The lake has two names. To the Ho-Chunk People, who have maintained a continuous relationship with this place for thousands of years, it is Tee Wakącąk — a sacred, holy space, a lake where spirits live. To the European settlers who arrived in the 19th century and lacked the cultural and linguistic context to understand what they were encountering, it became Devil’s Lake. The story of how one name replaced the other is a pattern repeated at sacred Native American sites across the country.
Tee Wakącąk: The Name That Came First
The Ho-Chunk name for the lake, Tee Wakącąk, resists simple translation. Naturalist and author Kenneth Lange described it as “a lake where spirits live” — not supernatural in the horror-story sense, but sacred in the way a cathedral is sacred: a place set apart, worthy of reverence, with deep spiritual meaning that goes well beyond its physical form.
The Ho-Chunk also name the land along the park’s southern boundary: Maa Wákąčąk, meaning “Sacred Earth.” The lake and the land surrounding it form a single, continuous sacred landscape, not a scenic attraction, but a place of profound cultural and spiritual significance to a people who have never left.
Ho-Chunk name — the lake
Tee Wakącąk
A sacred, holy space. A lake where spirits live. Used by the Ho-Chunk People for thousands of years.
Ho-Chunk name — the land
Maa Wákąčąk
“Sacred Earth.” The Ho-Chunk name for the land along the park’s southern boundary.
How “Devil’s Lake” Came to Be
When European explorers and settlers encountered Tee Wakącąk, they understood it as a place of spirits. In the European Christian tradition, spirits outside the church meant one thing. The Ho-Chunk name for a sacred lake became, in settler hands, Devil’s Lake.
This was not a misunderstanding. Across the country, the renaming of Indigenous sacred sites followed the same pattern: Native spiritual traditions were treated as primitive or threatening, Indigenous names were discarded, and European labels took their place. It was cultural erasure — not always deliberate on the part of individuals, but systematic in effect. Devils Tower in Wyoming, sacred to the Lakota as Mato Tipila (Bears Lodge), was renamed through mistranslation. Yellowstone is littered with the results: Devils Den, Devils Gate, Devils Stairway. At each site, a place of reverence became, on the map, a place of menace. The name stuck because the culture that applied it held the power to make it stick.
A national pattern
Researchers and historians have documented this naming pattern at sacred Indigenous sites across the American West. The National Parks Conservation Association’s Naming Matters and The Devil’s Role in National Park Place Names (National Parks Traveler) both examine how “Devil” names came to be attached to sites that Indigenous peoples held as sacred.
Two Names, One Place
Today the lake is known almost universally by its English name. But “Devil’s Lake” has never replaced Tee Wakącąk for the Ho-Chunk People. Both names exist simultaneously — one reflecting a 19th-century cultural misreading, one reflecting thousands of years of continuous presence and relationship with the land. Knowing both names, and what they mean, is part of understanding the full history of this place.
In the 1800s, alternate English names were proposed — “Lake of the Two Hills” and “Wild Beauty Lake” among them — but “Devil’s Lake” was already fixed in the popular imagination and on the maps. The alternate names never took hold.
Source: Lange, Kenneth L. (1989). Ancient Rocks and Vanished Glaciers. Worzalla Publishing Company, Stevens Point, Wisconsin. Ho-Chunk place names shared with community context. External references: NPCA — Naming Matters • National Parks Traveler — The Devil’s Role in National Park Place Names