Place Writing in the Root River Valley
Text originally published in Middle West Review, 10(1), Fall 2023.
“Land is our first relationship,” writes Patty Krawec in Becoming Kin, “and it is the first relationship that we need to restore.”[1] What does it mean to live in good relations with land? Understanding inherent ecological and cultural (i.e., ecocultural) histories of a landscape is one useful starting point. Place writing centered on environmental history, in all its variety, offers opportunities to connect historical abstractions to ecocultural particularities; histories of specific peoples-in-place, for example, rather than vague acknowledgements of a generic “Native American presence” of the past. Place-work can help situate specific peoples and ecologies of a place — those often erased or ignored by settler “improvements” and narrative self-mythologizing — into a more visible and enduring presence on the land today. In defamiliarizing the everyday, place writing can also help pluralize the particular; (re)imagining land as more than simply property to be bought and sold (i.e., instrumental valuation) but also as landscapes alive with agency, of robust intrinsic and relational values.[2]
Place-making, as a fundamental way in which humans make sense of the world, can be seen as residing at the center of ecology or “nature,” social relations, and meaning.[3] Geographic space becomes “place” through experience, allowing meaning-making to flourish in the stories we tell about places we know. To suggest that places are ecocultural — rather than only social, environmental, or worse, simply economic — asserts a challenge to anthropo-and settler-centric narratives and a path towards recovery from the cultural amnesia of Midwestern settler colonialism.[4] Place writing, as such, offers a means to engage with contextualized human and more-than-human relations of deep physical and metaphysical significance; taking a longer view of time, an ancestral view, allows for counterbalance to recent centuries of settler-narrative hegemony.
Place Names
When I wanted to know more about the pre-settler history of my own home place — the Root River valley in southeast Minnesota — there were few direct answers to my many basic questions. These are answers Google cannot provide. Who were (and are) the ancestral stewards of this place? How did people live in relation to these lands 200, or 400, or 1,000 . . . or 12,000 years ago? What did this land look like (and smell and sound like)? Working through potential answers (and many more questions), I found place names a useful starting point. Attention to place names, or toponyms, offers a portal for critical awareness — a productive questioning of one’s ever-emergent sense of self-in-place.[5]
North American place names often hint at Indigenous peoples and languages, as well as ecological and landmark features; specific waterways, landforms, rocks, and other cultural sites “imbued with meaning by generations of experience and knowledge.”[6] In or around the Root River watershed, such names include: Hokah, Carimona, Minneiska, Dakota, Winneshiek, Decorah, and Winona. Names with Indigenous-language roots, and the place-relations they represent, offer a path for contemporary residents to develop deeper understandings of the power of place.[7]
Beyond the Root River, in the 24,000-square-mile geologically unique area commonly referred to as the Driftless Area, many names draw from Dakota and Ho-Chunk (Hoocąk) words. One useful though rare collection of regional place names is Where the Waters Gather and the Rivers Meet by Paul Durand. Though not always thorough in his attributions, Durand drew from sources including Dakota residents of the Prairie Island Indian Community near Red Wing, Minnesota; Ho-Chunk community members of the Black River Falls, Wisconsin, area; writings from ethnomusicologist Frances Densmore (1867–1957); and cartographer Joseph Nicollet’s map of 1843.
Here is Durand’s Root River entry:[8]
HU’-TA WA-KPA’ (1) root (2) river. A question arises here as to the correct translation of the Dakota name for root. The Root River is called “Racine” (root) by Pike; “Root River” by Major Long in 1817. It was not until Keating’s narrative of Long’s expedition in 1823 where similar Dakota words HO-KA and HU-TA were confounded. Hoka is heron and has no place here. This river was known as CAH-HE-O-MON-AH or Crow River by the Winnebago.
