The Ho-Chunk, also known as Winnebago, are a Siouan-speaking tribe of Native Americans, native to the present-day states of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and parts of Iowa and Illinois.

Today the two federally recognized Ho-Chunk tribes, the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin and Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, have territory primarily within the states included in their names.

Since the late twentieth century, the two tribal councils have authorized the development of gambling casinos to generate revenues to support economic development, infrastructure, health care and education.

The Ho-Chunk Nation is working on language restoration and has developed a Hocąk-language "app" for the iPhone.

Since 1988, it has pursued a claim to the Badger Army Ammunition Plant as traditional territory; it has since been declared surplus, but the Ho-Chunk have struggled with changes in policy at the Department of the Interior.

It supports their claim in 1998 but in 2011 refuses to accept the property on their behalf.To build on its revenues from casinos, the Winnebago Tribe created an economic development corporation in 1994; it has grown and received awards as a model of entrepreneurial small business.

With a number of subsidiaries, it employs more than fourteen hundred people.

It has also contributed to housing construction on the reservation.

Like more than 60% of federally recognized tribes, it has legalized alcohol sales on the reservation in order to retain revenues that used to go to the state in retail taxes.

The Ho-Chunk are the dominant tribe in their territory in the 16th century, with a population estimated at several thousand.

Their traditions hold that they have always lived in the area.

Ethnologists have speculated that, like some other Siouan peoples, the Ho-Chunk originated along the East Coast and migrated west in ancient times.

Perrot wrote that the names given to them by neighboring Algonquian peoples may have referred to their origin near a salt water sea.The Ho-Chunk suffer severe population losses in the seventeenth century, to a low of perhaps as few as five hundred.

This has been attributed to the loss of hundreds of warriors in a lake storm, epidemics of infectious disease, and competition for resources from migrating Algonquian tribes.

By the early 1800s, their population has increased to twenty-nine hundred, but they suffer further losses in the smallpox epidemic of 1836.

In 1990 they number seven thousand current estimates of total population of the two tribes are twelve thousand.