University Place

The Ho-Chunk Struggle Against Removal, 1828-1875

– Hello, I’m Russ Castronovo, Director of the Center for the Humanities here at UW-Madison. And today, I have both the honor and pleasure of introducing Professor Steve Kantrowitz, the Plaenert-Bascom Professor of History. Professor Kantrowitz is a distinguished scholar and an esteemed teacher, a true embodiment of the Wisconsin Idea to make the university a public good. He has written award-winning books on the racial history of the United States, first in the year 2000, Ben Tillman & the Reconstruction of White Supremacy. And then in 2013, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889. You’ll see from his lecture today that he’s continuing his focus on the complex, tangled, and often painful histories of race in a nation that was built through settler colonialism. And you’ll also see that he has shifted that focus in important ways to address the history of Indigenous peoples and the conflicts surrounding land displacement and the matter of survivance. It’s a shift that has led him to bring his research and analytic skills to think about the Midwest and especially Wisconsin and the Native people who have inhabited this land from time immemorial. The work he’s presenting to us is drawn from his forthcoming book due out in early 2023, Citizens of a Stolen Land: A Ho-Chunk History of the 19th Century United States. So sit back, get comfy, and enjoy this lecture from Professor Steve Kantrowitz of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

– Thanks very much Russ for that wonderful introduction. Between 1828 and 1837, the United States government coerced the Ho-Chunk people into signing a series of treaties that stripped them of title to their ancestral homeland. Over the next 40 years, the government repeatedly expelled the Ho-Chunk to new homelands and new reservations across a huge area of today’s upper Midwest and Great Plains. Despite those facts, despite that initial stripping of the territory and those repeated forcible removals across new territories, Ho-Chunk people continue to live in large parts of their ancestral homeland today. And in fact, are the members of the federally recognized Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin. This raises some really important questions. How did the ancestors of today’s Ho-Chunk people defy federal efforts to remove them from Wisconsin by military force? And how did they reestablish a legal claim to live in this territory? Now, I’m a historian. So in first approaching that question, I did what 19th century historians of the United States conventionally do. I went into to published books and I went into archives, and looked at the other kinds of printed and written primary sources that historians like me usually use. But in the course of that, what I realized is that those sources overwhelmingly were produced by the same colonial power that had expelled the Ho-Chunk and sought to keep them expelled from Wisconsin.

And the same colonial power that had failed to accomplish those ends. And so I realized fairly quickly that those sources were not gonna tell me what I needed to know to answer those questions about how the Ho-Chunk defied removal, and how they reestablished a legal claim to remain in the ceded territory. So that took me to the experiences and the memories and the perspectives of today’s Ho-Chunk people. And conversations and engagement with Ho-Chunk people and communities have taught me to think of this history in some different ways than I was accustomed to thinking of them in my previous work as an American historian. We sometimes speak about people’s persistence in terms of survival or resistance, but a word that has come to the fore in Native American and Indigenous studies in the last years is survivance, here described by the scholar Gerald Vizenor as an active sense of presence, the continuance of Native stories, not a mere reaction or a survivable name. And that I think is really important for understanding how the Ho-Chunk survived, persisted, and continue to live their lives and tell their stories in Wisconsin and elsewhere as a sovereign nation. So that has changed how I think about Native American history and how I think about the history of the place that I live in Wisconsin. But it’s also changed how I think about United States history generally. And in particular, changed how I think about a category that’s been at the center of my work previous to this and at the center of lots of historians’ work in 19th century America: the concept of citizenship, the individual relationship of rights, privileges, immunities, and obligations in relationship to a government. Now, in my previous work, I’d explored the question of citizenship in a couple of different ways.

First, I thought about the ways that citizenship was radically transformed during Reconstruction, after the Civil War, and the way that white supremacist political forces sought to undermine and undo the acquisition of citizenship by African Americans during that period. After that, I looked more specifically at African American activism and the way that Black Northerners in the 19th century had imagined a citizenship that could be what they needed it to be. That could be a way for them to fully belong to the United States. Those two stories of white supremacist politics and African American activism were very different stories, but they shared one thing in common. And that is the central importance of Reconstruction, and in particular of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified in 1868, which for the first time clarified that all persons born or naturalized and subject to the jurisdiction of the United States are citizens of the United States and entitled to the same rights, privileges, immunities, obligations as every other citizen. That is a really important idea. It was a big deal. It remains a big deal. And in fact, not just a big deal in legal and constitutional terms, but in terms of its emotional and even spiritual qualities. When we think of citizenship, we think of it through the lens of its achievement during Reconstruction, but also with a broader array of outsiders claiming equality in the nation, in the Civil Rights movement, in the struggles of immigrants for naturalization and for equal rights.

