"Anthology of Menominee Sayings" is the result of seven years of
field work (conducted during the 1980's) with about half a dozen
speakers of one of Wisconsin's indigenous Algonquian languages.
The anthology, consisting of some 450 short pieces of Menominee
oral tradition, contains weather rules, conventions and taboos
surrounding hunting and fishing, wisdom on the conduct of life,
and omens predicting good or ill. The texts, therefore, tell of
the community's interest in the contour of life from its
inception to its preservation and eventual demise. Each text is
accompanied by an English translation and, where necessary,
explanatory linguistic and cultural notes. The notes take
Bloomfield's grammatical description and lexicon of Menominee as
a point of comparison, and indicate phonetic, phonological,
morphological, syntactic and semantic departures from the state
of the language as described by him. The text is useful to
students of culture, folklore, Native American studies, as well
as historical and descri