Folk Literature as an Ethnohistorical Device: The Interrelationships between Winnebago Folk Tales and Wisconsin Habitat

Abstract

What is the interplay between a people's folk literature and the natural environment in which they live? Can a people's folk literature be utilized to place these people in time and space? This article analyzes the interrelationships between Winnebago folk tales and Winnebago Wisconsin habitat, concluding that the Winnebago were residents of Wisconsin as early as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Furthermore, such analysis indicates that the strong correlations between oral history traditions and historical records make the study of folk literature invaluable aid in ethnohistorical reconstructions. For any given culture, folk literature offers many insights into the people's cosmology, religion, customs, and lifestyle. This is especially true of a people whose principal means of transmitting information has been through oral traditions. Their folk literature abounds with cultural details. If one studies this folk literature in depth, one also realizes that many important components of the people's natural environment appear in their folk tales. From ethnohistorical perspective, two questions immediately emerge: How close is the correlation between folk narrative and the actual natural environment in which a people lived? Is the study of a people's folk literature a valid tool for locating these people in time and space vis-a-vis their natural environment? These are intriguing questions especially when faced with problems of archaeological and historical reconstructions of a people in time and space. Such problems exist for the Winnebago, a Native American people who presently reside in Wisconsin and Nebraska. Archaeological work suggests that the Winnebago moved northward into Wisconsin from the Mississippi River valley (sometime after A.D. 1000), emerging as a part of the Upper Mississippian Oneota archaeological tradition in the late protohistoric period (Griffin 1960; Peske 1966). Ethnographical data also point towards this interpretation: Winnebago informants have suggested their people come from the south, probably entering Wisconsin from the southeast (Radin 1970: Chapter 1). A southern origin for the Winnebago is further supported by linguistical studies which classify the Winnebago language as Siouan. It is usually included as part of the Chiwere-Winnebago subgrouping, containing Winnebago and Chiwere (Iowa, Oto, and extinct Missouri) (Wolff 1950) or closely related to Chiwere with the realization that there is an obvious closeness between Winnebago and Iowa-Oto (Rood 1979: 236, 288). This article explores the nature and depth of the interrelationships between the folk literature of the Winnebago and the natural environment for the historic Winnebago in attempt to assess the duration of time spent by the Winnebago in their historic Wisconsin homelands. Such assessment entails documenting the historic Winnebago in time and space; examining Winnebago