In all of these ways, we think of citizenship as filled with words like equality, dignity, belonging, progress, and a lot of the touchstones for how Americans value their history are organized around the achievement of citizenship by groups of people who previously were excluded from it. Ho-Chunk history suggests a different history of citizenship. And another way of thinking about its relationship to American history. So what I wanna talk about in this lecture is the Ho-Chunk struggle with the United States over the course of the 19th century and the role of citizenship in that struggle. 200 years ago, the United States, its citizens, and its citizenship were marginal to the life of people in the Western Great Lakes, the area that’s currently Wisconsin and adjoining places. In that territory, among many other Native groups were about 4,500 Ho-Chunk people living in about 40 semi-autonomous bands of multiple families. Those bands spent much of their year in villages and in camps where they made use of variety of resources across the seasons of the year. In those semi-autonomous villages of course, people maintained relationships of language, of culture, of marriage across wide areas, and also understood themselves in relation to one another in a wide variety of ways. For example, Ho-Chunk people have a very, by the standards of most Euro-Americans, have a very expansive notion of kinship in which biological mothers, sisters, and fathers, brothers are very important figures known as mother and father by their Ho-Chunk names. Other relationships that we would characterize as uncles or cousins have the proximity in Ho-Chunk culture of brothers and sisters and parents.

In addition to this extensive notion of kinship, Ho-Chunk people’s lives are also organized into 12 clans, passed down from fathers to their children. And every Ho-Chunk person belongs to one of these clans. And these clans each have their own distinct cultural, social, spiritual, and political responsibilities to the nation. And to be born into one of these clans is to take up and be responsible for those responsibilities. And so I guess what I’m saying here is that Ho-Chunk people have lots of ways of talking about belonging and engagement and responsibilities and all kinds of things that we would think of as being social and political. But none of those things translates as citizenship, the relationship of individuals based in their rights to a government. And in fact, the Ho-Chunk language has no word that means citizen. In 1825, the United States made its first kind of forcible entry into the Ho-Chunk world in a treaty that did not demand the cession or surrender of any land, but that sought to figure out which Native people claimed which territory in the Western Great Lakes. And in that treaty in 1825 at Prairie du Chien, the Ho-Chunk were recognized by the United States as having ownership of the territory that you see here in green. Now the Ho-Chunk people’s ancestral homeland was much bigger than this, the area in which they lived, used resources, and spent much of the year, but in 1825, the United States recognized at a minimum, a Ho-Chunk title to this territory.

But immediately, and in fact, at the same moment as the treaty was signed in 1825, gangs of American squatters were already invading the Ho-Chunk homeland. They were seeking to take advantage of the Ho-Chunk’s resources in lead and other resources. And in the late 1820s, the number of American squatters entering and seizing resources from the Ho-Chunk people, attacking Ho-Chunk tribal members and doing so with comparative impunity, the number of those Americans just grew and grew and grew until a series of military conflicts between these squatters and the Ho-Chunk brought the entrance of the United States army into the Ho-Chunk country in the late 1820s. This is what I call the two-step of squatters and soldiers, the kind of dyad of American colonialism in the Western Great Lakes. Squatters would enter land, get into conflicts with the people who owned that land, call upon the American state for assistance. Soldiers would arrive theoretically with a mission of enforcing the treaties and keeping the peace, but in practical terms, rarely siding with Native people over American squatters. A new treaty would be signed and that treaty would further erode Native title. And then the squatters, who now became legitimate residents of that new territory, would then squat further into Native land. And that’s exactly what happened in the Ho-Chunk homeland in the late 1820s and 1830s. The United States demanded a treaty in 1828 that took some of the Ho-Chunk’s lead land, and then a treaty in 1829 that seized much, much more of it.

About a third of the Ho-Chunk territory that the United States had recognized only four years before. Now in this process, the most important forces driving it forward were squatter gangs of Americans. Well-armed, led by informal leaders, and pressing hard against Ho-Chunk sovereignty, autonomy, and the rights and dignity of individual Ho-Chunk people. This was particularly true in the case of the lead diggings of southwestern Wisconsin today and Illinois, but also true of other parts of the territory. If this story sounds unfamiliar, and my use of the phrase squatter gangs seems discordant or odd, many of you know the name of the leader of these squatter gangs. Henry Dodge, who entered the territory in the 1820s, quickly amassed a significant following of men, kept them well-armed, and led them into battle against Ho-Chunk people as if he were a military officer. By the early 1830s, the United States government had effectively recognized him as a military officer and then formally incorporated him and his squatter gang into the United States army. This really turned out to matter in 1832, when another group of Native Americans, a band of mainly Sauk people refused their own expulsion from the state of Illinois to territories west of the Mississippi River, returned back across the Mississippi River to plant, and were offered refuge by a Ho-Chunk village along the Rock River in what’s today northwestern Illinois. This story you may also know because the leader of that Sauk band was Black Hawk, and the resulting conflict with the United States we know as the Black Hawk War. Ho-Chunk people and the Ho-Chunk ancestral homeland played a critical role, maybe the critical role in the Black Hawk War.

First, almost the entire war took place within the Ho-Chunk homeland. Black Hawk’s band fled north along the Rock River and into the heart of the Ho-Chunk homeland, where they were given refuge by Ho-Chunk villagers. Now, the point of the refuge was to try to keep the peace. What the Ho-Chunk had learned during the late 1820s and early 1830s was that once American blood was shed, the U. S. army would come in and demand territorial concessions. So when Black Hawk’s band arrived in their territory, they thought that the best thing to do was to try to keep Black Hawk’s band and the American military separate from one another. And for some period of time in the summer of 1832, they succeeded and almost managed to create conditions for Black Hawk’s band to make its way safely back across the Mississippi River. However, if you know the story of the Black Hawk War, you know that Black Hawk’s band were discovered by American forces who pursued them across Wisconsin and massacred them at what is called by historians sometimes the Battle of Bad Axe, but better known as the Massacre at Bad Axe on the Mississippi River in 1832. This repeated the events of the late 1820s in the sense that what we had was a large American military on the ground, American blood having been shed by Native people, and the United States demanding territorial concessions from the local Native people, even though for the most part, they had not been at the center of the military struggle against the United States.

