logs to mills outside the reservation. Under pressure from the Pine Ring,
the government halted the Menominee logging operation in 1878. In 1882 a special
act of the US Congress allowed the tribe to cut “dead and down” timber. In 1888
the US Attorney General ordered another halt to logging on grounds that the timber
was government property. In 1890 another Congressional act authorized cutting and
sale of timber under the supervision of government superintendents. In 1908 a bill
authorized the Menominee to build their own mill and to harvest mature trees under
a selective cutting system where Forestry Service specialists would mark the trees
to be cut. In 1912 agency superintendents began a policy of clear cutting in direct
violation of the 1908 act. Selective cutting was reinstituted in 1926. In 1928 the
tribe was able to elect an advisory board and the board went to Washington DC to
protest the mismanagement of the forest and mill. It took until 1951 for the tribe to
win an 8.5 million dollar settlement for the failure of governmental officials to carry
out provisions of the 1908 act.
At present, the logging operation is managed by Menominee Tribal Enterprises
(MTE). But even now cutting prescriptions are approved by the Bureau of Indian
Affairs (BIA).
At one point, the Menominee nation was one of the most economically successful
Indian communities in North America. Despite federal oversight and mismanage-
ment, the Menominee logging operation employed hundreds of Menominee people
and generated significant revenues. But in the early 1950s the federal government
began a policy known as termination in which the sovereign status of targeted
nations was removed. The Menominee termination act was signed into law in 1954
and implemented in 1961. In effect, it was an attempt to legislate the tribe out
of existence. The idea was that all Menominees would become American citizens
instead of wards of the federal government. The tribe would receive no more finan-
cial support from the federal government, the land would be divided up, and the
reservation would become nothing more than another Wisconsin county.
The termination act immediately crippled the Menominee Nation financially,
because the tribe had no tax base to generate revenue. The tribal clinic and hospital
soon closed. There was deep ripple effect on all aspects of the tribal community.
Overnight Menominee County became a pocket of poverty.
