Museum tells story of Menominee clans

Exhibit in Oshkosh opens to acclaim, powwow as it features James Frechette’s carvings
By: 
Lee Pulaski
City Editor

It’s rare for a museum to open a new exhibit with a powwow.

In this case, though, Oshkosh Public Museum wouldn’t have opened up its exhibit on the Menominee Clans Story any other way.

The new exhibit, featuring over 30 wood carvings created by the late Menominee artist James Frechette that symbolized the various clans and the story itself told in audio in both the English and Menominee languages, opened June 5 with a powwow taking place outside on the grass. Vendors sold Native jewelry, clothing and other attire, and a frybread stand greeted visitors when they crossed the street from the parking lot.

Of all of the exhibits that the museum has opened, this one was the most important to get right, according to director Brad Larson. Oshkosh, like most northeast Wisconsin communities, sits on Menominee ancestral land, and even though it’s no longer land specifically for the tribe, Larson felt it was important to honor the people who walked the land centuries earlier.

“We could have had a smaller exhibit opening, but we didn’t want to. We wanted to do it right,” Larson said. “We really wanted to honor the clans and the Menominee, and we knew the way to do that is through this powwow. Anything else would be second rate, and we just didn’t want to do second rate.”

The exhibit opening had been planned for 2020, but the coronavirus pandemic put a kink in that event like so many others. Larson felt it was a good thing, because it gave museum staff more time to get things exactly right.

“I’m just really impressed with how everything came together, like a well-oiled machine,” Larson said. “It seemed like it was meant to be.”

The museum has enjoyed a lengthy relationship with the Menominee tribe, dating back to almost when the facility opened in 1924, according to Larson. Oshkosh has a number of collections that are deeply intertwined with the Menominee culture, he said, with some of it available for people to see in the People of the Waters exhibit one floor down from the clans exhibit.

Richard Frechette, James’ son, noted that his father started learning about the clans and art when he was very young. He said that James would visit tribal elders and listen to them tell stories in the 1930s and 1940s. The son then learned of the stories from his father.

“He didn’t know he was going to do a project like this,” Frechette said. “When he went to start carving, he didn’t carve. He started painting. Then he decided to carve, and it wasn’t just carving. He did in-depth research on every figure. He drew numerous drawings — very detailed drawings — of how each figure is and what that carving represented in the clans. Then it went off from there.”

Frechette sees his father’s work as a way to keep the Menominee culture alive. He said that his father left nothing to chance and would not stop until the figures were perfect.

“Everything he did was very detailed,” Frechette said. “He did everything very meticulously.”

James Frechette has had a powerful influence on his son, even after passing in 2006.

“I have a picture of him and Mom,” Richard Frechette said. “Every morning, I turn to the right, and I see them.”

Karen Hoffman, who claims she’s just nosy but is also part of the Frechette family through marriage, said that the exhibit seemed destined to be, although it baffled her how it all came together.

“It was a really organic development of disparate pieces that seemed to come together,” Hoffman said. “It was not random and not really happenstance, but not really planned, either.”

Hoffman said that James Frechette’s work is “huge” to the mission of breaking down stereotypes about the Menominee and Native Americans in general.

“Too many people don’t realize that Native people still exist, and when they think of us, they think that we’re either in the past or locked away on some prison camp reserve,” Hoffman said. “They don’t realize we work at Toyota. We work at Phillip Morris. We’re out and about. We’re artists.”

Richard Frechette and Hoffman both felt palpable emotion at the powwow during the family dance. Hoffman recalled flippantly saying beforehand that James would be dancing with them that day, but it turned out to be true for them.

“It brought a tear to my eye, I can tell you that,” Frechette said. “It was hard to fight it back.”


lpulaski@newmedia-wi.com