Arafed man in a blue jacket and a brown belt holding a knife

Baron Etienne Marinette presides over the heavily wooded Menominee County frontier from his formidable timber citadel known as Fort Menomin. His family has governed this territory contested by industrialists and displaced indigenous bands since his grandfather Louis Marinette established an early 19th century fur trade outpost that grew into a lumber town along the strategic river. Seeing fortunes rise and fall in timber, Baron Marinette now focuses efforts on rehabilitating war-torn lands by facilitating Native tribe resettlement on ancestral grounds to rejuvenate habitat and traditional lifeways disrupted by clear-cut desecration. He believes healing the land requires reconciliation and pathway for First Men to teach transplanted Europeans to live interdependently with nature’s limits rather than seeking always to harness solely for consumption's appetite. This progressive approach draws criticism from Detroit lumber tycoons and Chicago speculators. But leadership of regional Ojibwe and Winnebago support Baron Marinette’s vision to balance productivity and preservation. They share seasonal bounties from the forests, rivers and marshes with Marinette's table and his people in a mutually nourishing cycle.