Mediating indigeneity: Ho-Chunk ‘Indian News’ as a critique of the legacies of settler colonialism

Abstract

This article examines the legacies of settler colonialism discussed in the writings of Frisk Cloud, one of four Ho-Chunk men who published Indian News columns – a relatively early project of Indigenous media activism – in local newspapers in Wisconsin during the 1930s and 1940s. The first section of the article examines the origins of Frisk Cloud's column in 1939, when he was recruited to write ‘Indian News’ for his local newspaper and thus took up a ‘vernacular’ mode of Indigenous writing already popular in the region. The column offered him a public voice that he used to deliver critical commentary on key issues impacting Ho-Chunk lives. The second and longer section focuses on the content of the articles Cloud published over the next three years, showing how he used this forum to tell his readers about the experience of settler colonialism with which his community struggled and contextualized these struggles within a long history of indigenous dispossession in the area. Through his Indian News column, Frisk Cloud created a portrait of the human and ecological catastrophe produced by White settlement, making visible an alternative perspective on settler colonialism rooted in everyday indigenous experience. His career offers an historical perspective on the emergent nature and the critical intellectual agenda of recent indigenous media projects.