The Menominee collected the wild rice (actually not rice at all but the seed of a kind of grass) from canoes in summertime. The women usually performed this task while the men used bows and arrows to hunt small game from other boats or fished for sturgeon with hooks, spears, traps, and nets. First, the women would bend the tops of the tall aquatic grass over the canoe’s sides. Then they would hit the heads with a paddle, knocking the seeds into the boat’s bottom. The seeds could then be dried in the sun or by fire to open the hulls; next they were stamped on or pounded; and finally they were winnowed in the wind with a birch-bark tray, to separate the hulls from the grain. The grain was usually boiled and served with maple syrup or in a stew.
Wild rice is sometimes found in the shallows of small lakes and ponds. But the marshes bordering the western Great Lakes are especially lush. No wonder the Menominee and other Algonquians, such as the Chippewa, OTTAWA, and POTAWATOMI, plus the Siouan WINNEBAGO (ho-CHUNK), vied with one another for this territory (see NORTHEAST INDIANS). No wonder, also, when there was peace among the tribes, it was an uneasy peace. A tribe that had access to wild rice did not have to depend on farming for food and had a trade commodity that could buy hard-to-get items, such as buffalo furs from the prairies to the west of the Great Lakes. No wonder wild rice captured the Indian imagination and pervaded the mythology of various tribes.
When the first European explorer reached the region—the Frenchman Jean Nicolet in about 1634— the Menominee controlled the northwestern shore of Lake Michigan in what is now Wisconsin and Michigan. Because of wild rice, the Menominee moved less often than other tribes of the region, having year-round villages with two kinds of structures. Their cold-weather houses were domed wigwams, framed with bent saplings and usually covered with mats of cattails and reeds rather than the more common birch or elm bark. Their much larger warm-weather houses were rectangular with peaked roofs. The largest Menominee village stood at the mouth of the Menominee River where it empties into Green Bay, near the site of present-day Green Bay, Wisconsin.
The Menominee were known for their colorful clothing. Men generally wore deerskin shirts, breech-cloths, leggings, and moccasins; women wore shirts of woven nettles, along with deerskin tunics, leggings, and moccasins. Both men and women decorated their clothing with painted designs, porcupine quills, and in post-contact times, beadwork. The Menominee also wore copper jewelry, pounded and shaped from the surface deposits of copper near their homelands.
Menominee women were famous for their woven pouches. They utilized plant fibers, especially those from basswood trees, plus buffalo hairs. They dyed, spun, and wove the materials into large, supple bags with intricate geometric designs. The bags served many purposes, such as carrying and storing food or protecting ceremonial objects. The women also wove durable nets of bark fiber for fishing.
Like other tribes of the region, the Menominee made frequent use of tobacco, smoking it in their long pipes, or calumets. Just about every important ritual— making peace, preparing for war, curing the sick, or initiating someone into the Midewiwin Society—was accompanied by the smoking of tobacco. The Menominee thought that tobacco not only made a good ritualistic offering to Manitou, the Great Spirit, but that it also increased an individual’s intelligence for problem solving and decision making.