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- Treaties are agreements between separate nations, legally recognized groups that have the right to govern themselves.
- Great Lakes Indian tribes depended on the forests for raw materials for their homes and they built a variety of dwellings depending on the season. The most common was the dome-shaped wigwam, which served from late fall through spring. With the exception of the Iroquois, all Woodland tribes from New England to the Mississippi River built this style of structure. The Iroquois (Oneida) built a capsule shaped "longhouse".
- Wisconsin has the greatest number of Native American tribes and bands east of the Mississippi River.
- Wisconsin's original inhabitants were the Winnebago, Dakota (Sioux) and Menominee Indians.
- The earliest known Wisconsin pottery dates back to approximately 700 BC, made by Woodland Indians.
 Tomah is a small community in central Wisconsin. Many do not know that Tomah was the name of a prominent Menominee war chief.
- Oshkosh, a city in southeast Wisconsin, was the name of a Menominee Clan leader and a principal negotiator during the time when federal officials threatened to remove the Menominee to lands west of the Mississippi.
- In addition to family affiliations, every Woodland Indian is a member of a clan: a group of people that trace their descent from a common but often mythical source. Among the Ojibwa, Menominee, Potawatomi, and Ho-Chunk, the clans are patrilineal: descent was traced through the male line, and children belonged to the same clan as their father. The Oneida are matrilineal and follow the female line. Oneida children belong to the same clan as their mother. Oneida clans include the bear, wolf and the turtle.
- Unlike Europeans, Indians did not have natural immunities to diseases such as smallpox, measles, or mumps because these diseases did not exist in North America before whites came. After Europeans arrived, these diseases often wiped out whole Indian villages. The Ho-Chunk, for example, were said to have had between four thousand and five thousand people when Jean Nicolet first arrived among them in 1634. When French traders came back twenty years later, the Ho-Chunk had been reduced to only six hundred or seven hundred members. While wars with the Iroquois and other refugee Indian groups played a part in this rapid decline, European diseases were probably the main cause for the dramatic number of deaths.
Harvesting walleye from rearing pond, Bad River.
Stockbridge-Munsee Refuge
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