He grew up among the Upper Creek in present-day Alabama and, as an adult, became part of the "Red Sticks", a group that opposed assimilation and worked to revive traditional practices.

To carry out punishment for the crime of an unauthorized land cession, in 1825 Menawa led about 150 lawmenders in an attack on chief William McIntosh, who had signed the Treaty of Indian Springs that year without the consent of the Creek National Council.

His mother was a high-status Creek woman and his father a mostly Scots fur trader; such strategic alliances were common, as both cultures believed they benefited.

During the early 1800s, he was one of the principal leaders of the "Red Sticks" or Upper Creeks, who worked to revive traditional practices and resisted assimilation to European-American ways.

[2] In 1826, Menawa was a member of the Creek National Council, along with Opothleyahola and Selocta Chinnabby, that went to Washington D.C., to protest the Treaty of Indian Springs.

According to the memoirs of Lt Edward Deas, who led the third detachment of 2,420 Creeks from Alabama to Oklahoma, Menawa is said to have been alive on December 21, 1836 in Little Rock, Arkansas.

According to Deas, "The land party eventually arrived near Little Rock but Tuscoona Harjo, Menawa, and four hundred of their people, refused to travel much farther beyond that that.

However, none of Lt Deas' dispatches to his commander or to Washington, D.C. makes mention of Menawa dying along the "Creek Trail of Tears".