Henning Garvin, linguist with the Ho-Chunk Nation, clarifies the phonetic spelling of CAH-HE-O-MON-AH as likely translating to Kaaǧi Homąra.[9] “Kaaǧi is the Hoocąk word for ‘Raven,’” says Garvin, “though it is often used for ‘Crow’ as well,” and Homą means nest. As such, Garvin suggests that Ho-Chunk ancestors likely called the Root River, or at least its confluence at the Mississippi, Kaaǧi Homąra: Crow (or Raven) Nesting Place.
Settler renaming, in part, attempts to negate wayfinding narratives of the past and assert geographic dominance.[10] Central to the project of settler colonialism is displacement and erasure; this includes physical displacement, yes, but also displacement of cultural narratives — stories of The People indigenous to a place. Such displacement has allowed settlers to assert “their own primacy over the place.”[11] But places are plural, as the multiple names for Root River suggest, and recognizing the plurality of regional toponyms helps to better understand the place itself. Place writing — and the multiple meanings landscape-scale stories convey — can help disrupt settler-narrative hegemony while amplifying more foundational stories of people-in-place.
Place Writing in the Western Driftless
Southeast Minnesota is generally underrepresented in Midwestern historical writing. For example, The Driftless Reader, edited by Curt Meine and Keefe Keeley, and Mni Sota Makoce, by Gwen Westerman and Bruce White, focus little on the area; both assert a certain power to place but neither define place with theoretical specificity. Two other books — A Thousand Pieces of Paradise by Lynne Heasley and Oneota Flow by David Faldet — offer long-form versions of what this short essay attempts; a shared aim, in Heasley’s words, to “uncover histories” of specific places “that are less well known and to place them alongside the histories we think we know well.”[12] In these works, watershed-scale perspectives on ecology, social relations, and meanings emerge; Heasley on the Kickapoo River of southwest Wisconsin and Faldet on the Upper Iowa River, a watershed closely associated with the Root River’s own ecocultural past.
How deep is this past? At least 12,000 years. In public presentations, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer (THPO) for the Ho-Chunk Nation, Bill Quackenbush, uses a fifty-foot rope with markers for significant events or periods (1 inch = 20 years) to help audiences comprehend the breadth of enduring Indigenous presence throughout the Upper Midwest.[13] The authors of Twelve Millennia: Archaeology of the Upper Mississippi River Valley employ a similar metaphor by comparing 12,000 years of human presence to a twelve-inch ruler. At this scale, Europeans arrived in North America at about 11.5 inches; the Revolutionary War occurs at 11.75. In short, roughly 47/48ths of regional ecocultural history is Indigenous Peoples’ history.
The essay that follows asks readers to (re)consider their homeplace in light of the enduring presence of deeper ecocultural relations. It offers an example of writing foregrounded by self-education and reflection, however imperfect and incomplete (which is to say, very). This form of place writing — a watershed-scale view across multiple generations garnered from both settler and Indigenous voices — is one small way of engaging in a type of reciprocity work detailed in Dakota scholar Waziyatawin’s book What Does Justice Look Like? It also offers a complement to regional place writing found in collections such as Contours: A Literary Landscape, curated by the Driftless Writing Center.[14] The section below starts with an overview of Root River geography followed by ecological notes from both Native and settler sources. This essay invites contemplation and critique regarding what it includes and does not include (which is to say, much).
The Root River Valley
The blufflands of the Upper Mississippi River’s western edge contain deeply incised valleys and karst topography conveying surface water and underground streams through cavernous limestone reaches within the prominence of a Paleozoic Plateau.[15] “Living springs of cool, pure water” were common at the time of Harrington’s 1875 report. Given the tilt of bedrock, springs “are by far most common on the south or west side of bluffs, where the green clay of the lower part of the Trenton Limestone comes to the surface.”[16] On northeast-to-northwest facing hillsides, sporadic algific talus slopes create microclimates which nurture refugia such as the Iowa Pleistocene Snail and Northern Monkshood flower. Humans, too, have persisted in this region for at least 12,000 years.