This was simply making the best of the American situation and taking advantage of their military strength in relationship to the Ho-Chunk people in 1832. In fact, in the treaty of 1832, which grabs another third of the Ho-Chunk’s 1825 treaty lands, the American treaty commissioner describes the treaty as taking place on the blended grounds of conquest and contract. Now by 1832, Henry Dodge was a military officer. By 1836, he was the governor of the territory. And what this shows us is that American institutions, government, military were born in this region in the violent struggle over Native land. And this is an idea that has been familiar to historians for a long time. In fact, my long ago predecessor at the University of Wisconsin became famous for articulating a version of this idea in 1893. His name was Frederick Jackson Turner. And in an address at the Columbian World’s Exposition in Chicago in 1893, he advanced an idea that he called “The Significance of the Frontier in American History. ” In Turner’s view, “The frontier was the training school for a hardy and conquering stock.

” That is for Americans. It was the place where disparate European ethnicities and nationalities were broken down into their most basic elements by the encounter with the savage frontier. That’s Turner’s terms. And then remade themselves together as a democratic polity in response to those conditions of what he called the frontier and what he called savagery. We can see today that Frederick Jackson Turner was wrong about Native people, and that his lack of interest in them caused him to miss all kinds of crucial things about American history, about Native American history, about their relationships to one another. But Turner did understand something important and fundamental about American state making, about the way that Americans colonized and transformed the landscapes that they seized from Native Americans. And we can see that here in the Seal of the Wisconsin Territory when it became a territory in 1836, and the motto “Civilitas Successitt Barbarum,” slightly incorrect Latin for “Civilization Replacing Barbarism. ” And the state makers of Wisconsin did understand their project as imposing a new civilization of a particular kind over an order that they understood not to be civilization, but something else: barbarism. And here, in the territorial seal, we can see the elements of that civilization. At the top center, a capital building, the institutions of government.

Around it, a steamship, sailing ship, lighthouses, elements of a modern commercial economy. Dead center in it, at the bottom, a white farmer with a plow and a team cultivating the land according to American agricultural practices. And then in the middle, a kind of a crudely drawn figure of a Native American facing west across the Mississippi River, where presumably his new home lies. So this is civilization succeeding barbarism as a sort of foundational idea of the Wisconsin territory. One that had defined the conquest of that territory over the previous decade, and it would continue to define the settler state and its relationship to Native people over the ensuing decades. In 1837, the year after the territory of Wisconsin was established, the United States government simply coerced the Ho-Chunk people into ceding the last portion of their ancestral homeland, recognized only 12 years before in the treaty of 1825. This large quadrant north of the Wisconsin River that we see here on the slide. This treaty was created not even with the fig leaf of conquest that the treaty of 1832 was created with, but rather by coercing a delegation of Ho-Chunk people to Washington, by threatening to withhold their annuities, the annual payments they were due as compensation for giving up their land under previous treaties. And then once they were in Washington, refusing to let them leave and making violent threats against them until they agreed to sign a treaty giving away the rest of their land. Ho-Chunk people remembered and continue to remember the treaty of 1837 simply as naked theft of their land.

And reading the treaty journal and the accounts of it, it’s hard not to see it in those terms. This began the period of the Ho-Chunk people’s formal exile from Wisconsin. First to a territory that we’ll shortly see called the neutral ground, part of northeast Iowa and adjoining parts of Minnesota. And then to a succession of other places. The exile to the neutral ground, which took place beginning in 1837, but really forcefully from 1840 and thereafter, came at a huge human cost. Ho-Chunk people were already suffering from their dispossession and the deprivation of the resources that they were accustomed to relying on in their homeland. They were also subject to some of the epidemic diseases that they’d encountered in their contact with the Americans. By the time they were forcibly removed across the Mississippi in 1840, many were sick and many had died. Hundreds, perhaps well over a thousand Ho-Chunk people died during these few years, and they continued to face not only deprivation, disease, and death, but also as they resisted removal from their homeland, the threats of settler populations who attacked them with impunity, seized their goods, seized their weapons, seized their horses, and wrote petition after petition to the state government saying that if the government didn’t remove them from Wisconsin, then they would simply murder them. Ho-Chunk people responded to these terrible pressures in a variety of ways.

And we can divide these very roughly into sort of two streams of response. First, the figure on the left here, Roaring Thunder, who his Ho-Chunk name is Wakajaxetega, refused to leave Wisconsin, refused to leave the ancestral homeland. And for decades, led a campaign of quiet, non-military rejection of that removal process. They lived at the margin of American settlement. They found other ways to engage with settler populations and they simply refused to remove. And when forcibly removed, immediately returned to Wisconsin. We’ll come back to them and their story in a few minutes. The second group, half or more of the remaining Ho-Chunk people represented by the figure on the right, Wakajaguga, Coming Thunder Winneshiek. This group were the reluctant exiles of the 1840s and ’50s and ’60s. People who did not want to leave their homeland, but either felt they had no choice or assented, believing that they could carve out some form of autonomy and self-determination in the new territory or in territories near it.

