Grundy County Historical Society and Museum hosts Gerald Savage of Ho-Chunk Nation for annual dinner

The Grundy County Historical Society and Museum hosted its annual dinner Tuesday night, hosting speaker Gerald Savage of the Ho-Chunk Nation.

Savage is an Illinois Humanities Road Scholar speaker and a tribal elder with the Ho-Chunk Nation.

“My program is an oral history,” Savage said. “It’s been written down but it’s an oral history handed down from the elders.”

Savage said his tribe, formerly known as the Winnebago until 1964, has been in the area of Wisconsin and Northern Illinois since 7000 B.C., coming from the Driftless region of Wisconsin. The area is known as “Driftless” because it’s the area where the glaciers didn’t plow through, molding the land.

“We changed the name because when Nicolette first came across the Great Lakes, he had Algonquin guides and the Algonquin guides came and discovered our people at Red Banks,” Savage said. “Well, there must’ve been an algae bloom going on at the time because Winnebago in Algonquin means ‘People of the Stinky Water’. We’re not the People of the Stinky Water. We’re the Ho-Chunk People.”

Savage said he believes the tribe halved itself from a larger tribe because the language is similar to the one the Sioux speak, and there are many different branches of Sioux. He believes the Ho-Chunk were probably the original people.

Savage went over his regalia, which had eagle feathers on the back of a medicine wheel. He wears a bear claw necklace because he’s a member of the Bear Clan and he’s the Bear Clan Chief. He also wears a bone breastplate and bone choker.

“Back in the day, we would hunt all kinds of different things, believe it or not, and this area used to be full of woodland buffalo,” Savage said. “The woodland buffalo was hunted to extinction.”

The last woodland buffalo was killed in Southern Illinois during the 1800s.

Savage’s grandfather was born in Winnebago, Neb., and his grandmother was born in Wisconsin. Her father kept them deep in the woods, hidden so they wouldn’t get caught. They were discovered after he got a job, and the state took his kids and put them in a residential school.

“There’s not a lot of smiling faces there,” Savage said, pointing to a photo. “You’ll notice the girl’s hair wasn’t quite that long, and they all have dresses on. The boys all have short hair. My grandmother talked about when they were taken, they would get powdered down, stripped down, and had their hair cut to make sure they didn’t have lice. They weren’t allowed to talk any other native language, and they had to learn a new religion.”

His family moved to Illinois after they formed a Western show. In their travels, they met a man who mentioned that it’d been over 100 years since Illinois had any natives, and he offered Savage’s grandfather a job.

Savage shared a picture of Junior, a member of his family.

“Junior died of racism,” Savage said. “That’s how I put it. He came down with an appendicitis attack and they wouldn’t take him to the hospital. He had really dark skin. This was in the 1930s. They knew my grandfather couldn’t pay the bill so my grandmother got on the phone and got the local church to say they would pay the bill. They took Junior back to the hospital but it was too late. He died of sepsis from the appendicitis attack.”

Savage said his grandfather moved into Starved Rock State Park, which is where he had his own naming ceremony in 1962.

“The naming ceremonies are much like what you hear,” Savage said. The elder looks, he thinks, he prays and asks for a name to be given,” Savage said. “If you look in the picture here, there’s a lot of white skin. The only people with dark skin are myself and my grandfather. He looks at everybody else and sees a lot of white skin, and the name that comes to him is White Winnebago. That’s how I received my name that day. Remember that because I’m gonna reference it again. Humor is a big thing with Native Americans.”

To view the entirety of Savage’s presentation, visit https://fb.watch/sgpFKpWtYp/.