Regina "Gina" Washinawatok, Arts Educator (Menominee)

           

      Gina Washinawatok retired in June 2013 after 27 years of teaching.  “I loved my career as a teacher.  I loved what I did.  It was my life and I hated to quit.  I cried when I handed in my keys on the last day,” she said.   “I got a lot of enjoyment from working with kids and helping them open up and learn to express a part of themselves they didn’t know they had.  It’s very important for them to know who they are and where they come from.”  

     At the beginning of her career, Washinawatok taught studio art but after a decade or so, she began to teach a course in traditional Menominee arts – beading, finger weaving, quill-work, basket weaving, appliqué.  No instructional materials or curriculum existed; she had to create, plan and organize all aspects of the Traditional Menominee Crafts coursework.

       Washinawatok taught at the High School in the Menominee Indian School District formed in 1976.  Previously, Menominee high school students were bussed to the next town off the reservation to attend school.  Many issues, including racism, arose from this experience.  After a long fight for local control of their children’s education, the Menominee won the right to have their own school district, which now resides within the boundaries of the Reservation.  The Menominee people wanted a separate school district that not only taught regular subjects like math, science and English but would also teach and promote Menominee culture, language, history and the arts.

            In order to understand why the Menominee people wanted these changes, it is necessary to step back in time to remember that Native people were forced to attend boarding schools from the 1800’s on.  The boarding schools' sole purpose was to assimilate Native people into the general American culture.  This meant that Indian children were taken from their homes and sent to government-run boarding schools hundreds of miles away.  Once there, they were stripped of all things Indian.  Boys’ hair was shaved and girls’ hair was cut.  Children were not allowed to speak their language and there was harsh punishment if they did.  Many children died from being homesick and not allowed to go home.  “I visited some of the children’s graves at the Haskell Boarding School in Kansas.  You could feel the sadness of these little ones who never made it home,” Washinawatok said.

            During the 1950’s, several United States Congressmen decided that the United States government could end its treaty relationship with tribes like the Menominee because they had a successful sawmill.   Congress slated several of the more prosperous tribes for what became known as termination: ending treaty obligations to the tribes.   The United States would no longer provide services guaranteed in the treaties. The Menominee tribe became a forced experiment. “What was so detrimental to us as a people was not only that we were told that our land base, the reservation, no longer existed, but we were no longer considered to be Menominee Indians!" Washinawatok explained.  "If we’re no long Menominee, what are we then?  This was devastating to our very identity."

            Termination went into partial effect in 1954 and into full effect in 1961.  The Menominee reservation ceased to exist and became the 72^nd county in Wisconsin.  For the next ten years, the Menominee had to find the resources to run their county and pay taxes on their land.  Financial circumstances became critical and so Menominee Enterprises, Inc. – the corporation set up to manage the tribe’s resources – had to find other sources of revenue.  The Board of Directors bargained with the N. E. Isaacson Corporation to create a chain of lakes known as Legend Lake to be developed into vacation homes for non-Menominee.  Some Menominee realized that selling their land to pay their bills was not right. 

      For many Menominee, including Washinawatok’s father, Jim “White” Washinawatok, this could not continue.  Jim and other Menominee in Chicago and Milwaukee organized a grassroots movement known as DRUMS – Determination of Rights and Unity for Menominee Shareholders.  “Every weekend we drove the five hours from Chicago to the reservation to protest the sale of land”, Washinawatok remembered.  Finally, after much hard work by the Menominee, they succeeded in not only stopping the sale of the land but also in getting Congress to reverse termination. President Richard Nixon signed the Menominee Restoration Act in 1973. 

            As a teen along with her family, Gina Washinawatok came to be a part of the movement to restore the Menominee reservation and as an adult she became a teacher, helping to educate future generations in the arts and crafts traditional to her people and intrinsic to their identity, nearly destroyed by all the things that happened to them historically.   She grew up in Chicago with her parents, Jim and Gwen, and one younger sister, Ingrid.   When the family moved to Madison, Washinawatok began her studies at the University of Wisconsin.  In 1980, she made the decision to move her own family – two boys at the time – to the reservation and she finished her degree in Art Education at the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay.   She now has three sons, Daniel, James and Meyakenew, eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Washinawatok served in the Menominee Tribal Legislature for three years.  The Menominee Tribal Legislature is the governing body of the Nation.  While on the Legislature, she chaired the Labor, Education and Training Committee.  She helped organize a summit meeting on historical trauma, including forced assimilation and its impact on community members as a result of the issues they were seeing in their schools.  “The Menominee People have made great strides since the reservation was restored in building a culture and a way of life that draws on our strengths, traditions, and brings in renewal of the language through the Menominee Tribal School, the Menominee Indian School District and the College of the Menominee Nation and gives us confidence in knowing how unique we are as a tribal people and nation,” she said.  “I currently chair a committee named Maehnow Pematesen, the Menominee word for ‘Living in a Good Way’.  I try to remember what my parents taught me with how they lived their lives and fought for what they believed in for the Menominee People.”

     

To find out more:
Menominee Termination and Restoration
Community, Culture, and Language Revitalization in the Menominee Nation

Menominee Indian High School
Menominee Nation official site