The Winnebago Road to Nebraska

The Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska arrived in this corner of the state only after a long and painful series of expulsions from elsewhere. Their story is one of the more exhausting removal histories in the American Midwest, a nation moved so many times that tracing the path requires a map.

The Ho-Chunk, as they call themselves in their own language, were originally from the shores of Green Bay in what is now Wisconsin. Between eighteen thirty-two and eighteen sixty-six, the federal government removed them five times: first from Wisconsin to Iowa, then to Minnesota, then back to Wisconsin, then to Dakota Territory after the eighteen sixty-two Dakota War in Minnesota, and finally, after yet another flight back north, to their present location along the Missouri River in northeastern Nebraska in eighteen sixty-five and eighteen sixty-six.

This last move was not a government relocation in the formal sense. After the Dakota War, Ho-Chunk people in Minnesota were forcibly marched to Crow Creek in Dakota Territory, a desolate site where hundreds died of disease and starvation in the first year. Many of the survivors eventually drifted south by boat down the Missouri River and settled on the Omaha Reservation in Nebraska, with the consent of the Omaha Tribe. Congress retroactively recognized this and carved out the Winnebago Reservation from the northern portion of the Omaha lands in eighteen sixty-five.

The reservation near the town of Winnebago is still there today. The Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska is a federally recognized nation with roughly four thousand enrolled members. They operate WinnaVegas Casino and have worked to preserve the Ho-Chunk language, which belongs to the Siouan family and is spoken by relatively few people today. The land beside the Missouri River where they landed, after so many forced departures, is home.