And we’re gonna focus on this group now for a little bit. The expulsion of the Ho-Chunk across the Mississippi River in the 1840s was part of a larger process that American historians have called “Indian Removal. ” We know the story best through the infamous Cherokee Trail of Tears, but as you can see, it was a project that was aimed at a wide array of Native people across the Southeast and across the Western Great Lakes. And it expelled many Native people west of the Mississippi during the 1820s, ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s. This project was characterized by three big forces. One of them was the American policy we call civilization. Civilization imagined that Native people could be made to vanish by transforming them into analogs of American settlers. By transforming the ways they practiced agriculture, the way they owned land, the way they related to one another, and the way they spoke, dress, acted, and thought. Civilization often also imagined the transformation of Native people into members of the American body politic, as into citizens even. And the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which created the national justification and legality of Indian removal also imagined the incorporation of Native people.

If Native people refused to be expelled from their territory, they could remain, but they were then subject to American law. Now, you might think that that meant that they became citizens, but one really important thing to understand about citizenship before 1866, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, is that citizenship and political membership could be highly unequal. We’re accustomed to thinking of citizenship in the terms of the 14th Amendment, as equal, national, and characterized by a common set of rights and a democratic spirit. But that was not the case before Reconstruction. In the pre-Civil War United States, all kinds of people were subject to all kinds of unequal laws and pressures and policies. Women were unequal members of the body politic in almost every state, African Americans were unequal. In some states, they were not even allowed to reside. And Native Americans, as non-whites, in most states were subject to unequal laws, including for example, the inability to testify against white people in court. So when states like Georgia and Alabama extended their jurisdiction over Native people who refused to be removed from those states, those Native people fell under the jurisdiction of courts that did not recognize them as equal members. And so even if they remained, their property and their persons were intensely vulnerable to a legal and economic system that didn’t recognize their ability to make their own claims to sue or to testify.

But one thing that incorporation did do was it provided immunity from expulsion from the territory. And to some Native people, this seemed like the best of bad options. This became a concrete reality for the Ho-Chunk in 1846. In that year, the United States government warned the Ho-Chunk that the territory they now occupied, the so-called neutral ground, was gonna become part of the new state of Iowa. And once that happened, Iowa would extend its laws, presumably unequal laws over the Ho-Chunk, and they would be subject to state power however it was enforced upon them. Very reluctantly, and by the use of military force, the Ho-Chunk were removed, marched up the Mississippi River to a new territory, a reservation in what’s now central Minnesota called Long Prairie. They were not happy with this new territory. And they refused to stay put in this territory. In fact, as even before they got there, they had begun scattering across the landscape, some back to Wisconsin, some into other territories, just in pursuit of landscapes that they found more familiar. Once they discovered that Long Prairie was not at all ecologically like their old homeland, they left the reservation repeatedly, seeking territories where they could pursue their accustomed means of subsistence.

From the standpoint of settler authorities, this meant that they were wandering or vagabonds, and those words for them appear over and over in the sources. But the Ho-Chunk weren’t wandering. Their patterns of movement weren’t at all aimless or random. They were pursuing the resources that they needed in order to continue living the way that they preferred to live as Ho-Chunk people. They were recreating their lives in the conditions of exile. They do this so successfully in the late 1840s and early 1850s that the federal government finally realizes that they are never gonna stay put on the reservation at Long Prairie, and agrees to let them trade those lands for a more desirable, but smaller homeland in the southern part of the Minnesota territory at a place called Blue Earth. Now this happens initially in a treaty in 1855, and Coming Thunder Winneshiek is one of the leaders who negotiates this treaty. And in many ways, it’s a great success for the Ho-Chunk people. But it is also a treaty with the United States and so it is never an unmixed blessing. The treaties of the 1850s were characterized by a series of “civilization policies” that were growing ever more insistent on forcing Native people, including the Ho-Chunk into private ownership of land.

That is no longer understanding Native title as being collective to a homeland, but individual private property relations like American homesteaders and settlers used. And so the treaty of 1855 created a pathway toward what was called allotment. The division of collectively held land into privately held land as part of the process of trying to transform Ho-Chunk people into something more like American settlers, and by ending their collective ownership of land, also ending their sense of nationhood and common purpose. Allotment happened in a lot of different ways during the 1830s and ’40s and ’50s. And it happened to other people in the region, including people in the Wisconsin territory, to two groups of people in particular, the Brothertown people and Stockbridge-Munsee band of Mohican Indians, both of whom faced the same pressures as the Ho-Chunk during the 1830s with settlers encroaching on their lands, squatting on their lands, trying to seize their lands, doing violence against them. And in the 1830s and 1840s, both the Brothertown and the Stockbridge-Munsee made negotiations with the federal government to actually become citizens of the United States and accept allotment, private property ownership, instead of collective ownership. So this was an option that was available to some people in the region during this period. And it could seem to be the best of bad alternatives to Native people who saw no other way to prevent settlers from encroaching on their land. But it was a very, very mixed decision. Both groups of people were powerfully divided about undertaking this process, about accepting allotment and becoming citizens, and their experience of land loss following their acquisition of citizenship and the allotment of their lands, the land loss that followed this was so dramatic that within a couple of years, both groups of Native people sought to reverse the federal laws that had allotted their lands and made them citizens of the United States.

