What Is Up North Wisconsin

Lakes and summer cabins. Ole and Sven. Legends brought to life by industry and migration, settlement and extraction. And older, deeper relationships to the land - to Bad River and Good Water, to walleye, sturgeon and wolves. It's home for some and a getaway for others. But for all, Up North is shaped by the relationships they foster with the land and the waters and with the people who have lived there for 10 or 10,000 years.

To better understand what gives northern Wisconsin its meaning, we turned to experts in the College of Letters & Science - historians, ecologists, linguists and others whose work invites us to see the Northwoods in full. From Indigenous histories to linguistic encounters, from vacation homes to farmers markets, our experts offer insights into the stories and connections that define this place and why it matters.

Matt Villeneuve on how Up North Wisconsin is understood through Indigenous histories

Assistant Professor of U.S. History and Native American and Indigenous Studies

There's no one answer, but a good place to start is to recognize that Up North is a sacred direction. From here in Teejop, Up North is Anishinabewaki. Up North is the prophecy of the Anishinabeg. Up North is medicine, the stuff that sustains The People. Up North is wild rice, black ash, deer skin. Up North is treaty land, a paper homeland etched in birchbark and stripped of white pine. Up North is where wolves run, sturgeon run, people run - from mines, from relocation, from walleye wars. Up North is the Sandy Lake Tragedy and Chief Buffalo's Triumph. Bad River, Good Water, hard feelings, soft soil - that's Up North. Up North is a reservation; an allotment; Up North is a land held in trust, distrustfully. If Up North begins where the prairie meets trees, then Up North is also Menominee forest, Menominee county, Menominee nation; a reminder that this is a shared place so obvious it can be seen way up from outer space. Up North is Indian Country: Potawatomi sisters, Brothertown brothers, friends from Oneida - they're Up North, too. What's Up North? Ask the Native folks who call it a homeland, and they'll tell you: Up North is everything.

Gretchen Gerrish on the confluences of home and identity found on Up North waterways

Center for Limnology Research Scientist and Trout Lake Station Director

Water is part of the identity that people assign both to themselves and to the places that they visit in northern Wisconsin. When you ask someone where they're from or where their place is, it's more common to hear, "I'm just off Little Spider Lake." Not only does it identify where you're at in the landscape, but it often is a feel and an attachment to the water.

We see a huge range of interactions that people have with the lakes in the area. There are folks that harvest to feed their families, but then there's also a lot of recreational anglers that maybe have an occasional Friday night fish fry. There's also the speed boat and ski community, but there are also a lot of people engaging in silent sports: canoeing, paddle boarding or just floating and swimming.

Lakes in winter are also a big part of life. As the first couple of inches of ice appears on lakes, there's a race to get out and ski or ice skate. You'll watch the earliest fishing houses start coming out, and then the ice fishing village starts building into a winter community where folks are out there every day. Human interactions change seasonally with lakes just like the animals and plants in those habitats face evident seasonal transitions.

Many residents have intergenerational relationships with lakes in the area and others travel far to tour and visit northern Wisconsin waters. While people may have different relationships with the lakes, everybody values these spaces. They're unifying and a huge part of why people come here.

Joseph Salmons and Mirva Johnson on the languages that speak to and of the Northwoods

Lester W.J. "Smoky" Seifert Professor of Language Sciences; PhD Scandinavian Studies '25

We linguists want to know how non-linguists define regions, so we ask people to draw areas on a map of where they think people's English sounds different and label those areas. For Wisconsin, two areas are almost always identified: Milwaukee and the North. Some draw a bigger or a smaller "north," often labeled "Up North," "Northwoods," "Canadian," "Yooper," etc. While linguistic features don't have sharp boundaries, some things appear to be used more widely in the North, like "youse" to address more than one person, though we don't yet know how widespread that is.

Of course, Up North is hardly just about English. Indigenous languages like Ojibwe, Potawatomi and Menominee are used across the region today and learned by children, including in immersion schools. Many Scandinavians migrated to northern Wisconsin to farm the cut-over land starting in the mid-1800s, and they brought their languages. Finns, for example, were one of the largest immigrant groups in Wisconsin's northernmost counties. While fewer speak Finnish today, the language is still seen in street names and town signs and even used at community festivals. The ways that language becomes part of community events, signage and daily interactions contribute to how people connect language and place and develop a sense of what it means to sound like a local.

Anna Rue on the shared histories of recipes and ingredients found in the Northwoods

Director of the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures

I did not grow up in northern Wisconsin, so defining the culture and folklore of that area felt like a complicated assignment to me. That is, until I considered the story of sagamité and fish booya. Folklorist and UW-Madison professor emerita Janet Gilmore 's research on the history and contemporary variations of these boiled fish soups in the Great Lakes region traced the foodways tradition to several Native peoples living there, including Up North Wisconsin: the Ojibwe, Menominee, Odawa and Huron. Sagamité and fish booya are made in many ways, but at their heart they are simple fish soups with an abundance of vegetables, cooked outdoors for feasting occasions in large pots or kettles with differences based on social or local contexts. Few spice additions are made aside from salt and pepper, which made Indigenous fish soup traditions in the Great Lakes similar to those in the many ethnic groups who immigrated there: Czech, Scandinavian, French, Belgian, German, Bohemian, Métis and more. This rich ethnic mix of peoples contributed their own distinctive takes on this dish according to the traditions of their communities, creating local variations on a common food. Fish booya and sagamité dishes beautifully reflect the shared diversity and cultural depth of a part of the state that is often oversimplified. For many Wisconsinites, the term "Up North" communicates a unique multiculturalism that is enacted through everyday traditions that make the area, as folklorist and professor emeritus James Leary has coined, "a center of the world."

Alfonso Morales on farmers markets and the agricultural economies of northern Wisconsin

Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in the Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture

Farmers markets are found throughout Up North Wisconsin and serve multiple functions in their communities: entrepreneurship, a source of healthy food and a space to socialize kids. And while they are part of the community, they ultimately help activate that community because everybody is interested in food - locals, seasonal residents and tourists. To an external observer traveling between Wausau and the Upper Peninsula, superficially the markets will look the same - they'll all have tents and tables - but they're shaped by local vendors such as the Hmong farmers in Wausau as well as by the invisible rules and regulations that structure these spaces, from local rules to the state-wide networks that support these places.

Recently, especially in the past 15 years and increasingly post-COVID, Up North markets are seeing a heavier reliance on tourists. While local consumers may be purchasing products simply to put food on the table, tourists tend to be more well-off and conscious about quality and origin. We've seen an increase, for example, in vendors selling organic grains. We're also seeing many more people entering into local agriculture to meet this growing demand, which will continue to shape Up North markets and foster new connections to these economies.