The Ho-Chunk: Removed, Returned, Removed Again

The Ho-Chunk Nation, known to federal authorities for most of American history as the Winnebago, were removed from Wisconsin to Iowa in eighteen thirty-two. They walked back. The federal government removed them to Minnesota in eighteen forty-six. They walked back. They were removed to South Dakota after the eighteen sixty-two war in the region. They walked back. They were removed again to Nebraska, where the federal government established a permanent reservation and expected them to stay. Many walked back.

Scholars count at least five distinct removal orders over roughly thirty years. Each time, a core Ho-Chunk population that refused to leave sheltered with neighboring Ojibwe and Potawatomi communities, hid in the forests and marshes of central Wisconsin, and survived on the margins of a state that had no legal place for them. The removals were often violent. Families were separated. People died on the forced marches. Federal agents returned repeatedly to remove the ones who had come back.

The Ho-Chunk who stayed in Wisconsin did so illegally, under a legal framework that declared them subject to removal whenever the government chose to enforce it. The federal government did not formally recognize the Wisconsin Ho-Chunk as a distinct federally recognized nation with a homeland in Wisconsin until nineteen sixty-three. By then, they had been returning to the same land for over a century.

The Wisconsin Dells corridor, where you are near now, has been a Ho-Chunk economic and cultural anchor for generations. The waterparks and tourist infrastructure that surround the original sandstone canyon are recent; the Ho-Chunk presence in this landscape is not. They named it before the settlers named it, and many of them never left.