The Stockbridge-Munsee succeeded in reversing that; the Brothertown people did not. Other Native people also came to these conclusions, such as the Wyandottes in Kansas, and encountered similar struggles over land loss. Because once they became American citizens and once their lands were privately held, it was very easy for settlers to coerce or in other ways to get access to that land and very rapidly diminish the amount of land held by Native people. So the Ho-Chunk at Blue Earth, having been set on a path toward allotment in the treaty of 1855, are aware of the potential for this to go wrong. It does go wrong in 1859 when the rest of their annuities from previous treaties are about to expire and they’re forced to sign another treaty with the United States that gives up half of the land that they had gotten in 1855 and requires them to move toward allotment in the rest of the area. Here, Coming Thunder Winneshiek is a powerful opponent of the treaty of 1859 and of the policy of allotment because he understood the dispossession that was likely to follow it, and the corrosive effect that private property and the loss of that land would have on Ho-Chunk collective identity and nationhood. In 1861, when the federal government finally sent agents to the Ho-Chunk reservation at Blue Earth to survey the land and to take a census of the tribe so that the land could be divided into allotments for each household, Coming Thunder Winneshiek and his allies actually interfere with both the collection of the census and with the survey itself. They grab the surveyor’s instrument. They threaten to stab him with his own survey stakes. The officials on the reservation complain that they’ve completely disrupted the census and that nobody will allow their names to be taken down.

In other words, they really slow down the process of allotment and citizenship, seeing this as a last ditch way to prevent their dissolution as a people. We don’t know how this story would’ve turned out, this story that Coming Thunder Winneshiek set in motion when he resisted the census and survey in 1861, because as you probably know, by 1861, the United States was in the middle of a Civil War against the slaveholders’ rebellion. And in the context of that war, a lot of elements of American policy got thrown into disarray. One of those elements was American Indian policy. And one thing that happened very quickly at the beginning of the Civil War is that the federal government defaulted on its responsibilities to provide annuities to Native people across the West. And this was a particularly severe for the Ho-Chunk’s neighbors in the Minnesota territory, the Dakota people. The Dakota people, who had been confined into a tiny reservation, began to starve in 1862. And that summer, went to war against Minnesota settlers. And this is the conflict that we call the U. S.

-Dakota War. This took place right on the outskirts of the Ho-Chunk reservation. At various points during the struggle, the Dakota tried to recruit the Ho-Chunk into an alliance with them. For the most part, the Ho-Chunk do not participate in that. Although a few Ho-Chunk fighters do participate in the U. S. -Dakota War. And at the end of the war, when the United States military arrives in huge force and puts thousands of Dakotas to flight and captures and imprisons thousands of others, the Ho-Chunk are left in a very difficult position. This is particularly true because the United States responds to the U. S.

-Dakota War with overwhelming force, not just in the military sense, but interrs so many Dakota prisoners and tries many of them before military tribunals that are really kangaroo courts, and sentences more than 300 Dakota fighters to death. Those sentences are reviewed by the president, who commutes some, but on the day after Christmas 1862, 38 Dakota men are hanged at a mass gallows in Mankato, Minnesota, which is right on the outskirts of the Blue Earth Reservation. And this is part of a wave of anti-Indian hysteria in the Minnesota territory and across the Northwest that captures the Ho-Chunk in its wake. And in 1863, again, although the Ho-Chunk had played virtually no role in the U. S. -Dakota War, the United States government passes a law, and President Lincoln signs it that expels the Ho-Chunk from Minnesota to a barren reservation alongside the Dakota, out on the Missouri River at a place called Crow Creek. And we can see the rather torturous odyssey of the Ho-Chunk people during this period, expelled from the Blue Earth Reservation in 1863, transported by steamboats and overland to the reservation at Crow Creek in the Dakota territory. This is another kind of cataclysmic removal for the Ho-Chunk people. Hundreds and hundreds of people die. Many others become ill.

It is part of the historic memory of the Ho-Chunk people, part of a historical trauma that lives in their memory to this day. The circumstances at Crow Creek are so dire that almost immediately, Coming Thunder Winneshiek and other Ho-Chunk leaders lead their people in felling cottonwood trees, creating dugout canoes, and fleeing Crow Creek down the river to the Nebraska territory, where they seek refuge with a variety of people, including the Omaha. And in 1865, the federal government finally recognizes that this is what’s happened and creates a reservation for the Ho-Chunk people alongside the Omaha Reservation on the banks of the Missouri River. And the people who take up that reservation in 1865 are the ancestors of today’s Winnebago Tribe of Indians, a federally recognized nation within the borders of Nebraska. But that’s not the only story taking place during the 1850s and 1860s. At the other end of the diaspora, there are those people who I mentioned who would not leave Wisconsin, or who very quickly returned there once expelled from the territory. And a central figure in this or an emblematic figure, at least is the band leader called Wakajaxetega or Roaring Thunder, a man who Americans knew as Dandy or the Dandy. You can see here in a painting by the American portraitist Charles Deas, first in a kind of naturalistic rendering that he created in 1841. And then in a more romantic version that he did once he got back home to St. Louis, we can see why maybe Americans might have described Roaring Thunder as Dandy.

