Ho-Chunk Erotic

The Ho-Chunk are the Siouan people of Wisconsin, which is stranger than it sounds. Their Wisconsin neighbors, Menominee, Ojibwe, Potawatomi, Sauk and Meskwaki, all spoke Algonquian languages. The Ho-Chunk did not. Hoocąk belongs to the same family as Lakota and Osage, and its closest relatives, Ioway, Otoe and Missouria, are spoken by nations whose own traditions say they split from the Ho-Chunk and moved west. The Ho-Chunk stayed. Their origin story places them at Red Banks on Green Bay, and the Fox and Wisconsin River country has been home for as long as anyone has records. Winnebago, the name that still attaches to the Nebraska tribe, is an Algonquian exonym meaning something like people of the dirty water. Hoocąk is what they call themselves, usually glossed as people of the big voice or of the sacred language.

Two federally recognized nations exist today because of removal, not choice. After treaties in 1829, 1832 and 1837 took the Wisconsin lands, the United States moved the Ho-Chunk again and again over a quarter century: to Iowa, to two sites in Minnesota, then in 1863 to Crow Creek in Dakota Territory, an expulsion triggered by a Dakota war the Ho-Chunk had no part in. Survivors fled downriver to the Omaha and secured a Nebraska reservation in 1865. A stubborn portion never left Wisconsin, or walked back after each roundup, until the government relented in the 1870s and let them homestead. That is why the Ho-Chunk Nation, headquartered at Black River Falls, has no reservation but scattered trust parcels across more than a dozen counties, and why the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska shares Thurston County with the Omaha.

Society runs on twelve patrilineal clans in two halves, those above and those on earth. The Thunderbird clan traditionally supplied chiefs, the Bear clan kept order, and marriage crossed the divide. Clan naming, the Medicine Lodge and warbundle feasts persist alongside the Native American Church, which arrived in the early 1900s, and Christian congregations. Ho-Chunk women's appliqué ribbonwork is distinctive, and their black ash baskets were a Wisconsin Dells staple for generations, sold near the rock formations where the tribe staged summer ceremonials for tourists until 1997. The Dells trade now is gaming. In Nebraska, the tribal corporation Ho-Chunk Inc. is one of the country's better known tribal business stories, and the Winnebago homecoming pow wow, which the tribe dates to 1866 and holds each July for Chief Little Priest and his scouts, is among the oldest anywhere. Fluent Hoocąk speakers are few and mostly elderly, and both nations run language programs to keep its nasal vowels in living mouths.