Winnebago Tribe member Lance Morgan, founder of the $95 million tribe-run corporation Ho-Chunk, Inc, has been featured in Fortune magazine and dubbed by Inc. magazine as among “America’s 25 most fascinating entrepreneurs.” He’s also the force behind the design and development of a pedestrian-friendly, New Urbanist-style village on a reservation where 70% of people are overweight.

Morgan acknowledges that health issues such as diabetes and obesity disproportionately affect Native Americans and present one of his community’s greatest challenges. He also sees that this is a problem that can be solved. “We just need to be health-oriented,” says Morgan. “This is not some great giant innovation of genius. It simply just makes sense.”

Active Living (AL): Your first design plans for Ho-Chunk Village included strip malls with housing in the back. What changed your direction?

Lance Morgan (LM): I met Kate Kraft from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She recommended that I read a book, Suburban Nation, that talks about urban planning and that kind of stuff. And I thought that the dense environment really was helpful on the infrastructure-cost side, and that having a walking community—designing a community you can just walk around in—that’s pretty rare actually in the Midwest.
It was a great idea to deal with some of our health issues. So it went from ‘never heard of it,’ to ‘hey this is interesting,’ to ‘this makes a lot of sense.’

AL: What are the health problems on the reservation that made you interested in building an activity-friendly village?

LM: The number one issue is diabetes, and everything else relates to that almost. And diabetes, for the Native-American population, is really almost a genetic issue. We’re very predisposed to obesity and our problem with diabetes. It evolves from that.

AL: How might the village design compliment current efforts to get people more active?

LM: Really what we’d hoped it would do would change mindsets. What I don’t need is somebody to say ‘Boy, I’m going to have to get up and walk there’ and make the conscious decision. What we want it to be is integrated in so that you don’t even have to think about it. So it just really becomes part of your routine. I’ll just walk down there and get that—you know that kind of thing. The best answer would be that if it was seamless, you didn’t notice it.

AL: What current plans for the community look like?

LM: With The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s help, we hired a firm called HDR which designed the whole thing. They designed a system with a set of rules regarding street width, sidewalks, density of the community—those kinds of things—and we’re following them to probably 95 percent. So we’re setting up the whole community based on the original kind of New Urban design.

AL: What are some of its key features in terms of being an activity-friendly place?

LM: There’s a main street area, with kind of a town center. All the parking is tucked behind that and there’s off-street parking and things of that nature. But it’s very much a culturally oriented, walkable business kind of place. We only have two buildings, commercial buildings in now, but we have one under construction, another one that will start in a week, a third one that is due to start in the spring and a fourth in the summer. So we’ll have six major buildings on our main street hopefully by this time next year.

And behind the main street area are some multifamily type houses, townhouses with the apartments, and then you get back further, and you get into the single-family houses. But none of that is on the footprint—the footprint of the whole thing is 40 acres. So it’s not a very large project. But it’s got a hundred and some housing units in it.

AL: What are some of your goals for creating a walkable village?

LM: The tribe has a pretty well known wellness program, and the goal for that is education and activity. But not everybody is going to go to the gym. Some might change some of their eating habits to a degree. In our community, especially on a reservation, development kind of springs up by government grants; you have these kind of disjointed housing units off the highway somewhere. Even if you wanted to walk somewhere it’s almost impossible, and certainly it’s dangerous.

And what we thought we would do is set up a community where it was easy, and actually socially acceptable [to walk] and no one felt sorry for you. If you’re walking down the highway here now people will pick you up because that’s more our style, ‘Hey they need a ride.’ But if there’s a community where walking is the normal pattern, even if you just walked a mile extra a day, then I think that’s a lot for some people here.

AL: You mentioned an existing wellness program. How might the village design compliment current efforts to get people more active?

LM: The Winnebago tribe did it. Diabetes is a killer on our reservation. And the tribes have made a ten-year effort to fight it on every level. I’ve been to senior center exercise programs, there’s healthy lunches for the kids, there’s training programs for their mothers to cook, there’s exercise programs, youth activity programs—there’s everything—there’s Wednesday night basketball league for the guys, there’s marches, there’s walks, there’s native gardens, there’s—you name it we try to do it. There’s a buffalo program to create lean meat. I mean all of these kinds of things are across the board here.

AL: Your Web site mentions that the village’s pedestrian-friendly design reflects tribal values.

LM: From a cultural standpoint, it’s done in a couple of different ways. There are some overt things; we have Native American street names based on our clans and tribal leaders, we have lots of Native American design and cultural things built into it. We’ve got funding for an artist guild on the main street, and we’re moving our Internet Indian products company onto the main street—those kinds of things, so there’ll be those things that you’d expect to see in a touristy area.

Where it’s far more interesting I think, is in a traditional kind of Ho-Chunk village it was centered around a circle. The inside of the circle is really kind of where you did the commercial activity, the governmental activity, and where you were. And really if you look at the [current] design you see that circle in the middle. And we were densely packed kind of living. But where we lived was based upon function. Every clan had a role. And that clan’s role determined where it lived in that community. For example, the bear clan would be security, so they’d be on the edge. The eagle would be the leader, so they stayed in the middle in the commercial and governmental area. And if you look at our street signs, Eagle View Drive is right off the main circle where the government buildings are going. Bear Clan Street is where we’re hoping to put a police station. So there are all these little signals that somebody may never catch from the outside.