But what they missed about this man, what they missed about Ho-Chunk culture generally, was that these, his clothing, his accoutrement, his face painting, were all culturally meaningful. These all represented who he was as a band leader, as a clan leader, as an important figure in the lives of his people. And what they also failed to do was understand that although they could call him Dandy or the Dandy and begin to make up all kinds of trickster stories about, oh-ho, this guy who just won’t leave. In fact, what they were confronting was a militant leader defying the treaty regime, defying American military forces, and successfully carving out a foothold in the territory of Wisconsin and then the state of Wisconsin for decades after the Ho-Chunk had lost title to that land in the treaties of 1829, ’32, and ’37. He remained that kind of militant leader for decades to come, and state authorities recognized him in that role. In fact, in the midst of the panic that followed the U. S. -Dakota War, a panic that spilled eastward from Minnesota into Wisconsin, the governor of Wisconsin gets so agitated about the possibility that there’ll be a similar rebellion in Wisconsin, that he brings Roaring Thunder to the capital, to Madison, and interrogates him. And what Roaring Thunder tells him is, “No, we’re not militarily organized. “We have no interest in making war.

“We wanna coexist with settlers, trade our horses, “trade berries, continue those relationships “that we’ve been doing for decades. “If we get into a war with you, how are we gonna continue to trade with you?” And although the governor can’t figure out why they’re still in Wisconsin a generation after they’ve lost all their land there, he agrees that probably that’s what’s happening and that’s what continues to happen. Other Ho-Chunk people pursued other strategies to remain in Wisconsin. Roaring Thunder’s band and other bands like his persisted by living at the margins of white settlement and the kind of north and northwest periphery of white settlement in Wisconsin. But others lived closer to the center of that settlement, along the Wisconsin River, for example, and among these were communities led by two different men, one, Peter Decorah, and another, Blue Wing. Peter Decorah had actually petitioned the governor of the Wisconsin territory as early as 1840 to remain in the territory and not be expelled along with the rest of his people. And he’d done this by appealing to the language of civilization. He’d said he wanted to give up his Indian ways. He wanted to become a citizen. And he asked to be given permission to remain.

Authorities interviewed him, and they decided, “Hmm, he seems like the kind of person that we’d want in the territory. ” And so they allowed him to purchase land and to remain on that purchased land in the territory of Wisconsin. Another figure, a decade later in the 1850s, man named Aahucoga or Blue Wing did the same thing in Sauk County, in Reedsburg township by purchasing land through the land office and establishing himself as a quote “Civilized Indian. ” Now, the idea that land ownership conveyed certain kinds of rights and a certain kind of belonging shouldn’t be that surprising. You can go back all the way to the United States Constitution and the way that it excluded Indians from membership and from the census, and understand that the language there was Indians not taxed were excluded, but the phrase “Indians not taxed” implies the existence of another category of people, Indians taxed. And Indians taxed were people like Peter Decorah and Blue Wing, people who had taken up property and who local authorities, state authorities taxed on that property and were understood to belong to the political community, at least in that way, and not be subject to expulsion under whatever removal was taking place. Now, the idea there seemed to match the American policy of allotment and civilization and citizenship. It seemed to say these folks are becoming Americans, and that would be one way to look at it. And that is clearly how authorities looked at both Peter Decorah and Blue Wing in the 1840s and 1850s. But in fact, both Peter Decorah and Blue Wing were the leaders not of individual American households, but of Ho-Chunk villages.

Both on Peter Decorah’s land and on Blue Wing’s land in Sauk county, hundreds of Ho-Chunk people spent much of the year living not in settler cabins, but in Ciporoke, Ho-Chunk wigwams and lodges, not farming after the American fashion, but raising Ho-Chunk hills of corn, farming and fishing and hunting and trapping in other ways, pursuing the deer, often even pursuing them through settler villages. And in other ways, living as Ho-Chunk people in the Ho-Chunk way, just within the forms of American land ownership. So by the 1860s, what do we see? We see three groups of Ho-Chunk people persisting. First, the group now on a reservation in Nebraska, who become the Winnebago Tribe of Indians in the 20th century. Second, the group I’ve just described, persisting in Wisconsin in a variety of ways. And then a third group that I haven’t yet talked about, which is a group of people who managed to evade the dispossession and expulsion at Blue Earth in 1863. This was a group of 160 people. Mostly either people of mixed Ho-Chunk and white descent or Ho-Chunk people married to white traders who had taken up allotment under the treaty of 1859. And in 1863 said to authorities, we’ve taken up allotment. We are quote, “Civilized, we wanna remain and be citizens of the United States.

” Some of the men from this community served in the Minnesota regiments during the Civil War. And after the war, this group continued to press its claim to remain in Minnesota. And in 1870, the federal government acquiesced and said not only could they remain in Minnesota, but they could remain under the terms of the 14th Amendment. Here the story takes its final turn into the politics of Reconstruction. Reconstruction was the revolutionary remaking of the South, of the Constitution after the Civil War, and it included the 14th Amendment. Now the 14th Amendment was not aimed at making citizens of Native Americans. And in fact, the phrase in it, subject to the jurisdiction, it was meant to be exclusionary of Native people. That is, they were subject to Native nations and their sovereignty, not to the United States. But the Ho-Chunk people’s geographical divisions raised questions about just whose jurisdiction they are actually subject to. Now, Reconstruction’s idealism was real.

It did not succeed in doing all the things it meant to do, but lots of people believed that Reconstruction was meant to remake the American nation in non-exclusionary, non-racial, and egalitarian terms. And that idealism stretched even to Native people, at least in some views. The 14th Amendment, plus this idealism, this sense that American nationhood was so expansionist and so democratic, so egalitarian, it could embrace even Native people, created an opening for the Minnesota allotees in this period. And in 1870, the federal government passes a special law that allows the allotted Ho-Chunk in Minnesota to take up citizenship by naturalization as though they were immigrants to the United States. And in order to do so, they had to swear that they were self-supporting, that they had taken up the, quote, “habits of civilized life. ” And that citizen witnesses would swear that they had done so. And in a series of hearings in federal court in St. Paul, ultimately 160 Minnesota Ho-Chunk do become U. S. citizens in this way in 1870 and 1872.

This was not, of course immediately helpful to the Wisconsin Ho-Chunk. They could not swear that they had taken up the habits of civilized life. They had not taken an allotment. This law only applied to the very small number of people in Minnesota, but the Ho-Chunk in Wisconsin do learn about and hear about what’s happened in Minnesota. And they do discover that the ideal of Reconstruction’s equal citizenship can help them in another way. And that’s because the politics of Reconstruction were extremely contentious and bitter and racist. Now, in the center of these politics was a question over the status of African Americans, about whether former slaves and free people of color were legitimately citizens of the United States, whether the United States was or was not fundamentally a white republic. Reconstruction sought to say, no, it’s not a white republic. It’s a non-racial republic. The badge of slavery doesn’t attach to Black people anymore.

And none of the stigmas that follow from the history of slavery should attach to Black people anymore. And the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment in 1866 and 1868 were meant to give teeth to that. In fact, the federal government goes ahead and creates an entire new department, the Department of Justice to enforce these ideas, and also the idea of equal suffrage without regard to race, equal voting rights. So this is a very important and powerful idea, and the party defending and supporting it and pushing it forward is the Republican party, the party of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. But that was not the only political party in the United States in the 1860s and ’70s. And many Democrats in the North as well as in the South actively and ardently opposed Reconstruction and believe the United States should be a fundamentally white republic. Now, they couldn’t stop the Republicans from creating the conditions for a non-racial republic in the 14th Amendment and other policies, but they could complain about it. And in particular, they could complain about it when they thought they sniffed hypocrisy. In the early 1870s, Wisconsin settlers appealed to their elected officials, mostly Republicans, to expel the Ho-Chunk from Wisconsin once and for all. And those elected representatives, Republicans in the United States Congress, brought to the floor of the Congress a bill funding the expulsion of the Ho-Chunk from Wisconsin.

And the argument they made was that these people don’t fit in the state of Wisconsin. They don’t make good neighbors for Wisconsin settlers, they’re wandering vagabonds. All of the invective deployed against the Ho-Chunk over the past half century. And here, a white supremacist Democrat from Ohio named Allen Thurman decided to plant his flag and say, “Huh, for almost a decade, “you’ve been insisting that white Southerners “accept Black Southerners as equal citizens “and equal members of their body politic. “Even though those white Southerners “don’t think of Black Southerners as their equals “or as good neighbors, and you’ve passed, “you’ve changed the Constitution in order to make that so. “And now here, you’ve got some hundreds of Native people “in your state who you don’t think make good neighbors, “and you just want to expel them? That’s just hypocrisy. ” And to which the Republicans replied, “Well, but they’re subject to jurisdiction of their tribe. ” To which Senator Thurman responded, “How so? “They never left Wisconsin. “Their tribe is now living “hundreds and hundreds of miles away in Nebraska. “They themselves don’t recognize the authority “of that tribe over them.

“They consider themselves an independent people. “If they’re not subject to the jurisdiction of that tribe, “they must surely be subject “to the jurisdiction of the United States. “And if they are, under the language of the 14th Amendment, “they’re citizens of the United States, “and you cannot just expel them “any more than you could just expel any other citizen “of the United States. It doesn’t matter if you think they’re bad neighbors. ” And he so embarrasses the Republicans on this term that they agree to a stipulation in the removal bill, the bill funding the expulsion of the Ho-Chunk that says, “The removal of the Ho-Chunk from Wisconsin can only take place with their consent. ” And this lodges a ticking time bomb under the removal process. In 1873, the federal government gears up to bring troops in and begin rounding up the Ho-Chunk people in Wisconsin to expel them to the reservation in Nebraska. And the Ho-Chunk in Wisconsin mobilize in response. They send a delegation from Wisconsin to Washington, D. C.

, including Coming Thunder Winneshiek’s brother, and including this woman, Mary Crane, Hotakawinga, an incredibly important intermediary and translator for these policies. And one of the few women whose name actually surfaces in the sources from this period. They don’t successfully persuade authorities in Washington that the removal should not take place or that they really don’t wanna go, or any of the things that they’re trying to achieve, but they do learn that there is a kind of uneasiness about whether the federal government has authority to remove them. And they have learned by paying attention to the politics of the previous half century, that there are angles they can work that will make it harder and harder for the federal government to remove them. And that among these are the support of settler communities, as they learn from the experience in Minnesota. The acquisition of land, as they learn from Peter Decorah and Blue Wing, and citizenship, as they’ve learned from a variety of experiences around the decades of removal. At Christmastime 1873, the federal government sends its troops into rural Wisconsin, begins rounding up and deporting the Ho-Chunk bands still remaining in the state. And in the end, they deport more than 800 people to Nebraska in the middle of the winter in box cars, under terrible terms. Another traumatic experience of death and suffering of other kinds, an experience that is in the living memory of Ho-Chunk people today. But despite these horrors, this deportation turns out to be a failure.

