This paper discusses how biographies of American Indian leaders, situated within their own political cultures, provide a potential method for narrating histories of US-American Indian relations that work to explicitly reinscribe the indigenous sovereignty that the US settler state purported to subordinate. It illustrates this by focusing on the lives of Nawkaw Caramani and Hootschope, two men who led the Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) nation at a time when their territory and sovereignty faced severe threats from US imperial agents. In lives that spanned the decades of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Caramani and Hootschope participated in many of the well-known events of Great Lakes history, such as the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and various treaty councils with the US. But it is the way they negotiated the lesser-known conflicts and controversies that shed more light on how the Ho Chunks shored-up their sovereignty in the face of US aggression. Indeed, this paper argues that focusing in on the details of Caramani and Hootschope’s lives provides a method for illuminating – in ways rarely explicitly done in histories of indigenous nations – the governmental mechanisms of a fully sovereign nation as they faced an aggressive imperial power.