Siege and Survival

Winner of the Wisconsin Historical Society Book Award of Merit

The Menominee Indians, or “wild rice people,” have lived for thousands of years in the region that is now called Wisconsin and are the oldest Native American community that still lives there. But the Menominee’s struggle for survival and rights to their land has been long and hard.

In Siege and Survival, David R. M. Beck draws on interviews with tribal members, stories recorded by earlier researchers, and exhaustive archival research to give us a full account of the Menominee’s early history. Beginning in the seventeenth century, the Menominee’s traditional way of life was intensely pressured by a succession of outsiders. Native nations attacked other Native nations, forcing their dislocation, and Europeans introduced the fur trade to the area, disrupting the traditional economy and way of life. In the nineteenth century Anglo-Americans poured into the Old Northwest and surrounded the Menominee; as a result the Menominee people were confined to a reservation in 1854.

Beck examines these crucial early events from an ethnohistorical perspective, adding Menominee voices to the story and showing how numerous individuals and leaders in the trading era and later worked diligently to survive. The story is a complicated one: some Menominees encouraged radical cultural change, while others—as well as some non-Menominees—aided the community in its struggle to maintain traditions. Beck provides the most complete written history to date of this enduring Indian nation.

 Praise for Seeking Recognition

“Beck does a wonderful job of explaining the social, political, and economic activities of Menominee leaders and tribal members by situating them within the context of their own customs, traditions, and worldview…. Studies such as this one, which portray Native-American leaders and groups not as victims but as independent actors drive by complicated (and often unclear) motives, are absolutely vital to understanding the dynamic and complex relations inherent in history at the local, regional, and national levels.”—Michigan Historical Review

“Using interviews and incisive ethnohistorical techniques, Beck has crafted the best interpretive study of the Menominees from earliest French  contact through the beginning years of reservation life.”—Choice 

“The book’s strength lies in the solid implementation of historical method in telling the story of Euroamerican colonialism from a Native perspective.”—Anthropos

“I recommend the greater part of this book not only as a generally reliable guide to post-contact pre-1856 Menominee history but as a decidedly engaging one as well.”—Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute