Cabinet Cards of Scenes around Keshena, Wisconsin, Including Menominee and Stockbridge-Munsee Reservations and Logging.
Wisconsin: 1898–1899. Nineteen cabinet cards on large mounts; photographs measuring 4 ½ x 6 ½ inches and mounts measuring 8 x 10 inches. Photos with some wear; mounts worn with staining and damage to corners. Manuscript captions verso. Overall excellent. Item #List3226
Nineteen photographs dated 1898 and 1899 depicting scenes in and around Keshena, Wisconsin, which is in the Menominee Reservation. Photographs show the Menominee Hospital and the main street of Keshena, and a number show logging activity in the area. Logging was the primary industry in Wisconsin by the midcentury. According to the Wisconsin Historical Society, the lumber industry was made possible by the forced relocation of the Menominee people and also employed them; one photograph of a logging camp is captioned “A small portion of the rivermens camp. / Eating tent and cook / Joe Caldwell a half breed standing by a sleeping tent.”
Other Keshena scenes include shots of a summer cottage and a wigwam near “Macharcotte Lake”, which is probably Moshawquit Lake on the eastern side of the reservation, and several of “ration day” activity—as Indigenous tribes were forced onto reservations and prevented from traditional methods of food production, the US government began to issue rations. These radically shifted tribes’ diets and engendered dependency on the government, overall promoting the government’s aim of cultural assimilation.
In a more direct push for assimilation, the 1883 Code of Indian Offenses explicitly outlawed the performance of traditional dances (for which the punishment was withholding of rations). Nonetheless, two photographs in this collection show an 1898 “dream dance” in Keshena, described in the caption as “a dance infavorable to white men.” One shows the food being prepared for the dancers, with a menu of boiled rice, salt pork, and fry bread. The other shows the dance itself. A group of fifteen or twenty people, some seated and some dancing, are inside a circle formed by a low wooden fence beneath a tattered American flag. The dancers are all men, and wear suits or waistcoats along with more traditional accoutrements.
To the south, between Keshena and Shawano, several photographs show an Indigenous grave site. The graves are low wooden structures with small holes near the lids; as the caption describes it:
“Pagan Indian custom. Hole allows spirit to go in + out; food + tobacco placed in front. Spirit remains until widow has money enough to give a dance in medicine lodge to initiate a new candidate + dance off the spirit. Canoe + flag buried with body.”
There are also two photographs from the Stockbridge-Munsee reservation, which is to the south and east of the larger Menominee reservation. The Stockbridge-Munsee Community came originally from New England, New York, and the mid-Atlantic, and their reservation in Wisconsin was created in 1856 by a treaty taking land from the Menominee reservation. One photograph shows a street scene and the other the home of Elizabeth Gardener, describing her family as the “only ones who could speak their tribal language.”
Of interest to historians of Wisconsin Indigenous history around the turn of the twentieth century.
Price: $1,750.00
Status: On Hold