The true geological “driftless” area lies almost entirely in southwest Wisconsin, plus most of what is now Jo Daviess County of northwest Illinois, whereas “Driftless Area topography” encompasses contiguous portions of southeast Minnesota and northeast Iowa.[17] A place named for what it lacks — remnant glacial drift from the most recent Ice Age — the western Driftless embosoms the Cannon, Zumbro, Whitewater, and Root rivers in present-day Minnesota and, in northeast Iowa amid globally unique clusters of 1,000-year-old effigy mounds, the Upper Iowa, Yellow, and Turkey rivers.[18]
The Root River flows west-to-east via north and south branches, and middle and south forks, for eighty miles at roughly 44°N latitude. Draining about 1,670 square-miles, the watershed spans nearly all present-day Fillmore and Houston counties while its headwaters reach into portions of Mower, Olmsted, and Winona counties. The Root’s mouth opens to the Mississippi below Pine Creek, near La Crescent, and above the river-terrace village site of Hokah, across from western Wisconsin’s ancient seasonal gathering place at Prairie La Crosse. Bluff promontories along this stretch of the Mississippi are the tallest of all its meandering route, reaching nearly six hundred feet from river to ridge. Narrower gorges along the upper Root stretch to about three hundred feet.[19]
Ice Age glaciers retreated about 14,000 years ago and left what is now considered the Upper Midwest barren rock or covered in massive inland seas. By 12,000 to 9,000 years ago, Paleo-era peoples living around the Upper Mississippi River Valley saw spruce-larch forests emerge followed by areas of diverse deciduous forests. Prairie growth sprouted in the Middle Archaic period, about 5,500 years ago, while a shifting but durable ecological transition area, or ecotone, of mixed prairie and oak savanna stretched along the western driftless edges from 3,500 to 3,000 years ago (Late Archaic) and remained until the nineteenth century.[20]
Technologies of stone and wood advanced through millennia of human innovation; Paleo-era stone toolmaking led to a period of copper tools and art by the Middle Archaic. Horticulture in the Upper Midwest emerged 3,000 to 2,000 years ago and included varieties of sunflower and squash; by the Middle Woodland period (2,000 to 1,000 years ago), staple foods including nuts (e.g., hickory, walnut, hazelnut, acorn) and fruits (e.g., sumac, grape, raspberry, blackberry, nightshade, hawthorn) complemented cultivated plants while agriculturalists of the day grew and stored provisions in seasonally occupied, semi-permanent villages.[21]
Woodland-era peoples living 1,500 to 1,000 years ago built conical and linear mounds for burial and ceremonial purposes. By the Late Woodland, 1,000 to 700 years ago, inscriptions on the landscape emerged as strategically placed effigy, or animal/spirit-being shaped mounds.[22] Effigy mounds represent a tradition of ceremonialism likely connecting heterogeneous groups of the time.[23] Several effigy mounds were recorded near the mouth of the Root River, including bird and four-legged effigies, along with dozens of conical and linear mounds throughout the valley.[24] Mounds near Rushford are some of the oldest in the area, dating to AD 1100–1400.[25]
Though nearly all mounds in the Root River valley have been destroyed, some sites represent a concentration of cultural activity associated with the Oneota Tradition.[26] While descendants of regional mound-builders are widespread, and debated, several Root River sites are associated with present-day Ioway, or Baxoje peoples, and related Otoe-Missouria cultural traditions.[27]
The transition from Late Woodland to Oneota traditions was not always a time of plenty; population growth in the greater Driftless Area led to resource depletion (e.g., deer and firewood), resulting in near-abandonment by humans between about AD 1050 and 1150.[28] A robust horticultural economy emerged with the Oneota Tradition, however, and villages along the Upper Mississippi at present-day La Crosse included large ridged-field systems in locations now known as Brice Prairie (occupied AD 1250–1400), Pammel Creek (1400–1500), and Valley View (1500–1625). Residents cultivated corn and squash (and beans, after about 1300) while also hunting wild game and gathering fruits, nuts, medicinal plants, and freshwater resources. Based on pottery and other evidence, occupants of the Valley View site appear to have decamped across the Mississippi to the Root River’s south fork, along Riceford Creek, and nearby Bear Creek, a tributary of the Upper Iowa, before moving west to the Spirit Lake area in the 1680s.[29]
Lifeways of the seasonal round, as described by Ho-Chunk THPO Bill Quackenbush and others, involved gathering on large river terraces such as Prairie La Crosse in summer for council, sport, trade, ceremony, burials, and farming.[30] Autumn saw smaller groups disperse for hunting camps and winter preparations to interior valleys which afforded shelter from harsh weather and access to year-round spring water. Corn varieties supplemented squash and other cultigens while wild plums, crabapple, grapes, strawberries, and other fruits were common. Aquatic resources such as catfish, drum, pike, sucker, bowfin, sturgeon, crawfish, clams, and turtles were harvested using techniques appropriate to the prey; larger fish were speared while nets and seines with stone sinkers caught smaller species.[31] Large game included elk, bison, bear, and white-tailed deer.
