Mamaceqtaw

The Mamaceqtaw, called Menominee, or wild rice people, by the Ojibwe and French, are an Algonquian-speaking nation of Wisconsin and Michigan, who had occupied lands around Green Bay and the Menominee River for more than a thousand years before European contact. Mamaceqtaw means the people; the French called them folles avoines, after the wild rice that, with sturgeon, formed their staple diet.

French explorers met them in the mid-seventeenth century, when they may have numbered about three thousand, and drew them into the Great Lakes fur trade. They took the French side in the colonial wars and, after initially staying neutral, joined the British in the War of 1812, fighting at Mackinac Island.

From 1821 treaties with the United States reduced their territory; Chief Oshkosh resisted pressure to move beyond the Mississippi and kept a homeland on the Wolf River.