Ho-Chunk President Jon Greendeer (center with scissors) cuts the ribbon on the official opening day for Ho-Chunk Gaming Beloit.
Ho-Chunk President Jon Greendeer waves the scissors after cutting the ribbon to officially open Ho-Chunk Gaming Beloit.
The Ho-Chunk Nation held a mini pow wow at its new Beloit property on Friday. The casino officially opened to the public at 2 p.m.
The public at large waits in line to enter Ho-Chunk Gaming Beloit on Friday. The Ho-Chunk Nation officially opened at 2 p.m. About 15 minutes before, the line to enter from the Interstate-90 stretched around the parking area and into the parking garage.
Ho-Chunk President Jon Greendeer (center with scissors) cuts the ribbon on the official opening day for Ho-Chunk Gaming Beloit.
Ho-Chunk President Jon Greendeer waves the scissors after cutting the ribbon to officially open Ho-Chunk Gaming Beloit.
The Ho-Chunk Nation held a mini pow wow at its new Beloit property on Friday. The casino officially opened to the public at 2 p.m.
The public at large waits in line to enter Ho-Chunk Gaming Beloit on Friday. The Ho-Chunk Nation officially opened at 2 p.m. About 15 minutes before, the line to enter from the Interstate-90 stretched around the parking area and into the parking garage.
BELOIT — In 2012, about one year into his first term as president of the Ho-Chunk Nation, Jon Greendeer said he made a special trip to Beloit to take a close look at the land that the City of Beloit and Ho-Chunk National leadership hoped would someday become Ho-Chunk Gaming Beloit
He parked across Colley Road in the Springbrook Village manufactured home village and stared at the three-foot high grass growing in what was no longer a farmable field, and he noticed a path.
“I was curious to see where it led and I found a fully functioning meth lab in the middle of the field,” Greendeer said.
On Friday, Greendeer’s speech was delivered in the middle of a ceremony celebrating the opening of the state’s second largest casino — with a convention center and 312-room hotel to follow in 2027. The price tag for all that construction is expected to be at least $705 million, the largest single site construction project in City of Beloit history.
And Greendeer almost didn’t live to see it through. About a third of the way into the speech, Greendeer let the crowd know that he survived a heart attack in June 2025.
“I have a titanium chest now,” Greendeer said, showing off the surgical scar in his chest after the talk, but before officially letting the general public into the casino at 2 p.m. “I go climbing in the mountains every two months. I’m the perfect example of that one person who runs four or five miles a day and has a heart attack and doesn’t know why. That was me, but it’s all heredity and a lot of stress.”
Greendeer served one term as president and decided not to run for re-election in 2015 to spend more time with his family. It’s not as if the Beloit casino idea languished when he was out of power. In 2021, Gov. Tony Evers finally approved the facility and in 2022 the casino idea cleared a federal hurdle when the Bureau of Indian Affairs approved placing 33 acres of land in trust in Beloit for the project. But Greendeer’s predecessor wasn’t as bullish on Beloit. In June of 2023, Marlon White Eagle wrote in a blog post to IndianGaming.com that “our Beloit casino project is important, but it should not be at the expense of our other enterprises.”
When Greendeer won a write-in campaign to replace White Eagle in mid-2023, he threw his considerable energy behind getting the Beloit project off the drawing board. Friday, it opened with nearly 800 new employees, already making it one of the city’s five largest employers.
“There were lots of points since then where a reasonable thinker would have thought that (this casino was never going to happen),” Greendeer said. “But Ho-Chunk people … we are tenacious and if I didn’t bring that kind of energy to our nation, they wouldn’t have me where I am. We were going to do right by Beloit, so there was never a deviation from that.”
The casino opening seemed to attract a lot of attention in the area. The Beloit Police Department posted on its Facebook page at 2:45 p.m. Friday that parking was limited on the Ho-Chunk Casino site and traffic backups were forming in the area.
The Ho-Chunk Nation hosted some sneak preview days last week leading up to the grand opening on Friday, including a Beloit Day on Thursday when anyone who lived in or worked in Beloit was welcomed to get a look inside the casino and make a few wagers.
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