Monona History Club: Citizens of a Stolen Land: Ho Chunk History of the 19th Century

During the 1820s and 1830s, the United States took possession of all of the Ho-Chunk people’s ancestral lands within what is today Wisconsin. Despite this, over many decades, the Ho-Chunk resisted, returned, and ultimately regained the right to live in parts of their homeland. 

Today, their descendants are citizens of the Ho-Chunk Nation, a federally recognized sovereign nation headquartered in Black River Falls. How did the Ho-Chunk thwart American efforts to expel them, and how did they achieve this remarkable reversal of American policies of conquest?

This presentation is part of the Badger Talks program, provided by UW-Madison, in partnership with the Historic Blooming Grove Historical Society.

--

Presented by Professor Stephen Kantrowitz

Stephen Kantrowitz writes and teaches about race, citizenship, and Native American-settler interactions in the nineteenth-century United States. His most recent work explores the transformation of American citizenship in the Civil War era through the experiences of the Ho-Chunk people. Professor Kantrowitz was born in Boston, earned his Ph.D. at Princeton University, and has been teaching at UW–Madison since 1995. He is Plaenert-Bascom and Vilas Distinguished Professor of History and the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships for his scholarship and teaching.