Mississippi Indian Culture Territories

Indigenous Milwaukee

The Indigenous Peoples of North America have always claimed Milwaukee as their own. Known as the “gathering place by the waters,” the “good earth” (or good land), or simply the “gathering place,” Indigenous groups such as the Potawatomi, Ojibwe, Odawa (Ottawa), Fox, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sauk, and Oneida have all called Milwaukee their home at some point in the last three centuries. This does not include the many other Native populations in Milwaukee today, ranging from Wisconsin groups like the Stockbridge-Munsee and Brothertown Nation, to outer-Wisconsin peoples like the Lakota and Dakota (Sioux), First Nations, Creek, Chickasaw, Sac, Meskwaki, Miami, Kickapoo, Micmac, and Cherokee, among others. According to the 2010 census, over 7,000 people in Milwaukee County identified as American Indian or Alaska Native, making Milwaukee the largest concentration of Native Peoples statewide. Milwaukee, then, is—and has always been—a Native place, home to a diverse number of Indigenous Americans.

American Redskin Mississippi Indian Milwaukee’s Creation Story is thousands of years old, when the Mound Builders civilizations, also known as the Adena, Hopewell, Woodlands, and Mississippian cultures, flourished in the Great Lakes, Ohio River Valley, and Mississippi River Valley between 500 BCE to 1200 CE (some scholars even suggest 1500 CE). It is estimated the Mound-Builder civilization spread to southeastern Wisconsin in the Early Woodland Era, sometime between 800 and 500 BCE, and flourished during the Middle Woodland Era (100 BCE to 500 CE). For thousands of years, the Mound Builders occupied southeastern Wisconsin and erected conical earthworks and effigy mounds that are still visible today, like the Aztalan mounds in Jefferson County.

These civilizations were semi-sedentary, mixing the cultivation of corn, squash, and beans with hunting, gathering, and fishing along the western banks of Lake Michigan. The Mound Builders also established elaborate exchange networks penetrating as far south as the Gulf of Mexico and as far east to the Hudson Valley, navigating waterways like the Mississippi, Illinois, and Wabash Rivers to trade with other Indigenous groups. The mounds themselves were a central part of these peoples’ lives, as physical and totemic representations of their spiritual worldviews and practices, burial sites, ceremonial grounds, and territorial boundary markers. These mounds remain visible testaments to the Indigenous occupation of southeastern Wisconsin for thousands of years.