Jon Greendeer, the tribe’s elected president, agreed that having scattered lands in key places is an advantage “if your goal is to make money.” But, he added, “if your goal is to preserve your people, your culture, your language, it’s the worst thing on Earth.” He would rather have a tribal homeland with geographic continuity. But they include parcels near larger population and visitor centers, like Madison and the Wisconsin Dells.

Its land holdings are mostly small, scattered in more than a dozen Wisconsin counties. Indian gambling has allowed the Ho-Chunk to capitalize on what is otherwise the tribe’s greatest drawback. “In the course of less than 35 years, we’ve changed a complete society, and for the better,” says Lowe, now a business consultant to tribal nations. Kate Golden/Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism Ho-Chunk president Jon Greendeer at the tribe’s headquarters in Black River Falls. It has allowed the tribe to build infrastructure and create programs for its roughly 7,400 members, and to preserve the Ho-Chunk way of life.

Gambling has provided tribal members with jobs, opportunity and income. The Ho-Chunk are tied with the Oneida in the number of casinos, and their profits are comparable to those of the Potawatomi. That accounts for more than a third of the annual totals reported for all 11 state tribes in a 2012 state audit. The Ho-Chunk’s gambling operations generate about $200 million in profit annually, a figure confirmed by tribal officials. The tribe, which prefers the word “gaming,” now operates a network of six casinos, with 175,000 square feet of casino floor space, 5,000 slot machines and about 100 tables, for games including blackjack, poker and roulette. “We were, for all practical purposes, a welfare state.”Īll that is different today, due in large part to the tribe’s ability to run gambling operations. “The tribe subsisted wholly on federal and state programs,” said Lowe, who served as the Ho-Chunk’s top political leader in the early 1980s and again in the mid-1990s. There were no tribal businesses, and debt stirred talk of bankruptcy.

His people, the Ho-Chunk, were impoverished, like most of the nation’s Native American tribes. 28, 2014.Ĭhloris Lowe remembers how it used to be. Gannett’s John Ferak, editor of the project, discusses highlights with Frederica Freyberg on Wisconsin Public Television’s Here and Now, Feb.

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