Good Seeds: A Menominee Indian Food Memoir

By Thomas Pecore Weso

For Menominee Indians, the "Good Seeds” of life are the manoomin or wild rice that also gives the tribe its name. This new food memoir by tribal member Thomas Pecore Weso takes readers on a cook’s journey through the North Woods tribal lands. Weso connects Menominee food—beaver, trout, blackberry, wild rice, maple sugar, partridge—to the colorful individuals who taught him Indigenous values, including his medicine man grandfather, Moon, and his grandmother Jennie.

Cooks will learn from his authentic recipes. Amateur and professional historians will appreciate his often humorous personal stories about reservation life during the mid-twentieth century, when many elders, fluent in the Algonquian language, practiced the old ways. With his rare perspective as a Native anthropologist and artist, he mixes a poignant personal story with the seeds of Menominee cooking traditions to write a memoir that showcases foods many cooks don’t have in their repertoires and details Reservation culture and cooking with humor and heart.