Menominee - Menominee Indian Reservation

Menominee Indian Reservation

The reservation was created in a treaty with the United States signed on May 12, 1854 in which the Menominee relinquished all claims to the lands held by them under previous treaties, and were assigned 432 square miles (1,120 km2) on the Wolf River in present-day Wisconsin. An additional treaty which they signed on February 11, 1856 carved out the southwestern corner of this area to create a separate reservation for the Stockbridge and Lenape (Munsee) tribes, who had reached the area as refugees from New York state. The latter two tribes have the joint Stockbridge-Munsee Community.

The Menominee Indian Reservation is located in northeastern Wisconsin. For the most part, it is conterminous with Menominee County and the town of Menominee, which were established after termination of the tribe in 1961, and before the reservation was re-established in 1975.

After the tribe had received federal recognition in 1973, it essentially restored the reservation to its historic boundaries in 1975. Many small pockets of territory within the county (and its geographically equivalent town) are not considered as part of the reservation. These amount to 1.14 percent of the county's area, so the reservation is essentially 98.86 percent of the county's area. The largest of these pockets is in the western part of the community of Keshena. The reservation includes a plot of off-reservation trust land of 10.22 acres (41,400 m2) in Winnebago County to the south, west of the city of Oshkosh. The reservation's total land area is 353.894 sq mi (916.581 km²), while Menominee County's land area is 357.960 sq mi (927.111 km²).

The small non-reservation parts of the county are more densely populated than the reservation, holding 1,337 (29.3%) of the county's 4,562 total population, as opposed to the reservation's 3,225 (70.7%) population, as of the 2000 census.

The most populous communities are Legend Lake and Keshena. Since the late twentieth century, the members of the reservation have operated a number of gambling facilities in these communities as a source of revenue. They speak English and their traditional Menominee, one of the Algonquian languages. Current population of the tribe is about 8700.