the Ho-Chunk name for themselves means "people of the sacred language" and they believe themselves to be the original branch of a Siouan-speaking family of tribes extending west onto the Great Plains; their ancestral home is Moga-shooch, or Red Banks, on the east shore of Green Bay where they greeted Jean Nicolet in 1634; since ca. 1600 they have resided throughout the Fox, Wisconsin, and Chippewa valleys but especially near the Wisconsin Dells and Black River Falls; population in 2001: 6,065.

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[Source: Loew, Patty. Indian Nations of Wisconsin (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2001).]