People of the Sacred Voice: the Winnebago/Ho-Chunk

The tribe of Glory of the Morning, Red Bird, and the famed Decorah family, the Winnebago or Ho-Chunk are a Siouan-speaking woodlands tribe with ancestral territory in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and parts of Iowa and Illinois.  The name Winnebago is a Potawatomi word, referencing people living by the stinking water, or possibly salty water.  The tribe's name for themselves, Ho-Chunk means sacred voice people of the pines.  Like other Native peoples they suffered displacement from their ancestral lands several times.

They were first encountered by Jesuit missionaries in 1634, living near what is now Green Bay, Wisconsin.  Other missionaries encountered them near Lake Huron in 1659-60.  They fished, lived on wild rice and other food stuffs that they could gather.  Oral tradition always places the Ho-Chunk in Wisconsin, possibly as descendants of a mound-building culture in the area.  The Ho-Chunk were once a powerful tribe in the region, but suffered like others from the effects of warfare and disease.  Sometime after European contact, 600 warriors lost their lives while on Lake Winnebago when they encountered a storm, further depleting the tribe's numbers.  The Great Peace of 1701 brought a welcome respite from war.

The Ho-Chunk were valuable trading partners to the French.  Later, after the French and Indian War, they were equally willing to trade with the British and did not participate in Pontiac's Rebellion of 1764.  Although forced to remove several times, some as far away as Nebraska, many eventually found their way back to their homeland in Wisconsin.  Today, the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin and the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska both have federal recognition.