Fiscal Note
No fiscal impact.
Title
Affirming and proclaiming Friday, November 23, 2018 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, 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, 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 living around the lakes; and,
WHEREAS, on December 2, 1829, President John Quincy Adams, presented the Ho-Chunk with the first treaty for ceding vast amounts of mineral-rich land wanted by the white settlement; and,
WHEREAS, beginning in 1849, the federal government began a series of attempts of forcible removals, the Ho-Chunk were rounded up and put into boxcars to move the Ho-Chunk from their Wisconsin territory to Iowa, then Minnesota, still later to South Dakota and finally in Nebraska, leading to mistrust and conflict with a dominant government society; and,
WHEREAS, the Ho-Chunk returned on foot to Wisconsin to live as refugees on their former homelands, and in 1875, those in Wisconsin were allowed to settle on lands that were not wanted and are the only tribe in Wisconsin for whom no reservation was ever formally established; and,
WHEREAS, in 1887, with the General Allotment Act, the shift changed from isolation to assimilation and accult...
Click here for full text