Troops beginning to round up Ho-Chunk people discover that a surprising number of them are carrying deeds to property. Not to the property they’re currently on, often to property in some distant northern county, two or three acres of it, place they may never actually have been, but property holding, which establishes kind of, at first blush at least, the right to remain. A few of them say they’ve actually been naturalized as U. S. citizens, which is possible. And so, as troops begin to discover that some of the Ho-Chunk people are making these claims, they begin to be warned by civilian judges that they can’t just deport any old person. They have to make sure that these people don’t have a legitimate claim to remain. And as Ho-Chunk people learn what forms of documentation will guarantee them some kind of immunity from removal, they begin obtaining that documentation. The connections between settler communities and Ho-Chunk communities, including that between Blue Wing and his village and the settlers at Reedsburg in Wisconsin, those connections are so tight and have been going on for so long that when some members of Blue Wing’s family are rounded up by U. S.

troops and placed on a box car in Reedsburg, 200 white citizens of Reedsburg mob the soldiers and actually forcibly remove Blue Wing’s family from their custody. Now, they’re not freeing all the Ho-Chunk people, but they’re saying settler communities reserve the right to decide which Native people belong here and which don’t. Finally, because of the phrase “with their consent” in the removal legislation, neither the federal officials on the ground in Wisconsin nor those in Nebraska feel that they can physically restrain Ho-Chunk people who wanna return to Wisconsin. They have no military authority to do so. And so, as soon as Ho-Chunk people are deposited in Nebraska, they begin returning, and they return in huge numbers over the course of 1874 until finally, by 1875, the federal government gives up. It grants the Ho-Chunk people in Wisconsin the right to remain there and it establishes a special homestead policy for them that allows them to buy land from the federal domain in Wisconsin and to remain there. Local authorities in parts of western Wisconsin begin acknowledging the right of these Ho-Chunk residents and landowners to be part of the political community. In fact, even to vote. Perhaps then to be citizens. Whether or not this policy actually made the Ho-Chunk people into citizens is unclear.

They would not really clearly be American citizens until that status was imposed on all Native people by the federal government in 1924. But their status as homestead owners and as people not subject to reservation authority did insulate the Ho-Chunk people between the 1870s and the early 20th century from some of the worst features of colonial power, from some of the worst forces that afflicted Native life during that period, and that sought to destroy Native people’s languages, their cultures, their political communities, their family relations; in every other way, tried to make Native people disappear. The Ho-Chunk people did not disappear, and they remain in Wisconsin, a federally recognized sovereign nation today. Why don’t we know this history? Why is this history so surprising and discomfiting? That’s because it doesn’t fit the way that we think about American history and American citizenship. And that’s really strange. The historian I spoke to you about a little while ago, Frederick Jackson Turner, really worked hard to make Native people disappear as people. He understood them as a force that created settler life, and that helped settlers forge their new civilization in opposition to the quote, “savage wilderness” that included Native people. But in Turner’s view, it didn’t matter who Native people were, and it didn’t matter what they did. They served that function and then they disappeared. The very strange thing about that is that Frederick Jackson Turner was actually born and raised in the Ho-Chunk homeland, in Portage, Wisconsin, not that far from where Blue Wing’s community was.

And he grew up in a world where Ho-Chunk people were regularly present, but he could not see them and would not see them as human beings with histories and destinies and ideas of their own. He only could see them as a force against which the United States and its settlers and its citizens had to push in order to make themselves. And Turner’s erasure of Ho-Chunk people and his a erasure of Native American history generally has been kind of part and parcel of the way that we’ve been educated to think about our own settler state and its communities and its history. And therefore, a figure like the leader of a squatter gang, like Henry Dodge, becomes in Wisconsin view a statesman and a founder, and the parts of his history that represent the attempt to erase the Ho-Chunk from existence disappear from our account of that, just as the Ho-Chunk disappear from the way we tell the history of that time and place and the history that’s continued since then. But Turner got it wrong and Dodge did not succeed. And the Ho-Chunk are still here. And that’s in part because they understood that citizenship could be and was not only a tool of conquest aimed at taking their land, but also a tool that they could seize for their own purposes. And so taking Ho-Chunk history seriously demands that we consider citizenship and United States history from that perspective as well. That we understand that the struggle over the place of Native nations and their sovereignty continues to be a feature of American life and American struggle in matters ranging from legal jurisdiction over territory, to child welfare and adoption, to all kinds of other matters. Ho-Chunk history, as I’ve described it today, is history of an encounter with the United States.

And I can’t finish without saying that Ho-Chunk history itself is much bigger than the history of its encounter with the United States. It’s tens of thousands of years old. It has its own internal dynamics, its own way of talking about those dynamics, and its own vocabulary, including literally its own language. None of that have I covered today. All of that remains for Ho-Chunk people to continue living and thinking about. And when they’re ready, we’re interested, sharing with the rest of us. But I want you to remember as I conclude that that history too continues. Thank you.