Menominee (c. 1791 – April 15, 1841) was a Potawatomi chief and religious leader whose village on reservation lands at Twin Lakes, southwest of Plymouth in present-day Marshall County, Indiana, became the gathering place for the Potawatomi who refused to remove from their Indiana reservation lands in 1838. Their primary settlements were at present day Myers Lake and Cook Lake. Although Menominee's name and mark appear on several land cession treaties, including the Treaty of St. Mary's (1818), the Treaty of Mississinewas (1826), the Treaty of Tippecanoe (1832), and a treaty signed on December 16, 1834, he and other Potawatomi refused to take part in subsequent land cession negotiations, including the Treaty of Yellow River (1836), that directly led to the forced removal of Menominee's band from Indiana in 1838.
Despite his efforts to resist removal, Menominee was among the 859 Potawatomi who were forcibly removed from Twin Lakes, Indiana, to Indian reservation lands near present-day Osawatomie, Kansas, on what became known as the Potawatomi Trail of Death. The journey from September 4, 1838, to November 4, 1838, covered about over 61 days; 42 died (28 of them were children) along the route. It was the single largest Indian removal from Indiana. Menominee survived the march to Kansas, but died less than three years later, and is buried at St. Mary's Mission, Kansas. In 1909 the State of Indiana erected a statue of him near the headwaters of the Yellow River, southwest of the present-day town of Plymouth, Indiana, near the site of his former village at Twin Lakes. It is the first monument to a Native American erected under a state or federal legislative enactment.
Early life and education
Menominee was a Potawatomi native, whose exact date and location of birth are unknown. It is believed he was born around 1791, most likely in what is now the states of Wisconsin or Indiana. The Potawatomi were Algonquian speaking people who became the second largest tribal group in Indiana. They moved south from northern Wisconsin and Michigan to occupy a wide territory that included the southern tip of Lake Michigan to Lake Erie, an area encompassing northern Illinois, north central Indiana, and a strip across southern Michigan.
A series of land cession treaties with the federal government that began during Indiana's territorial era and continued into the 1830s required the Potawatomi and other tribes to relinquish nearly all their reservation lands in most of present-day Illinois and Indiana. Menominee and his band established a village on reservation lands at the headwaters of the Yellow River, near the Twin Lakes, southwest of Plymouth, in present-day Marshall County, Indiana.
Religious alliance
Menominee became a religious leader known as the "Potawatomi Preacher" or the "Potawatomi Prophet", but he was never as well known as Tenskwatawa (The Prophet), a Shawnee spiritual leader. Menominee combined The Prophet's spiritual tenets with Roman Catholicism to create a new religion that would help his people cope with the changes caused by the growing influence of settlers and increased pressure by the federal government to cede the Potawatomi reservation lands in Indiana and move west. Menominee was known to have included prayer in his spiritual gatherings and urged the Potawatomi to abstain from drinking alcohol and other vices.
Menominee encouraged other religious groups to establish missions in northern Indiana. At a Fort Wayne council meeting in 1820, Menominee invited Isaac McCoy, a Baptist missionary, to visit Potawatomi villages in the Yellow River area. When the 1821 Treaty of Chicago provided federal funds for an Indian school, McCoy established the Carey Mission in 1823, at the present-day site of Niles, Michigan, but the school began to decline by 1826 and closed in 1830. It was replaced by a new Catholic mission near the Potawatomi community at Niles, where an earlier Jesuit mission had been in operation between 1690–1761. In 1830 Father Frederick Reze(e) baptized thirteen Potawatomi, including Potawatomi chief Leopold Pokagon and his son. After Father Rise(s)'s departure, Chief Pokagon petitioned the Catholic Church to send a new priest. Father Stephen T. Badin re-established the Saint Joseph mission in 1830 and was joined by Father Louis Deseille, another Jesuit missionary, to the Pokagon community in 1833. Father Deseille expanded the Catholic mission to Menominee's Yellow River village at Twin Lakes in 1834. These two communities were at the heart of the regional resistance to removal in the 1830s. Father Deseille baptized Menominee on August 24, 1834, and the Potawatomi chief was given the Christian name of Alexis.
