On the frigid morning of November 8, 1832, over four hundred forty Ho-Chunk (Hoocąk) family representatives gathered here at the Fort Winnebago Indian Agency. Indian agent John H. Kinzie carefully recorded their names, villages, and the sizes of their families in preparation for the annual payment for land which had been sold under pressure to the U.S. government. The census penned that day offers an unparalleled look into the people who have called this region home for millennia.

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Each name on the register represents a family who was at that very moment on the cusp of losing all that was familiar and known, for in only a year's time, seventy-five percent of these families would be driven from their homes. By the end of the decade, the faces of Wisconsin's cultural landscape had changed dramatically.

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The Historic Indian Agency House and the Ho-Chunk Nation Museum & Cultural Center have partnered to bring the cultural landscape of 1832 to life and to educate through the powerful material encapsulated in the 1832 annuity register. The result is an outdoor exhibit entitled, "A Landscape of Families," which now stands on the very site where the census was taken nearly two hundred years ago. It provides a final glimpse of Ho-Chunk families in enjoyment of their homeland prior to the start of forced expulsion from their villages.