Dane County Buys 165 Acres to Return Sacred Land to the Ho-Chunk Nation
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Dane County will spend $6.41 million to buy 165 acres along the Yahara River and hand the land to the Ho-Chunk Nation. For the tribe it is not a real estate deal but the return of old villages, burial mounds, and the resting places of their ancestors.
For more than a century, the wooded bluffs and marshland south of McFarland, Wisconsin, sat in private hands. The Ho-Chunk people knew what was there long before any deed was filed. Their old villages. Their burial mounds. The places where their ancestors were laid to rest along the Yahara River.
On May 14, the Dane County Board voted 32 to 1 to bring that land back to them.
The board approved spending just over $6.4 million to buy roughly 165 acres in the Town of Dunn, then donate the protected property to the Ho-Chunk Nation. County Executive Melissa Agard called it the largest land gift in Dane County history.
"These are our old village sites," Ho-Chunk Nation President Jon Greendeer said of the property. "These are our old cemeteries, resting places for our ancestors."
The land is split by U.S. Highway 51, with about 44 acres on the west side and 121 acres to the east. Part of the eastern parcel runs along the Yahara River and Lower Mud Lake, and a corner of the western piece has roughly 250 feet of shoreline on Lake Waubesa. It is a mix of woods, wetlands, and old farm fields, some of it still enrolled in a federal conservation program.
What makes it rare is what sits beneath the surface. An archaeological review found six recorded sites on the property, including linear and conical burial mounds and a set of crossed linear mounds that a retired state archaeologist described as likely the only ones left in the Midwest, and possibly anywhere. Other effigy and burial mounds that once stood here were destroyed long ago by farming and development.
The deal was built to make sure that does not happen again. Dane County and Groundswell Conservancy will share a permanent conservation easement on the land, which bars development for good and protects both the natural habitat and the archaeological sites. The Ho-Chunk Nation will own and manage the property, but the agreement keeps it open to everyone.
"The partnership is structured to ensure that the property remains open to all members of the public for recreational and educational use," said Tony Abate, senior director of conservation at Groundswell Conservancy.
For the Ho-Chunk, the return carries weight that is hard to measure in acres or dollars. The Nation's connection to this region, which they call Teejop, or "Four Lakes," reaches back beyond memory. In 1832, under the federal Indian Removal Act, the government forced the Ho-Chunk off this land. For decades after, state and federal officials tried to push them out of Wisconsin entirely. They kept coming home anyway, buying back individual parcels one at a time. Today the Ho-Chunk are a "non-reservation" tribe with land scattered across 14 Wisconsin counties, much of it reclaimed acre by acre.
Lambert Cleveland Jr., vice president of the Ho-Chunk Nation, called the agreement one of the most significant preservation achievements for the Nation in the last 50 years.
The vote was not without friction. Officials in the Village of McFarland said they learned of the plan only two days before the board acted, and they argued the price, about $38,850 an acre, ran well above what nearby parcels have sold for. They also pointed to the county's projected $15 million budget shortfall next year and asked the board to slow down. The lone no vote came from Supervisor Goodwill Obieze of Sun Prairie.
County leaders pressed ahead, framing the purchase as a chance that would not come around again. The land had not been on the open market in generations, and the burial mounds it holds cannot be recreated once they are gone.
"This is a historic investment in conservation, cultural preservation, and partnership," Agard said. "These lands are environmentally significant, culturally sacred, and deeply important to the history of this region. I'm proud Dane County is taking this step to protect this land forever while ensuring it can be stewarded by the Ho-Chunk Nation, the original caretakers of this place."
For Greendeer, the vote was less an ending than a beginning. With the land protected and back in Ho-Chunk hands, he said, the focus turns to the long work of caring for it.
"From today going on, we can see protections of the land, preserve the cultural landscape and make sure the environmental integrity grows over the course of time for that natural habitat," he said.
It is a small piece of a much larger map. The Ho-Chunk once held more than ten million acres across what is now southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois. One hundred and sixty-five acres along the Yahara will not change that arithmetic. But for a Nation that has spent nearly two centuries finding its way home, getting back the ground where its ancestors rest is its own kind of victory.