Sauk and Meskwaki peoples — distinct but often allied, especially after the Fox Wars of 1701 to 1742 — were pushed west from the eastern Great Lakes.[32] Territory between the Upper Mississippi and Green Bay to southern Lake Michigan was occupied by Ho-Chunk, Potawatomi, Menominee, and Dakota communities, among others.[33] Sauk and Meskwaki village sites concentrated in present-day southern Wisconsin, northern Illinois, and eastern Iowa, with Meskwaki generally more north and west than Sauk villages.[34] Mdewakanton Dakota peoples were also living along the Mississippi at this time, below Kaposia — a primary village near the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers. Mississippi River Dakota sites include Red Wing, between the Cannon River and Lake Pepin, and Kiyuksa (or Keoxa, also called Wabasha’s Prairie), between the Whitewater River and the Upper Iowa on both sides of the Mississippi, including near the sacred island-mountain at present-day Trempealeau, Wisconsin, and on the Root River (location of a winter camp favored by Wabasha I, who died there in 1806).[35]
After the devastating events of Sauk leader Black Hawk’s retreat and the U.S. Army-led slaughter at Bad Axe Creek on the Mississippi in late summer of 1832, most Ho-Chunk people were systematically pursued and faced attempts at forced removal from Wisconsin to the so-called Neutral Ground in northeast Iowa (which also included a triangular tract of southeastern Minnesota and the lower Root River valley). Hundreds of Ho-Chunk lived in seasonal camps along the Root in the 1840s.[36] Camps included those
of Winneshiek (II), Little Soldier, Yellow Thunder, Big Canoe, and Big Thunder. In 1855, after two other forced removals, Ho-Chunk leader Short Wing (a chief and diplomat, brother to Coming Thunder Winneshiek) held out for a time on the Root River with about two hundred people.[37] In the late 1870s, men such as Big Fire, Long Marsh, Walking Cloud, Yellow Bank, and Green Rainbow are noted in Lanesboro newspapers as visiting the area, sometimes traveling one hundred miles to and from Black River Falls, Wisconsin. In short, as much as the Root River valley (and all southern Minnesota) is considered ancestral lands of the Eastern Dakota, the Baxoje, Meskwaki, and especially Ho-Chunk peoples have also called the western driftless region home across many generations.
Placemaking and Extirpation
While sometimes buried in archives and other non-digital sources, references to the Root River exist in letters, reports, and anecdotes asserting people of the Ho-Chunk Nation (then Winnebago) as the most prominent residents of the Root River valley prior to mass settler incursion in the 1850s. A combination of settler and Indigenous voices is essential for better understanding the breadth and continuity of regional ecocultural relations.
Agriculture in the Root River valley existed long before settlers arrived. The traditions of Indigenous agriculture connect Woodland and Oneota sites at Prairie La Crosse to many others, including Waukon Decora’s village at the mouth of the Kickapoo River in the 1830s, where a one hundred-acre field held pumpkins, potatoes, squashes, and wild tobacco.[38] During the 1840s Ho-Chunk leaders’ camps, such as that of Winneshiek (II) on the Root River, also grew corn.[39] While Indigenous agriculture in the Upper Midwest has endured for centuries, without big game, subsistence can also tilt toward starvation.
