The Ho-chunk ("People of the Big Voice") moved from the southeast to the area near Green Bay, Wisconsin 1,000 years ago. The Algonquians called them “Winnebago" ("People of the Dirty Water").
Cultural anthropologist and folklorist Paul Radin began collecting Ho-chunk stories in the early 1900s and published The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology in 1956. (34) The stories he recorded came to him second hand: an “older individual” told them (in the Ho-chungra language) to Sam Blowsnake, who wrote them down in Ho-Chunk. Then "Radin, Blowsnake, and another [Ho-Chungra] man, Oliver Lamere, collaborated on the translation in ot Enlgish, which Radin . . published in literate prose" (35).
Student comment:
The Trickster is probably the strangest thing I have ever read. From the excerpts alone, I think the Trickster’s character and behavior might symbolize the white man taking a bite out of Native Americans, whom the more natural bulb symbolizes. The story says, “Moreover, the excrement began to come up to him,” which I take as meaning that white people have built an empire on treating others like, for lack of a better term, shit (27). At the end of 25, the story says, “If the trees had not spoken to him he certainly would have died” (27). If the Trickster had not returned to nature (Native Americans) for help, he would have died—much like the relationship between Pilgrims and Native Americans.
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