How Menominee County got its name

Most county names in Michigan honor a person. This one honors a nation — and the nation is still here. The Menominee call themselves Mamaceqtaw, “the people,” and they are among the oldest peoples of the Great Lakes: in the Nation’s own telling, they have no migration story at all, because they were created right here, at the mouth of the Menominee River, where their history reaches back some ten thousand years. The name everyone else knows them by came from their neighbors — from the Algonquian word for wild rice, the food at the heart of their world. In the Nation’s telling, wild rice and maple sugar were the Creator’s two gifts to them, and wherever the people went, the rice seemed to follow. So they became the Wild Rice People: the Menominee.

Their homeland once spread across some ten million acres of what’s now Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula, including this shore. Through a series of treaties in the first half of the 1800s they were pressed to give nearly all of it up, and the government planned to move them west entirely — until Chief Oshkosh traveled to inspect the proposed lands in Minnesota, judged them poor, and refused. In 1854 the Menominee secured a reservation on the Wolf River, inside their ancient homeland, about sixty miles west of this river’s mouth. The Nation lives there today; Wisconsin even has a Menominee County of its own, which is the reservation itself.

Michigan’s Menominee County, for its part, was carved out of Delta County in 1861 under a different name entirely — Bleeker. When the county government was organized two years later, the borrowed name was dropped for the one that was always on this river. River, city, county: all three say Menominee, and all three are saying the name of the people who were here first.