“Elk were abundant” in the early 1840s, wrote Winona-area historian Lafayette Bunnell, “outside of the timber, on the borders of the prairies but a short distance from Winona . . . and a little farther west buffalo were still to be found quite numerous.”[40] Yet extirpation of large game was active. In October of 1841, Henry Hastings Sibley, working for the American Fur Company (AFC), induced about 150 Dakota to travel south from Mendota to the oak savannas west of the Root River. Sibley had no legal right to hunt the land — some of it being the so-called Neutral Ground, established about a decade earlier as a buffer between Dakota to the north and Meskwaki to the south — but AFC stocks were low. “The hunt was successful” wrote Franklyn Curtiss-Wedge in 1911, “2,000 deer, fifty elk, as many bears, five panthers and a few buffalo skins were obtained.”[41]
As a riverine landscape, resource-rich wetlands have served as both resource and refuge.[42] Recollections of traditional gathering in the wetlands and forests of the greater Driftless Area are shared by Ho-Chunk elders such as Mountain Wolf Woman. In her autobiography, Mountain Wolf Woman recalls a spring trip to the Mississippi near La Crosse where her father was trapping and where she learned to collect yellow water lily roots with her mother and sisters.43 In an endnote from the same chapter, collaborator and editor Nancy Oestreich Lurie also notes the use of low-intensity fire to burn out underbrush in the pine-dominated forests near Black River Falls. This allowed blueberry bushes to flourish, at least until the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources instituted its policy of total fire suppression resulting in blueberry bushes being choked out by undergrowth.[44]
Traditional forms of gathering and hunting in the Upper Midwest are often closely tied to landscape management, including the intentional use of fire. Generations of Indigenous peoples used fire to maintain the open-canopy oak savannas attractive to bison, deer, and elk herds.[45] In 1858, the year of Minnesota’s statehood, an inducement to eastern settlers published by J. W. Bishop of Chatfield described prairie fires and timber in very instrumentalist terms:
. . . usually small, and stunted by the fires, which, until of late, have yearly swept over these great pasture grounds; but a grove is here and there found, where the growth having become sufficiently dense to kill out the grass, thus checking the fire, it has thriven unharmed, and in most localities the settler has but to enclose his proposed ‘wood-lot’ with a few furrows, when a thicket of forest trees will spring up, furnishing in a few years an ample supply of fencing and firewood.[46]
Bishop predicts an end to prairie fires — and the prairies themselves — suggesting that as the land is “improved” and cultivated, “the fires are more limited in their extent, being interrupted by plowed fields, roads, &c., and in a few years will probably cease altogether.” Bishop describes the south branch of the Root “or Carimona River,” as “well wooded,” with “maple, oak, elm, ash, butternut, black walnut,” and “basswood poplar” but little pine “and no hemlock or beech.” Carimona, as it happens, is the family name (variously spelled) of a lineage of influential Ho-Chunk leaders.[47]
Along the western Driftless ecotone, a few bison herds remained until the mid-1800s. The People of Prairie La Crosse were regularly “moving back and forth across the Mississippi River from at least 1200 AD,” pursuing small herds in the Upper Iowa and Root River valleys.[48] Perhaps one of the last bison herds living on the Root River is evidenced by an anecdote of about 1845. Settlers near Rushford reported a man “whose name is disremembered” speaking of bison on the bluffs. In the daytime, they “would be on the bottom lands feeding and quenching their thirst from the river. This place was on the south side of the river . . . and at the that time the herd did not cross the river.”[49]
Bunnell recounts a similar big game story from the spring of 1852 where a Dr. Balcombe visited Wabasha’s Prairie. Led by a guide, Balcombe “spent three or four days in exploring the country along the branches of the White Water [sic] and Root river . . . [near] what is now Saratoga [township], they saw a large herd of elk, the last that have been seen in this vicinity.”[50] Extirpation of wolves was also active. In April of 1881, 104 wolves were killed in Fillmore County alone. A “sum total of $728 was paid as bounty, bounty being $7 for every wolf.”[51]
