This Is Not Our Way: Colonization, Patriarchy, and the Silencing of Ho-Chunk Women

Understanding the Difference: Patriarchal vs. Matriarchal Societies

Before we talk about Ho-Chunk women, we need to clear something up that is often misunderstood or intentionally distorted.

Matriarchal societies are not the opposite of patriarchal ones.

Patriarchal societies are built on hierarchy, dominance, and control. Power is concentrated, decision-making is top-down, and authority is often tied to gender, force, and status. Patriarchy rewards aggression, silences dissent, and normalizes harm, especially when that harm comes from men in positions of power. It teaches that leadership means control and that men are entitled to rule.

Matriarchal societies are fundamentally different.

They are not about women ruling over men.
They are about balance, relationship, responsibility, and continuity.

In matriarchal and matrilineal societies, women are central because life comes through women. Lineage flows through mothers. Homes are anchored by women. Decision-making is relational. Leadership is earned through care for the people, not domination over them.

Power is not hoarded.
It is shared.
And it is accountable.

Before colonization, many Indigenous Nations across Turtle Island lived within these systems. Men were not erased. They were placed within a web of responsibility: to women, children, elders, clans, and the land.

That distinction matters, because what we are living with now is not a traditional imbalance.
It is a colonial one.

Matrilineal Traces in Ho-Chunk Life

While later written records describe Ho-Chunk clan descent as patrilineal, our life ways tell a deeper story.

Maternal-line relationships mattered. A man’s responsibility to his sister’s children mattered. Women were central within households. Women carried knowledge, kinship, ceremony, and continuity. These are not accidents. They are traces of an older Ho-Chunk life world shaped by matrilineal and mother-centered logic.

Ho-Chunk women led throughout, quietly, often without recognition, and sometimes not allowed to speak at all.

Leadership in Ho-Chunk ways never came from being the loudest person in the room. It came from responsibility, wisdom, and service to the people.

Colonization did not erase this overnight. It pressured it. It constrained it. It pushed women out of visibility.

The Fur Trade and the First Disruption (mid-1600s–1700s)

Beginning in the mid-1600s, the fur trade marked one of the first major disruptions to Ho-Chunk gender balance. This new economy prioritized individual accumulation, competition, and male participation in European-controlled trade networks.

Men were elevated as intermediaries and decision-makers, while clan accountability and women’s authority were deliberately undermined. Traditional Ho-Chunk systems of shared responsibility were replaced with incentives that rewarded independence from women, families, and clans.

This was not an organic cultural shift.
It was an imposed system that reshaped how Ho-Chunk men were taught to understand power, status, and gender.

Missionization and Boarding Schools: Re-Engineering Gender (1800s–early 1900s)

Throughout the 1800s and into the early 1900s, Christian missionization and boarding schools further enforced patriarchal gender roles foreign to Ho-Chunk life.

Ho-Chunk boys were taught that manhood meant authority and control.
Ho-chunk girls were taught obedience, silence, and submission.

These institutions worked intentionally to erase Indigenous kinship systems and replace them with European family structures where men ruled households and women complied.

This was not education.
It was cultural re-engineering.

And its effects did not end when the schools closed.

The Indian Reorganization Act and Colonial Governance (1934)

The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 imposed Western-style governance systems that centralized power, formalized male-dominated leadership, and removed decision-making from clan-based, relational structures.

Ho-Chunk governance was reshaped to mirror U.S. political systems built on hierarchy, exclusion, and individual authority. Over time, this reinforced the belief that men should control leadership, speak for the people, and make decisions without accountability to women or clans.

We are still living with the consequences of that shift.

Naming the Harm We Live With Now

We need to say this plainly.

Ho-Chunk women are talked over in meetings.
Ho-Chunk women are dismissed when we speak.
Ho-Chunk women are told our knowledge does not matter.
Ho-Chunk women are sexualized, harassed, and mistreated in the workplace.
Ho-Chunk women experience sexual misconduct and abuse within community spaces.
Ho-Chunk women are silenced in ceremony, or not allowed to speak at all.
Ho-Chunk women are punished for telling the truth.

