The story of this land

As the sun sets behind Dejope residence hall, Aaron Bird Bear stands before a group of students seated around the building’s sacred fire circle, a gathering place and monument honoring Wisconsin’s Native American tribes. First, he greets them in Ho Chunk, the language of the mound-builders whose history in Madison dates back thousands of years. Getting no response, he tries Ojibwe, the language used for trade in the Great Lakes region; then French, the language of the fur trappers and missionaries who came to Wisconsin in the 1600s; and finally English, the language of the colonists and the Americans who attempted six times to forcibly expel the area’s indigenous people from their ancestral homeland.