In just a few decades, inducements to settlers turned vast stretches of tallgrass prairie, fire-dependent oak savanna, and otherwise intact symbiotic plant and animal systems into a dissected land of agricultural statistics. “Crops, acres planted and yields, and head of stock” recorded for 1879–1880 included wheat, oats, corn, barley, rye, buckwheat, potatoes, beans, hay, flax seed, timothy and clover seed, wild hay, apples, grapes, strawberries, tobacco, honey, maple sugar and syrup, butter and cheese, sheep and wool, horses, cattle, mules, and hogs.[52] By the second decade of the twentieth century an estimated 225,000 apple trees had been planted in southeast Minnesota.[53]
The settler flood also induced insects, vermin, and disease; outbreaks of smallpox, measles, and dysentery occurred from at least the 1760s through the 1830s.[54] Rats arrived “by immigration,” wrote Curtiss-Wedge in 1912. Later, chemical treatments such as the “Paris green” method were introduced to kill the Colorado beetle, or potato bug. Grasshoppers ravaged the state in 1873 while chinch bugs arrived in 1879 and decimated wheat crops; “cultivation of corn, oats, and barley was substituted for that of wheat, the live stock industry and dairying was introduced . . . Land rose in value from $15 or $20 to $100 and $150 per acre.”[55]
One constant in these times of change has been the seasonal migration of birds along the central North American flyway. Root River blufflands are now largely agricultural but also designated as an Important Bird Area. Species of concern include the Louisiana Waterthrush, Cerulean Warbler, and Acadian Flycatcher. The hardwood forests and floodplains host “Red-shouldered Hawk, Barred Owl, Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, Tufted Titmouse, Wood Thrush, Blue-winged Warbler, Prothonotary Warbler, and Scarlet Tanager” while open grassland parcels “provide prime habitat for several sparrow species as well as Bobolink, and Eastern Meadowlark.”[56]
Inducement to Reimagination
The Driftless Area is not filled with so many awe-inspiring sights of grandeur as to make it singularly special; many vastly more charismatic landscapes exist. But to the people who live there, it is a special place. Place writing at the watershed scale, focused on deep-time ecocultural relations, offers a way to reflect on and assert a plurality of place meanings. In the era of #LandBack and other important social movements centered on tribal sovereignty, place writing offers one small way settler-descendants can move beyond tropes of self-mythologizing “progress” and, as the subtitle to Patty Krawec’s Becoming Kin suggests, toward “unforgetting the past and reimagining the future.”[57]
This essay acts as an extended invitation for residents throughout the Midwest to engage in watershed-scale critical place writing grounded in self-education and meaningful reflection. In doing so, settler-descendants need not make the mistake of expecting Indigenous peoples to be primarily responsible for educating others about their ancestral homelands. Tribal language programs and place-name recovery efforts, for example, breathe life into better understandings of the region’s ancestral roots and are “part of a fuller recovery of our national story and the human story.”[58] The continued presence and traditions of survivance by modern Indigenous peoples reflects a valuable breadth and depth of place-based ecocultural relations.[59] All citizens can benefit from developing these more nuanced, balanced, and pluralistic senses of self-in-place.
NOTES
1. Patty Krawec, Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2022), 126.
2. Austin Himes and Barbara Muraca, “Relational Values: The key to pluralistic valuation of ecosystem services,” Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 35 (2018): 1–7.
3. Daniel Williams, “Making Sense of ‘Place’: Reflections on Pluralism and Positionality in Place Research,” Landscape and Urban Planning 131 (2014): 74–82.
4. Doug Kiel, “Untaming the Mild Frontier: In Search of New Midwestern Histories,” Middle West Review 1, No. 1 (Fall 2014): 9–38.
5. James Cantrill and Susan Senecah, “Using the ‘sense of self-in- place’ construct in the context of environmental policy-making and landscape planning,” Environmental Science & Policy 4, no. 4–5 (Aug. 2001): 185–203.
