Birch Bark Basket
MCHS has been collecting objects of historical interest since the 1950s (and also inherited collections before this point). And not all objects have a clear provenance to tell us where they came from and what they are. One of the ongoing projects our curators work on, is to process the odd things that we come across that were never properly added to the collections. The donors of these objects might not think it important to tell us the story, or possibly never quite knew themselves. In other cases the paperwork of something brought in for
In this case, the uncertainty in the object’s origin is even more complicated, because it is almost certainly originally created from Native Americans.
The Complicated Story of “Indian Artifacts”
In the 1935, the Wausau Chamber of Commerce established the Marathon County Civic Corporation with the hopes of developing new ventures to spur the creation of tourism to the area. Leaders announced two such ventures that they felt had great promise: to develop downhill skiing on Rib Mountain, and the creation of a museum to sell “Indian artifacts.” The ski hill was a clear success by the time skiers were slaloming down in the winter of early 1938. But they also did make an attempt to develop an “Indian museum” as well.
One of the reasons this happened was due to the expertise of a local figure named Hugo Munn, a successful decorator and interior designer, he was also the leading collector of native pieces in Wisconsin. He claimed to have become such an expert through his life, that he was able to train native groups in practices they had forgotten. And
Before the lumberjacks and homesteaders came to establish the settlements in the mid 1800s, the area that would become Marathon County was home to groups of Ojibway (Chippewa), Menominee, and Ho-Chunk.
[A little about the actual fate of the native tribes in being forced onto reservations, but needing to come to the indian office in Wausau to collect payments]
Treaties with these groups led to Americans buying control over this region, but native people continued to be a regular presence, often a welcome one.
Early settlers, facing a need to create new identities for their emerging communities in the early 1850s, chose to adopt native words as their names. In 1854, the community at the Little Bull Falls chose to adopt the name Mosinee, after the leader of a band of Chippewa who would spend part of the year embanked on the Wisconsin River, near where the paper mill would later be built. And before that in 1850, Big Bull Falls adopted the name “Wausau,” borrowing the word for “far” or “distant” in Ojibwe (although it is worth noting that this was not necessarily because the natives called it waasa, but because of a humorous misunderstanding).
In the 20th century, the residents of Marathon County came to see the natives as an other-ed people firmly in the past, but