‘Hey, there you go. You are enrolled.’ I remember a hot summer with my four other siblings sitting on top of a car. My mother put us all in that station wagon and drove us up to Stevens Point. She gave us all pop sickles on the hottest of days. A bunch of the ladies backed up their car, opened up the trunk and pulled out papers and had my mom fill out one-page papers for her and all five of us and boom, we were enrolled. I’m 1247. She’s 1246. We all know our numbers. My grandkids are not enrollable with us. Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez was a case that eventually went to the ground. The argument was, ‘You’re Native. You’re an Indian people. We have no idea what you consider to be a Native person. We don’t know that. Once we do something codified in law and say you have all of those rights through your treaty rights, you get to determine your tribal membership. You have that ability.’ And that is something that the tribal government has not gotten into. And if we talk about sovereignty, that is the essence of sovereignty, to dictate your own tribal enrollments.”

Another important feature of the treaties and interpretation of the laws governing Indigenous people are annuities, annual payments that the federal government makes to the officially-recognized tribes. Huling feels the annuities were started to absolve the Euro-American settlers of their guilt.

“Our first annuity roll was 1901,” Huling said. “It was basically the Federal Government saying, ‘Hey, we’re even going to give you a little bit of money for letting us take your land. We’re going to tell you that we are buying it. Remember that X that you put on that treaty? That’s what that means. And it’s a Big Brother type of mentality. Once again, here’s the Almighty Father. What do you have to do? We have to look good in the eyes of ourselves. And I believe in all honesty, treaties were that way from the get go. We have to look good to ourselves. And one of the measures of taking care of Native people was a measure of saying, ‘Okay we are going to do this for you. You’re just going to leave the land alone and move on.’ Did we know that? No, these were our ancestral grounds. We trailed these ways like Judge Doyle said.”

While the Federal Government felt the treaties ceded the rights to the land to the Federal Government and the settlers, the Ho-Chunk and others felt that was preposterous because no one could “own” Mother Earth. In their minds, they were ceding nothing.

This illustrates that it wasn’t the Native viewpoint that mattered when deciding issues of sovereignty. It was the Federal Government that decided. With little power, the tribes often needed to rely upon the kindness of strangers to protect their rights and preserve their sovereignty.

“You see now that we do have a Native Ho-Chunk woman, Tricia Zunker, who sits in Congress now,” Hurling said. “She is enrolled here. That’s phenomenal. To see those who have passed like Senator Daniel Inouye and what he had done making those moves and getting that recognition is all great and wonderful. But we are still a lost people among people whom the Federal Government swore to uphold and take care of. They have that trust responsibility. What do we get now? Sure we maybe get the possibility of grants. But who is going to get the big money? What can you do with that money within your tribe? We codified it within the law. We created a program. It has nothing to do with the treaty anymore. Once the Supreme Court decided that we needed to partake of that and discuss that in a law, let’s do a law because only those who can think and want to change a law and have the ability to change a law can. None of these people have that ability to understand and change these laws. We have a handful within the federal governmental system that we hope can do a lot. We hope they can do something. We hope our own representative from our own tribe can help us and do what she can for us. Deb Haaland, who is now the secretary of the Dept. of Interior is wonderful. She is another Native woman who was just appointed. These are great things, but I think the issue is when we look at treaties and sovereignty, how impactful is a tribe going to be? How much are they going to call to arms their ability to stand up and have a voice? Black lives surely mattered recently in the last 3-4 years here. But do Native lives matter?”

The Ho-Chunk have been very conscious about developing good relations with the governmental entities that can impact them. And there is always a need to have strong advocates within the Federal Government.

“Our relationship with the state of Wisconsin is good,” Huling said. “There are those who stand in our corner and we have been in their corner. Tammy Baldwin was just elected when I moved to Madison to go to law school. I would say that when there is some real complication when it comes to the legal situation, she is always there for us and always in favor of what we need and supports us. Our brother in kind, Ron Kind is a big supporter. To see him going out could be catastrophic for us at times because we could call on Ron and he would be there. My uncle who passed, Owen Mike, and Ron Kind had a relationship like I know of no other. He was a tribal member who was a Vietnam veteran, served in the Army and the Marines in the Asian Pacific theaters. He was just a wonderful uncle. Ron and he had a phenomenal relationship. We would go to his house and there would be Ron Kind having coffee with him. There are some who are great.”