6. Gwen Westerman & Bruce White, Mni Sota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2012), 4.
7. Ibid., 14.
8. Lafayette Bunnell, History of Winona and Olmsted Counties, Minnesota, (Chicago: H.H. Hill and Co., 1883), 50.
9. Personal communication, June 2, 2022.
10. Natchee Blu Barnd, Native Space: Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2017).
11. Lynne Heasley, A Thousand Pieces of Paradise: Landscape and Property in the Kickapoo Valley (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 183.
12. Ibid., 8.
13. Bill Quackenbush, public demonstration. Aztalan State Park, Wisconsin. Oct. 8, 2022.
14. Waziyatawin, What Does Justice Look Like?: The Struggle for Liberation in Dakota Homeland (St. Paul: Living Justice Press, 2008); Driftless Writing Center, Contours: A Literary Landscape (Viroqua, WI: Driftless Writing Center, 2020).
15. Jean C. Prior, “Paleozoic Plateau,” accessed June 3, 2023, https://iowageologicalsurvey.uiowa.edu/iowa-geology/landforms-iowa/paleozoic-plateau
16. M.W. Harrington, “Report on Olmsted County,” in The Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota-Fourth Annual Report, ed. N.H. Winchell (St. Paul: Minnesota Geological Survey, 1875).
17. J.C. Knox, “Geology of the Driftless Area,” in The Physical Geography and Geology of the Driftless Area: The Career and Contributions of James C. Knox, eds. Carson, et al. (Geological Society of America Special Paper 543, 2019), 1–35.
18. “Effigy Mounds National Monument,” National Park Service, accessed June 3, 2023, https://www.nps.gov/efmo/index.htm.
19. Dennis Thompson and Suzanne Rhees, “Root River State Trail Extension, Houston to La Crescent, Master Plan” (St. Paul: Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, 2011).
20. R.G. Baker, E.A. Bettis III, R.F. Denniston, L.A. Gonzalez, L.E. Strickland, and J.R. Krieg, “Holocene Paleoenvironments in Southeast Minnesota-Chasing the Prairie-Forest Ecotone,” Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 177 (2002): 103–122.
21. Katherine Egan-Bruhy, “Precontact Subsistence Patterns in Southwest Wisconsin: Flora,” (webinar from The Mining and Rollo Jamison Museums, UW-Platteville, May 15, 2022), https:// youtu.be/Z4dO4UYQrN8:46:01–54:09.
22. Robert A. Birmingham and Amy L. Rosebrough, Indian Mounds of Wisconsin, 2nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2017).
23. Michael P. Gu.no, “Of a People of a Place: Reframing the Meaning(s) and Implications of Prehistoric Wisconsin Effigy Mounds,” Material Culture 49, No. 2 (Fall 2017): 51.
24. N.H. Winchell, ed., The Aborigines of Minnesota, (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1911), 81–82.
25. Colin Betts and Dale Henning, “Abberrant Earthworks? A contemporary Overview of Oneota Mound Ceremonialism,” Wisconsin Archeologist 97, No. 2 (2016): 101–119.
26. Constance Arzigian and Katherine Stevenson, Minnesota’s Indian Mounds and Burial Sites (St. Paul: Minnesota Office of the State Archaeologist, 2003), 111.
27. Federal Register, 64, 141, Doc. №99–18890, “Notice of Inventory Completion for Native American Human Remains and Associated Funerary Objects in the Possession of the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council, St. Paul and Bemidji, MN,” (U.S. Department of Interior, July, 1999), 40039–40040. See also https://www.bahkhoje.com/ and https://www.omtribe.org/.
28. James Theler and Robert Boszhardt, “Collapse of Crucial Resources and Culture Change: A Model for the Woodland to Oneota Transformation in the Upper Midwest,” American Antiquity 71, No. 3 (July 2006): 433–472.
