Fiscal Note
No appropriation required.
Title
Affirming and proclaiming Friday, November 24, 2017 as "Ho-Chunk Day".
Body
WHEREAS, the Ho-Chunk people are descendants of the effigy mound builders, ca AD 700-1100, and are the aboriginal inhabitants of the Madison region, known to the Ho-Chunk as “Te Jop e ja” (The Four Lakes). They always lived on this land, which was theirs only for safe keeping, and to take from it only as needed; and,
WHEREAS, effigy mounds were found in neighboring states of Iowa, Minnesota and Illinois but not in the large clusters found in Southern Wisconsin; and,
WHEREAS, oral tradition and historic documents describe the Ho-Chunk as a large and populous tribe of 10,000 that occupied more than 10 million acres of land in much of Southern Wisconsin and Northern Illinois; and,
WHEREAS, Jean Nicolet (Nicollet) de Belleborne was the first known European explorer to cross Lake Michigan into Wisconsin in 1634, who became the French ambassador to the Ho-Chunk people; and,
WHEREAS, the years following Nicolet’s voyage found great losses in the Ho-Chunk population, reduced at its lowest point to only 500, the Ho-Chunk of the 1650s were not the same power they had been and were unable to withstand the wholesale invasion of their homeland; and,
WHEREAS, warfare and foreign diseases disseminated the tribe by the late 17th century, with the population rebounding by the late 18th century, and by the early 19th century the Four Lakes region once again became the hub of Ho-Chunk activity, returning to the homeland of their ancestors, the effigy mound builders; and,
WHEREAS, the heart of the effigy mound region is around the present-day City of Madison, in the Four Lakes Mound District which covers the four principal lakes of Mendota, Monona, Waubesa and Kegonsa, wherein notable buildings were built and erected through the digging up and destroying of effigy mounds; and,
WHEREAS, in 1829, according to a census there were 598 Ho-Chunk people ...
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