Indians in Wisconsin's History

Long before Wisconsin became a state, indigenous nations thrived here. This meticulously researched handbook reconstructs their world: the clans and kinship structures, the crafts and clothing, the hunting grounds and seasonal settlements that sustained peoples like the Ho-Chunk, Menominee, and Ojibwe for generations. Then came the French, the British, the Americans each claiming the land, each drawing Native nations into conflicts not their own, each treaty eroding another piece of territory. Douglass documents the slow violence of displacement: the wars, the broken agreements, the forced removal to reservations, the shocking diminishment of populations that once numbered in the tens of thousands. Originally published by the Milwaukee Public Museum in 1954, this volume carries the weight of mid-century scholarship its thoroughness, its biases, its urgent effort to record what remained before it vanished entirely. It stands as an invaluable record of a erased world and the peoples who still endure.