Omāēqnomenēwak-Eskōnekan

We are Kāēyas Mamāceqtawak,
the Ancient Ones

We place our origin story at the mouth of the Menominee River. Our work takes place within our ancestral homelands, which once spanned across 10.5 million acres and are now held within 235,000 acres of the Menominee Nation. Our people are called Omāēqnomenēwak (the People of the Wild Rice), and we have lived in relationship with these lands for more than 10,000 years.

Figure 1: www.menominee-nsn.gov

The Menominee worldview teaches that land, water, and all beings are woven together in one living system. These teachings guide our restoration efforts, from watershed protection to the return of our relatives, the Buffalo and Sturgeon, and grounds our work with our young people, and wellness of community, land, and water.

The Menominee Relationship with Buffalo

The Menominee people have long regarded Buffalo as a sacred relative, known to us as Pesāēhkiw, whose presence is understood as coming from within the Earth. We consider them a cultural and ecological keystone species for their role in healing both the ecosystem and our community. To ensure our value and care of buffalo remain intact and strong, it is important that we understand the circumstances that removed these relatives from our community.

Menominee ancestral territory sits on a significant bioregion of Eastern hardwood forests, Western prairie systems, and an abundance of inland wetlands and rivers, including the Great Lakes. These ecological landscapes formed natural migratory corridors and stopovers, which informed Menominee lifeways and became a part of our cultural, ecological, and caretaking practices, including hunting, fishing, gathering, and agriculture. It was within this geography and broad landscape that our spiritual leaders maintained Buffalo’s presence as relatives through ceremony.

Through coordinated policy and systematic efforts, the U.S. government, along with colonial settler behavior and mentality, intentionally disrupted Menominee relationship with Buffalo.

Disrupted Relations: Buffalo and Menominee Life

From the late 1800s through the early 1900s, anthropologists, government agents, and early media documented Indigenous cultures through a narrow colonial lens intended to support the narrative that Native peoples were a hindrance to Westward expansion. These records became the authority for how the broader public understood Native-to-Government relations during a time period when the U.S. government was actively dismantling traditional knowledge through boarding schools, religious prohibition, and land dispossession. Much of what was written, recorded, and photographed reflected what outsiders observed after disruption had already occurred.

It didn’t capture the fullness of Menominee knowledge as it existed before, and it excluded Buffalo and other lifeways from our people’s history.

Together with forced assimilation, anthropological extraction, and widespread land dispossession, these policies and tactics severed Menominee spiritual relationships with Buffalo and other relatives across more than 150 years of systematic colonization. By the time American history and anthropology texts, and journalism and media began documenting and sharing Menominee life during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, our knowledge and relationships that once sustained Buffalo’s presence had been criminalized and our stories driven underground.

“Chief Oshkosh (kāēh nap, “used to be”) was the last known Menominee chief to conduct Buffalo ceremonies, songs, and dances held through the mid-1800s, before the BIA forcibly silenced these practices.”

Buffalo Territory

Healing, Identity, and Resilience

Today, Menominee knowledge is being re-gathered through place-based memory, family teachings, and the places where our ancestors moved through the Great Lakes region. The stories being collected and shared carry oral histories, our history and connections to land, relationships, and intertribal trade routes, and continue to affirm Menominee connections to Buffalo that extend beyond what was captured in colonial records. Menominee Cultural Geography is one such documentation that highlights ancestral travel routes, ecological relationships, and stories that reconnect Buffalo to our homelands.