This is not Ho-Chunk culture.

This is colonized masculinity operating unchecked inside our Nation.

And silence has protected it for too long.

The Part We Don’t Like to Say

It is also important to say this: some Ho-Chunk women uphold these behaviors too.

This is not because Ho-Chunk women are weak or complicit by nature. Colonial systems trained survival through alignment with power. When patriarchy is imposed for generations, some women learn that safety comes from enforcing it, defending it, or distancing themselves from other women.

When women police other women, excuse harm, protect abusers, or dismiss lived experiences, that too is colonization doing its work.

This is not Ho-Chunk tradition.
It is internalized colonization.

Saying the Hard Part Out Loud

When we see Ho-Chunk men behaving in ways that mirror white patriarchal dominance: silencing women, sexualizing them, dismissing their voices, protecting abusers, and normalizing harm. We must be honest about where that behavior comes from.

It does not come from Ho-Chunk culture.
It comes from centuries of colonial systems training Indigenous people to replicate the very power structures used to dispossess and control them.

Colonization did not just harm Ho-Chunk men.
It taught them to harm Ho-Chunk women.

Decolonization Requires Confrontation

Decolonization is not gentle work.

It requires Ho-Chunk men to confront how colonial thinking shaped behavior.
It requires Ho-Chunk women to unlearn survival strategies that protect harm.
It requires communities to stop excusing abuse because the person causing it is respected, related, or powerful.

Accountability is not division.
Silence is.

Returning to Clan Systems Means Returning to Women

Clan systems were never about power.
They were about care, balance, and responsibility.

They protected women and children.
They held people accountable.
They reminded people who they belonged to.

When Ho-Chunk women lead, they are not taking something away from men. They are restoring balance that was broken.

Ho-chunk women leading is not radical.
Ho-Chunk women leading is remembering.

Closing

This is not about blame.
It is about responsibility.

Decolonization asks all of us, men and women, to unlearn what was never ours.

Our ancestors did not survive removal, violence, and assimilation so Ho-Chunk women would be diminished.

We were never meant to be silent.
We were never meant to be controlled.
And we are done pretending otherwise.

References & Further Reading

This piece is grounded in Ho-Chunk oral history, lived community knowledge, and Indigenous scholarship that documents the impacts of colonization on gender, kinship, and governance systems.

The following works offer historical, cultural, and analytical context for readers who wish to learn more:

• Patrick Jung (2023). Traces of the Feminine: Matriculture in the Traditional Ho-Chunk Life World. Matrix: A Journal for Matricultural Studies, Vol. 3, Issue 1.
  ↳ Explores matrilineal and matricultural traces in traditional Ho-Chunk life, and how women’s authority persisted even as colonial pressures reshaped formal descent and governance systems.

• Paul Radin (1923). The Winnebago Tribe. Bureau of American Ethnology.
  ↳ Early ethnographic documentation of Ho-Chunk social structures, kinship, ceremony, and leadership, including maternal-line responsibilities and avuncular relationships.

• Milwaukee Public Museum. Ho-Chunk/ Winnebago cultural and kinship summaries.
  ↳ Notes on maternal-uncle relationships and kinship patterns often cited as evidence of earlier matrilineal systems.

• Indian Reorganization Act (1934).
  ↳ Federal legislation that imposed Western governance structures on Tribal Nations, disrupting clan-based, relational systems and reinforcing patriarchal leadership models.

• Boarding School Records & Missionary Accounts (1800s–early 1900s).
  ↳ Document the intentional reshaping of Indigenous gender roles, family structures, and authority through assimilationist education and Christian doctrine.

• Indigenous feminist and decolonial scholarship on internalized colonization, patriarchy, and gendered violence in Native communities.
  ↳ Highlights how colonial systems train both men and women to uphold harmful power structures as survival strategies.

A Note to Readers

Ho-Chunk knowledge has always lived in relationships, not just in books. Scholarship helps document what our people already know: that balance, accountability, and women’s leadership were foundational to our ways and that their disruption was neither natural nor inevitable.

Decolonization begins with remembering.

- Sunshine Thomas-Bear
Hisgexjį Horak