Challenging Master Narratives and (Re)telling Ho-Chunk History, 1862–1935

This presentation focuses on Ho-Chunk history to explore the connections between present day remembering and memorializing of historic events by Native American communities. This presentation discusses Ho-Chunk/Winnebago people as active agents in their history and in the memorialization of traumatic events, linking levels of experience between themselves and their ancestors and creating a national history that supersedes settler-state regional boundaries. Ho-Chunk people were removed from their ancestral home in Wisconsin in the mid-1800s, and their history is reflective of survivance and subversion. Today the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska and the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin are the federally acknowledged tribes of the Ho-Chunk people. This presentation will discuss the methods used by the communities in Wisconsin and Nebraska to gain access to lands and treaty rights from 1862 to 1935. This presentation will discuss how the treaty process created a tie between the Omaha and Winnebago people in Nebraska, the use of the Homestead Act by Wisconsin Ho-Chunk in reclaiming land, and the connection between Ho-Chunk people and regional histories in Nebraska and Wisconsin. It is evident in this early history of removal that Ho-Chunk people maintained connections with ancestral land and with their communities through continual travel from one community to another and by challenging imposed boundaries. This research dialogues with Indigenous histories that focus on re-framing settler narratives that focus on the building of the United States and re(telling) narratives that acknowledge the presence, survivance, and complexities of Native peoples.