HomeMy WebLinkAboutChevalier - Grignon - Manning - Chief Oshkosh Plaques (October 2021)Chief Oshkosh
Monument Project
Presentation:
Becoming Neighbors
with Legitimacy
Arnold Chevalier, Dave Grignon,
and Pascale Manning
Image credit: Oshkosh Public Museum manningp@uwosh.eduContact:
David Grignon (Menominee) –
Tribal Historic Preservation
Officer, Menominee Indian
Tribe
Current Members of the Chief Oshkosh Monument Project
Committee
Pascale M. Manning –
Assistant Professor of
English, UWO
Arnold Chevalier
(Menominee) –
Former Chair of the
Wisconsin Humanities
Council
FIVE PLAQUES
-
FINALIZED LANGUAGE
-
WITH IMAGES INDICATING PLACEMENT
1) BIOGRAPHICAL PLAQUE
(SOUTH SIDE, FACING THE STATUE):
This statue commemorates Oshkosh (b. 1795), Chief of the Menominee Nation from 1827 until
his death in 1858. It is largely in relation to the conflicts of settler colonialism that Oshkosh is
remembered by history. From the War of 1812, in which Oshkosh fought alongside the British, to
the Black Hawk War of 1832, where he sided with the Americans, to the numerous treaty
negotiations he effected on behalf of the Menominee Nation, his tenure as Chief was shaped by
proceedings enforced on Indigenous peoples by an organized settlement campaign. While the
Menominee and Ho-Chunk Nations had by the nineteenth century a long history of coexisting in
adjacent lands, reaching agreements through a principle of land sharing, Chief Oshkosh was
forced to negotiate agreements with the U.S. government under a principle of Indigenous removal
that saw the Menominee, like so many Indigenous nations in North America, forcibly displaced
from and dispossessed of their traditional territories. But under his leadership, the Menominee
successfully resisted a proposed total removal to lands in Minnesota, securing instead in 1854 a
276,480-acre parcel of land along the Oconto and Wolf Rivers. It is there, in what became the
modern Menominee Reservation, that Oshkosh died in 1858.
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2) STATESMAN PLAQUE
(ON EAST SIDE OF THE STATUE)
While seeking to prioritize the needs of the Menominee at a time of rapid change, Chief Oshkosh
witnessed settlement on several fronts: by encroaching European and American traders and settlers
seeking lands and means to extract natural resources in the Wisconsin Territory, but also by Indigenous
nations displaced by the U.S. government (including the Oneida, Stockbridge-Munsee, and Brothertown,
a.k.a the New York Tribes). With the passing of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, Chief Oshkosh was
faced with the difficult task of protecting the rights of the Menominee against a federal government that
perceived them as an obstacle to expansion. In the years leading up to and following the 1830 Removal
Act and the 1848 formalization of Wisconsin’s status as a state, Oshkosh negotiated land cessions –
including the 1831 Treaty of Washington, the 1836 Cedar Point treaty, the 1848 Lake Pow-aw-kan-nay
treaty, and the 1854 Treaty of Wolf River –that ultimately amounted to more than 10,000,000 acres of
land around Green Bay, the Fox River Valley, Wisconsin River, and lake Michigan. Oshkosh’s life was
marked by the growing isolation of the Menominee as other local nations –the Sauk, Mesquakie, and
Ho-Chunk –were removed from their traditional territories. But it is testament to his skill as a leader that,
as part of a delegation sent to petition President Millard Fillmore to prevent the removal of the
Menominee to 600,000 acres along the Crow Wing River in Minnesota, Oshkosh helped to persuade the
President to allow the Menominee to remain and became the architect of two agreements that led to the
formation of a reservation along the Oconto and Wolf Rivers, estimated by 1856 to be of some 235,000
acres.
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2) STEWARD PLAQUE(ON WEST SIDE OF THE STATUE, OPPOSITE “STATESMAN” PLAQUE)
Under the leadership of Chief Oshkosh the Menominee ultimately secured 235,523 acres of
forested land along the Oconto and Wolf Rivers, and the practice of tree harvesting they enacted
there has led the Menominee forest to become one of the world’s most historically significant
examples of ecosystem preservation in a working forest. The sustainable forestry practices of the
Menominee Nation are recognized internationally as signal examples of responsible land
stewardship, and it is the blending of traditional methods and beliefs with evolving forestry
practice that has enabled the Menominee to ensure longstanding sustainable yield and a
balanced habitat in their forest. Chief Oshkosh himself is reputed to have offered instruction on
a method of harvest that emphasizes regeneration and endurance: “Start with the rising sun and
work toward the setting sun, but take only the mature trees, the sick trees, and the trees that have
fallen. When you reach the end of the reservation, turn and cut from the setting sun to the rising
sun, and the trees will last forever.” Regardless of the source of the instruction, the long-term
productivity of the Menominee forest has been ensured as well as the health and diversity of its
ecosystem.
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3) LAND PLAQUE(ON NORTH SIDE, BEHIND OSHKOSH, FACING THE LAKE)
Posoh –Welcome! You are standing on the ancestral lands of the Menominee, which stretch out around
you as far as the eye can see and for millions of acres beyond to the west, north, east, and south. From this
site you see Lake Winnebago, one of many shallow lakes in the region that once supported a thriving wild
rice marsh. This crop formed an essential part of the traditional Menominee diet, which also included
sturgeon, game, and both wild and cultivated plants and vegetables. (Indeed, the word “Menominee” is a
form of the Algonquian word “Menōmaeh” (“wild rice”) or “Omaeqnomēnewak,” meaning “people of
the wild rice.”) To the east lies the Fox River, a waterway that sweeps north, toward lake Michigan’s
Green Bay, where it mingles with the water issuing from the sacred Menominee River, whose mouth lies
on the western shore of the great bay. Menominee oral history tells of how Maec-awaetok (Great Spirit)
created the first human by gifting the power of transformation to a bear at the mouth of the Menominee
River, and how the Ancestral Bear in turn helped to build the Menominee tribe through the
transformation first of Eagle, then Crane, then Wolf, and finally of Moose into the tribe’s earliest people.
From them were borne the principle clans, family groups stretching from time immemorial to the period
of Chief Oshkosh’s governance to the present and into the future. Chief Oshkosh, whose name means
“The Claw,” was of the Bear Clan, and his devotion to his Clan’s duty to regulate civil affairs is apparent
in the living legacy to his efforts to protect the interests of his people during a time of rapid change.
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5) META-PLAQUE(ON THE SOUTH SIDE, BELOW THE ORIGINAL PLAQUE; THIS REVISION ASSUMES THAT AN IMAGE OF OSHKOSH WILL BE INCLUDED ON THE PLAQUE):
As the image on this plaque demonstrates,the statue before you not
only misrepresents the personal appearance of Chief Oshkosh
himself but in doing so perpetuates white Euro-American
stereotypes of Indigenous peoples as primitive and exotic.In
reducing Chief Oshkosh’s many significant accomplishments to
lending his name to this city,the original accompanying plaque
serves as an example of the colonial tendency to reduce and erase
Indigenous strengths and achievements.Taken as a whole,the
existing monument serves as a troubling testament to the long history of
misrepresentation and misunderstanding of Indigenous peoples and the living and
present legacy of settler colonialism and serves as a reminder of how far we have yet to go
to properly recognize the real contributions and presence of Indigenous peoples.
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