Hocak

The Hocak, also called Ho-Chunk or Winnebago, are a Siouan-speaking people of the western Great Lakes, historically centred in Wisconsin. Successors of the Oneota culture, whose ancestors raised thousands of effigy mounds there, they lived in wigwam villages where women grew corn, squash and beans and men fished from canoes. Their name means People of the Sacred Voice, and their society had twelve clans.

In the sixteenth century they were the dominant power between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi, but epidemics, a deadly lake storm and Algonquian pressure cut them to a few hundred by the late seventeenth century. Wars with the Illinois, Ojibwe and other neighbours cost them much of their eastern Wisconsin land.

The Winnebago War of 1827 and the Black Hawk War of 1832 preceded treaties of 1829, 1832 and 1837, by which the United States forced them to cede their Wisconsin lands and move west.