29. Mildred Wedel Mott, “Peering at the Ioway Indians through the Mist of Time: 1650 — Circa 1700,” Journal of the Iowa Archeological Society 33 (1986): 1–74; R. Eric Hollinger, Archaeology and Ethnohistory in Northeastern Iowa, in Oneota Historical Connections: Working Together in Iowa, Report 24. ed. S. J. Schermer, et al. (Iowa City: Office of the State Archaeologist, 2015): 55–69.
30. The Mining & Rollo Jamison Museums, “13,000 Years of Driftless Ingenuity,” (webinar from the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, May 15, 2022), https://youtu.be /Z4dO4UYQrN8.
31. Mississippi Valley Archeology Center, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, “The Mississippi and smaller rivers and streams provided many fish,” Facebook, June 9, 2022, https://tinyurl.com/mww2rvwn.
32. “The Meskwaki Nation’s History,” Meskwaki Nation, accessed June 3, 2023, https://www.meskwaki.org/history/.
33. Helen H. Tanner, “Indian Villages and Tribal Distribution c. 1768,” in Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 58–59.
34. Wayne C. Temple, Indian Villages of the Illinois Country. Scientific Papers, Vol. II, Part 2. Chapter 3: Sauk and Fox. (Springfield: Illinois State Museum, 1966), 83–125.
35. Charles C. Willson, The Successive Chiefs Named Wabasha (St. Paul: Collections of the Minnesota Historical Society, 1908).
36. Alden O. Droivold, History of Rushford, Vol. 1 (Rushford, MN: Rushford Area Historical Society, 1986), 12.
37. Mark Diedrich, Ho-Chunk Chiefs: Winnebago Leadership in an Era of Crisis (Rochester, MN: Coyote Books), 162.
38. Heasley, 179.
39. Diedrich, 136.
40. Bunnell, 63.
41. Franklyn Curtiss-Wedge, History of Mower County Minnesota (Chicago: H.C. Cooper, Jr. & Co., 1911), 42–43.
42. Hugh Prince, Wetlands of the American Midwest: A Historical Geography of Changing Attitudes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
43. Mountain Wolf Woman, Mountain Wolf Woman, Sister of Crashing Thunder: The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), 9.
44. Ibid., Chapter II, Note 4, pp. 116.
45. Julie Courtwright, “‘When We First Come Here It All Looked Like Prairie Land Almost’: Prairie Fire and Plains Settlement,” Western Historical Quarterly 38, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 157–179.
46. J.W. Bishop, History of Fillmore County, Minnesota with an outline of the Resources, Advantages, and the inducements she offers to those seeking homes in the West (Chatfield, MN: Holley & Brown Printers, 1858), 7–8.
47. Diedrich, 18–33.
48. Doug Henning, “Cultural Adaptations to the Prairie Environment: The Ioway Example,” Proceedings of the Twelfth North American Prairie Conference, (1990): 193–194.
49. Edward Neill, History of Fillmore County (Minneapolis: Minnesota Historical Society, 1882), 284.
50. Bunnell, 235.
51. Franklyn Curtiss-Wedge, History of Fillmore County Minnesota, 1 (Chicago: H.C. Cooper, Jr. & Co., 1912), 176.
52. Edward D. Neill, History of Houston County (Minneapolis: Minnesota Historical Society, 1882), 292–293.
53. Curtiss-Wedge, History of Fillmore County, 180.
54. Tanner, Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, 170–171.
55. Curtiss-Wedge, History of Fillmore County, 505–506.
56. “Blufflands-Root River Important Bird Area,” American Audubon Society.
57. Krawec, Becoming Kin, 18.
58. David Treuer, “Language Carries More Than Words,” interview with Krista Tippett, On Being with Krista Tippett, June 19, 2008, audio, 51:16, https://onbeing.org/programs/david-treuer-language-carries-more-than-words/.
59. Amy Lonetree, “Visualizing Native Survivance,” in People of the Big Voice: Photographs of Ho-Chunk Families by Charles Van Schaick, 1879–1942, eds. Tom Jones et al. (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2011), 13–22.
