Over the course of a sojourn in North America between 1857 and 1862, the Capuchin priest Antoine Marie Gachet from Fribourg, Switzerland, spent two and a half years among the Menominee Indians of Wisconsin. As part of his pastoral and missionary work Gachet engaged in ethnographic and linguistic studies, resulting in a Menominee grammar, a diary account of his labors, and an ethnographic collection.
This unusually well documented collection, preserved at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Fribourg, is here published for the first time in its entirety as Five Years in America: The Menominee Collection of Antoine Marie Gachet, together with a catalogue raisonné and a selection of Gachet’s hitherto unpublished drawings held by the Capuchin Friary in Fribourg. Placed in the contexts of Catholic missionary ethnographic collecting and of Menominee historical ethnography of the mid-nineteenth century, these material and visual documents offer valuable insights into the lifeways of a Native American people of the western Great Lakes region during a period of cultural change and adaptation. A biographical sketch by the late Anton Rotzetter, Order of Friars Minor Capuchin, describes Gachet’s work in Fribourg and India before and after his five years in North America and explains the ideology of conversion in the Franciscan tradition.
