Present construction disturbs past remnants of Native American village in Menominee Park

When pulling up the structures of the present, one can not always know what might be waiting from the past. This proved just the case when a road construction project in Menominee Park revealed a Native American village dating back to around 900-1600 C.E. Since excavation of the site began this October, a number of artifacts and cultural features have been discovered by UW-Milwaukee’s Cultural Resource Management program, which was hired to complete the project. 

“We’re finding ceramic pots, all fragmented, and those would have been used for storage containers,” Dr. Jennifer Haas, the director of the Cultural Resource Management program, said. “We’re also finding stone tools, so projectile weapons and knives that would have been manufactured there.”

In addition to these physical items, the team has found “remnants of past behavior,” such as fire pits and cleared areas beneath now-disappeared houses, which suggest past activities but cannot be excavated like other artifacts.

Haas also notes that, while a number of artifacts are being uncovered by the archeological team, the primary goal of the project is to document and preserve the site.

“There’s not a whole lot of excavation that is being done by the archeologists,” she said. 

Dr. Margaret Huettl, a descendent of the Ojibwe Nation, who studies Indigenous communities at UW-Oshkosh, believes that the choice to preserve the village represents the acknowledgement of the right Native communities have to control their history as it shows up in the present. This is especially important given the lack of recognition these communities have historically received from those who ‘settled’ their homelands.

“We live in a place that is called Oshkosh. It’s named after a leader of the Menominee people, but we don’t think about the fact that we are in our homelands, past, present, future, no matter how many times we use that word,” she said. “To me, this is an example of how you can’t really erase that history, even to this day.”

Timber Smith, the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Coordinator for the City of Appleton and a resident of Oshkosh, agrees that the archeological project offers a valuable opportunity for communities in the region to learn about the often-overlooked history of its Native tribes. 

“History is identity,” he said. “To truly understand who you are, where you live, the why of a community, you need to understand the historical context behind it.”

Throughout the project, the Cultural Resource Management team and the City of Oshkosh have communicated with most of the major tribes in Wisconsin, but there is not enough evidence to be certain which tribes once occupied this particular land.

“It’s very difficult to make a direct connection between the materials that are left and the tribes that we know currently,” Haas said. “We know from historical narratives and then from tribes themselves that these are aboriginal homelands of the Ho-Chunk people and the Menominee Nation, so it’s reasonable to assume that the people who were living there at the time are likely related to those nations.”

The artifacts that are being excavated from the site are legally in possession of the City of Oshkosh, but the city is collaborating with the tribes with historical ties to the region to determine what will be done with those artifacts. Smith believes that, while making such artifacts available to the public can promote learning about the region’s past, it is also important for Native communities to have control over what happens with the remnants of their past.

“It’s their history. It’s their legacy. It’s their identity,” he said. “They should be able to do whatever they want with these things. It is not for us to say what should be done with these artifacts. Do I think it’s important to study? Yes, I think it’s definitely important to study. And, yes, do we want people to be educated from these artifacts? We absolutely want people educated from them. So we don’t want to just take them and run, per se, but I do think we want to have a clean agreement and a clean understanding that within a reasonable amount of time that these artifacts need to go back to their tribes to do with as they see fit.”

While there is a great deal not known about the residents of this village, historical evidence, which is gathered from written accounts, archeological findings, and oral tradition, can be used to hypothesize what the village was used for and why the Native community that once occupied it left the site, as Huettl explained.

“They came here to fish, to gather wild rice, and it would likely have been one of those villages where they came to access those resources that were important to them,” she said. “They would have been aware of what their environmental impacts were and the health of resources in the area, so one reason they might not have come back to that area would have been giving that spot a break.” 

Huettl also cites conflict with other groups in the region as a possible reason for the abandonment of the village. The Cultural Resource Management team was preparing for excavation of the site even before the construction project began. By consulting historical records of the area, the program was able to determine that an archeological site might be found beneath the roadbed, and, after making this prediction, it designed a plan with the city and tribal nations to test the sediment around the road for artifacts when the construction project began.

“We knew that there was a pretty good chance that there was a site, so we did shovel tests on the sides of the road and found artifacts there,” Haas said. 

By studying the archeological evidence that has been found at the current site and considering past records of the area, the Cultural Resource Management team has determined that the Native American village was likely much larger than the site that is currently being investigated. 

“We don’t know for sure, but we suspect that it is probably around the park,” Haas said. “It’s probably a pretty large village site through most of the park area.”

The project is an opportunity not only for the Oshkosh community to learn more about its past, but is giving archeology students at UW-Milwaukee the chance to apply techniques they have learned in the classroom to historical sites before graduating. 

“They get real-world experience,” Haas said. “The students that we hire tend to be grad students who are going into archeology, and by being hired onto this project they are getting hands-on experience that should help them be hired once they have their graduate degree.”

Because of the excavation work, events that normally take place in the park, such as the Festival of Lights and Turkey Trot, have been temporarily moved to other locations. The archeological team plans to take a break from their work over the winter, but expects that the project will be finished in the spring, when the road construction will resume.

“We can only do our work when there is no snow and the ground is not frozen, so we will have another couple weeks left in the fall and then we will return in the spring to finish up,” Haas said.

By Aria Boehler

Published November 27 2023

Oshkosh West Index Volume 120 Issue II