MENOMINEE ANCESTORS COMING HOME FOR REBURIAL

MENOMINEE ANCESTORS COMING HOME FOR REBURIAL In accordance with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), the Menominee Tribal Historic Preservation Office on behalf of the Menominee Tribe will bring home Menominee ancestors and their funerary objects for reburial. There are 67 ancestors (co-mingled) and 3,967 associated funerary objects that were excavated from the Riverside Cemetery site located on the Menominee River in Menominee Michigan. The associated funerary objects include hornstone blades, bifaces, chert blades, chert flakes, charcoal, copper artifacts including awls, crescents, points, beads, wood fragments, quartzite flacks, stone fragments, soil samples, stone points, and cores, birch bark fragments, shell beads, red sandstone/catlanite fragments, worked stone or whetstones, limonite, seeds bark, deer premolar and a shell. The Riverside site was excavated jointly by the Oshkosh Public Museum (OPM) and Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM) between 1961 and 1963). The excavation was led by Anthropologists Robert Hrushka of OPM and Robert Retzenthaler of MPM. Most of the site collections were donated to the MPM by the Oshkosh Public Museum on 9/26/1967 The Riverside Site is considered a multicomponent site representing Late Archaic to the Mississippian time periods, with the main component being a Lake Archaic/Early Woodland Transition/Red Ochre Old Copper culture cemetery dating between 1,000 to 100 BC. It took many years of “consultation” under the provisions of NAGPRA to have our request approved. Also from MPM is one ancestor that was excavated at Potato Rapids site (47-MT 79) in Marinette County located on the Peshtigo River. Also being repatriated is the human remains of one ancestor from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (UMAA). The ancestor came from the Chalk Hill Mound Group located on the Menominee River near Sixty Islands and the other ancestor (cranium) came from a school located in Menominee, Michigan and was donated to UMAA in 1953. And lastly, 7 hornstone biface fragments that were gifted to the Oshkosh Public Museum by Robert Hrushka that came from 20-ME-0001 Riverside Cemetery Project. The University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh sent the biface fragments to the Menominee Tribal Historic Preservation Office for reburial. Repatriation ceremonies will be held at the Menominee Logging Museum on November 14 starting with a feast at noon and the reburial will take place at the Repatriation Burial Ground located at Crow Settlement after the feast. PLEASE BRING A DISH TO PASS FOR THE FEAST AT NOON ON NOVEMBER 14TH AND NO SMALL CHILDREN WILL BE ALLOWED AT THE FEAST AND REBURIAL.