"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 descriptive linguistics. The volume concludes with a short descriptive grammar focusing on phonology, morphology and syntax.