May 18, 2025 at 10:45am live-streamed from the Great Hall

Click: Dr. Patrick Jung PhD to present:
The Native People of Milwaukee: History, Culture, and Spiritual Beliefs

Sunday, May 18, 2025

Dr Patrick Jung PhD

The history of the Native people of Milwaukee is largely unwritten because Milwaukee was not along the great artery of the Fox-Wisconsin Waterway, which, even before the coming of Europeans, had been an important corridor for Native people traveling between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. Unlike Native population centers such as Green Bay and Prairie du Chien, Milwaukee had a smaller Native population for this reason. Nevertheless, Milwaukee attracted Native people who were drawn by the rich soil that produced abundant corn and by the many wetlands that hosted a rich array of wildlife. The population of Native people in Milwaukee by 1830 (shortly before their removal) was about two thousand people organized into at least five discrete village communities. Native people in Milwaukee believed in manitous, or spirit beings that lived on the same plane of reality as human beings. They also believed that a human consisted of three distinct entities: the corporeal body (wiyo), the soul (udjitchog) that traveled to the land of the spirits in the West after death, and the shadow (udjibbom) that roams the earth after death but generally stays close to the grave.

Patrick J. Jung received his doctoral degree in American history from MarquetteUniversity in 1997 and has taught history and cultural anthropology at the Milwaukee School of Engineering in Milwaukee, Wisconsin since 2003. He has written several books and articles on the Native people of the western Great Lakes, including The Black Hawk War of 1832 (2007), The Nicolet Corrigenda: New France Revisited (2009)with the late Nancy Oestreich Lurie, and The Misunderstood Mission of Jean Nicolet: Understanding the1634 Journey (2018).

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