Menominee Nation builds dugout canoe for symbolic return to birthplace
Tribal members were carving a dugout canoe on the Menominee River, preparing a symbolic trip back to the mouth of the river where Menominee creation story begins.
Menominee Nation members were building a traditional dugout canoe along the Menominee River, shaping a vessel meant for a symbolic return to the tribe’s birthplace at the mouth of the river.
The project tied the work of the present-day builders directly to the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin’s creation story, which says tribal history begins about 60 miles east of the current Menominee Indian Reservation. The tribe says that is where its five clans, Bear, Eagle, Wolf, Moose and Crane, were created. It is also the place tied to Menekaunee, the Menominee’s main village near present-day Marinette, Wisconsin, at the mouth of the Menominee River.
That connection gives the canoe project a meaning beyond craft. The Menominee are the only present-day tribe in Wisconsin whose origin story says they have always lived in the state, and the canoe reflects a heritage that was built on water travel long before modern roads or bridges cut across the region. Wisconsin maritime history identifies Native American dugout and birchbark canoes as the first vessels to travel the state’s lakes and rivers, and the Menominee used dugout canoes historically, with dugouts more common than birchbark canoes in their traditional lifeways.
The Menominee River build also fits into a larger record of Indigenous canoe knowledge across Wisconsin. On Lake Mendota, underwater researchers working with the Ho-Chunk and Menominee nations recovered a 15-foot canoe on Nov. 2, 2021 that was mostly intact and later radiocarbon dated to 800 CE. A second Lake Mendota canoe, found on Sept. 22, 2022, measured 14.5 feet and was made from ash, with a date reaching back to 1,000 BCE. Wisconsin archaeological work has documented dugouts even older than that, including one dated to 2,500 BCE.
Taken together, the river canoe in Menominee County, the Lake Mendota recoveries and the tribe’s origin story point to the same thing: canoe building is not being revived as a display piece, but carried forward as a living practice that still connects Menominee families, waterways and identity.
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