On February 3 Thomas Pecore Weso discusses his memoir
Good Seeds. For Menominee Indians, the "Good Seeds” of life are the manoomin or wild rice that also gives the tribe its name. Weso takes readers on a cook’s journey through the North Woods tribal lands, connecting 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. And amateur and professional historians alike 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.
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Thomas Weso is an enrolled member of the Menominee Indian Nation of Wisconsin. He is the author of many articles, personal essays, and a biography of Langston Hughes with coauthor Denise Low. Weso holds a master’s degree in Indigenous Studies from the University of Kansas, and is copublisher of Mammoth Publications. An accomplished artist, his paintings are in collections in Arizona, California, Kansas, Missouri, Washington, D.C., and Wisconsin.
