On a Thursday evening in October, a room inside a small brick library in Viroqua will fill with neighbors, and Annie Jones will begin with a circle. Not a diagram on a slide, exactly, though there will be that too — a Native American medicine wheel, the four directions laid out in yellow, red, black, and white. By the end of the hour, everyone in the room will have used it to sketch a personal action plan for engaging with Native American people and communities.
The talk is called "Indigenous Ways of Knowing about Wisconsin's Tribal Nations," and it is part of Badger Talks, the University of Wisconsin–Madison's campus-wide speaker bureau. It is free, it requires no registration, and it will not be available virtually. If you want it, you have to be in the room at 205 South Rock Avenue at 5:30 p.m. on October 8, 2026.
That insistence on the physical room is not incidental. Badger Talks exists to carry the university out into the state rather than waiting for the state to come to Madison. Its own description places it squarely in the tradition of the Wisconsin Idea — to extend the resources of the University to citizens of the state. The program connects more than 600 faculty and staff across hundreds of disciplines with schools, businesses, civic groups, and libraries, running over 400 engagements a year and reaching more than 20,000 people, at an average of about fifty per event.
Jones is a professor of organization development and a Tribal Nations Specialist with the UW–Madison Division of Extension, jointly appointed in the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology. She has worked with Extension for twenty-five years, in roles that have included associate dean, special assistant to the dean for strategic directions, and a county-based community development educator. Her hometowns, as her university profile lists them, are Oconto Falls and Kenosha. Her research centers on Indigenous methodologies — specifically the use of the medicine wheel and cultural teachings to enhance planning and evaluation — and on participatory, community-based action research.
That combination matters for what the evening actually is. This is not a lecture about tribes delivered at a tribe. It is a working session on a method: how do you plan, evaluate, and act in a way that is accountable to a worldview that organizes the world in circles rather than straight lines? The medicine wheel, as it is commonly taught, is a map of the four directions and the cycles of life — a framework for balance and for understanding one's place in a web of relations. Jones's research takes that framework seriously as a planning tool, not a metaphor.
What the audience will be introduced to is a set of governments. Wisconsin is home to eleven federally recognized tribal nations, each a sovereign entity that runs its own courts, police, schools, clinics, and natural-resource programs, and each of which sits in a government-to-government relationship with both Washington and Madison. A twelfth, the Brothertown Indian Nation, has long sought federal recognition. Most of the land that is now Wisconsin was ceded by treaty between 1825 and 1854, and several of those treaties reserved rights to hunt, fish, and gather on the ceded territory — rights that remain in force today and that continue to shape state law and politics.
The numbers behind that history are large and mostly invisible to newcomers. Roughly 144,572 Wisconsin residents identified as American Indian or Alaska Native alone or in combination in the 2020 census. Something like 4,000 effigy and burial mounds still stand across the state, out of perhaps 15,000 or more that were built. The Menominee Reservation covers 235,524 acres, most of it sustainably managed forest. The history reaches back past the pyramids — copper tools worked on this land thousands of years ago.
Viroqua itself sits in the Driftless Area, the unglaciated corner of southwestern Wisconsin where the Kickapoo River meanders through steep-walled valleys that the last ice sheets never flattened. The town became the Vernon County seat after a sharp rivalry with neighboring Springville, and its downtown is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In recent decades it has become known, somewhat improbably for a farm town of its size, as a hub of organic agriculture and small-scale food production. It is also, like the rest of the region, Ho-Chunk and broader Indigenous homeland long before it was a county seat.
The library hosting the talk has its own long history. McIntosh Memorial Library has served the Viroqua area since 1898. Its building began as a Carnegie library, constructed in 1905 with funds from Andrew Carnegie, and was later renamed for Margaret McIntosh, who gave the money to expand and remodel it in her father's memory. Today it holds more than 40,000 items, runs fifteen public internet computers, belongs to the Winding Rivers Library System, and produces a monthly radio show on Viroqua's WDRT. Its stated vision is to be "an inspiring beacon of lifelong learning." A free, no-registration evening about tribal sovereignty and Indigenous worldviews fits that mission without much stretching.
It is worth noting that this is not the first time Jones has brought this particular talk to Vernon County. She gave a version of it in Viroqua in September 2025, at the Vernon County Historical Society Museum, and she has delivered it elsewhere in the state — including a stop in Dodgeville. The talk travels because the request system travels: Wisconsin groups can generally request up to two Badger Talks per calendar year, and presenters typically volunteer their time while the university covers travel. The result is a quiet, recurring circuit of expertise moving between Madison and places like Viroqua.
What an attendee should expect is not a finished answer but a worksheet. The description is explicit: you leave with your own personal action plan, developed using the medicine wheel. That framing — that the point of learning about eleven sovereign nations is to change what you personally do next — is the unusual thing about the event. Most public programming about Native peoples stops at information. This one asks for a commitment, drawn in a circle, on a Thursday night, in a library that has been lending books to this valley since 1898.