Development plans unveiled for Ho-Chunk garden at Riverside Park; garden may be ready next October

The International Friendship Gardens along La Crosse’s riverfront will add a proposed Ho-Chunk garden next year.

Planners have announced more details of the garden project which was approved by the city park board in October. A centerpiece of the garden will be a sculpture of a historic native resident named Betsy Thunder, according to Friendship Gardens president Chuck Hanson.

“She was a native healer,” Hanson tells reporters, “and not only did she help native peoples, but she helped white settlers as well, and what I was told is that they wanted to make a statement about community, friendship, and healing.”

Thunder was a local medicine woman of the late 1800s. Henry Greengrass is a director of youth services for the Ho-Chunk Nation, and he says the garden, and the Thunder sculpture, can help show how strong Ho-Chunk women are.

“There are times when we bring our youth down to the International Friendship Garden, and a lot of times where they ask, well, what about us?” said Greengrass. “Why aren’t we represented here?”

The Ho-Chunk garden is planned near the junction of the Mississippi and La Crosse Rivers, at the north end of the park. Nearly $300,000 has been raised already for the new garden, to be added to seven gardens now honoring countries where La Crosse has sister cities. The Ho-Chunk area could be dedicated by next October.