And if you look at if from a bigger picture, it’s a modern version. We tried to make a modern version of a traditional Ho-Chunk village. The circle, everything goes form there, the commercial activity in the middle, the government activity in the middle—we tried to base it somewhat on the same kinds of principles. It’s kind of hard to translate, but it’s there. There are more little signals in the community, but those are the main ones.

AL: How might this design strategy be applicable to other tribes?

LM: The density economic cost issue is pretty important; it’s controversial too. We only have so much money for infrastructure. So putting the houses closer together helps the New Urbanism, but also helps for getting us the sheer number of houses that we need, spreading the money out among a number of units.

That’s controversial because people’s goal here has more from living close together in a community network to getting away from everybody else. Because the communities that have developed on reservations are so unattractive, so unappealing, everybody wants to move away from the community and live out in the woods. We’ve developed this kind of mindset that we don’t want to have neighbors, because if you’re living in these kind of rural ghettos you don’t want to be there anyway.

The trick for us is to develop a community that has pride, that you don’t mind being close to somebody else—and you’re not so close—it’s a house more than a city, but it’s different for us. The trick for us is to create standards and create a neighborhood that is desirable enough and has the amenities to get people to want to live in that environment, to change their mindset. What’s been built in their head has been to get away from town.

AL: What has been the response in your community?

LM: I think people conceptually understand that it’s important. I think there’s some negativity about the houses being close together. I think that as the neighborhood evolves that that’ll be okay. Because it’ll be attractive enough. I don’t think there’s enough commercial activity yet to really get the people to walk yet, it’s really in the initial stages. I think that there’s some skepticism maybe, because of the nature of where we are [geographically]. But I think that if we keep pushing it, and create a built environment that is conducive to [walking], and educate people about some of the benefits of it, that it’ll happen. It will just happen. And I think we’re on a path towards that.

AL: Estimated completion is five years away. What’s your vision for 10 years down the road?

LM: We’ll make it better, and we’ll have an environment that’s unique unto itself. If we can integrate Ho-Chunk into the community even better, so that we can make the rest of the community walkable too, I think all of that stuff will matter. We just need to be health-oriented. You asked the question about what the community thinks? I’m not sure that they’re completely aware of these goals, they’re not thinking about it in those terms. But I think that it’s probably my job and some of the other leaders’ jobs to do some of this planning on behalf of the community. And take some steps. It’s a little bit paternalistic but I think it’s probably okay, because I think that it makes sense.

AL: I hear there are other tribes studying your success. Looks like you’re creating a model that others can use. What’s the reaction from other tribal leaders?

LM: What’s unique about this is how simple it really is to go big picture and develop a context. Everybody else is kind of at the micro level, the building level, the housing complex level—we need this kind of entrepreneur-building or we need this particular business. Nobody has stepped back really and said ‘Hey, let’s design a community where we really have a chance to make it our own.’

What’s typically done on this reservation is that you have money that becomes available and you want to build a building and we say, well, where should we stick it? And that’s why you have these random, disjointed communities on a reservations where walking really isn’t possible. So when people come and see this, just the fact that they come and see it makes it obvious to them that they should be doing the same thing. This is not some great giant innovation of genius; it simply just makes sense. So I think it’s easily transferable.

I suspect that we are the developing model and that things will emanate from us as we get more successful. We need another year or so into this project before we can really tout it. You know, Indians are very visual and once we’re up and running, it will be clear that this is the way to go and I think that those will emerge.

AL: How has this changed you?

LM: It’s interesting, everyone thinks I’m a nicer guy now. You know, this is a hobby of mine, this community. I run a corporation, you know, and my job isn’t really to design innovative communities, my job is to develop this company, create jobs and make the tribe self-sufficient.

I realized, to be honest, that we really had to develop our community in order to be successful. And the side effect of that is that it helped our company, and its helped make me much more aware. I’m a guy who believed in a kind of Reaganomics when I started this, you know, economy and it will trickle down, but I realize that we need more help than that. We have a nonprofit entity that helps us do this stuff too, and I said really what you do, everything you do, relates to the transition of our people from poverty to prosperity. There’s nothing that you do that isn’t tied into that in some way, whether it’s housing, education, entrepreneurial work, health activities. Everything you do is tied into that. And it really has helped me to evolve, to really think about this at a higher level. And to think that hey, we can make a difference, we can push some of these social agendas, we can still be a company. I think that it’s changed me for the positive. And, you know, I thought that I was fine before, but I’m really proud of the work that I’ve done here now.

AL: What advice would you give to others looking to create healthier communities?

LM: Think big but work small. You’ve got to really think big. And set some big goals. Then work like the dickens on the little things to make them happen. And everything else will gain momentum.

AL: Who are the key players who have helped you make this happen?

LM: Well to be honest, Kate Kraft at The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She birthed this project, she pushed it. I blew her off the first time I met her, I said who is this lady? She pushed it, she pushed the concept, she helped fund the design, you know we never would have done that—we never had the money to do that kind of thing. Really, if this project has a mother, it’s Kate Kraft. And you know, there’re lots of people here. I get all the credit here to be honest, but I took her vision, pushed it here, developed support amongst our team. But the vision was supplied by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and I’m not, you know, saying that to you guys at all. It’s the truth. Tell Kate Kraft that if this project has a mother it’s The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

A visionary tribe member on why he’s building a walkable village on the Winnebago Reservation
Read the Full Interview
Additional Links
Fact Sheet on Native American Health
Behind the Scenes