Curated developments to fold into a future revision. Each item is tagged
so a third-edition rewrite can pull related brief coverage automatically.
Stories from The Weekly Brief tagged with any of this chapter's themes,
most recent first. Each new issue's tagged stories appear here automatically.
Issue 008 · June 28, 2026
This week's ICT Newscast packages three significant Indian Country developments: a Ho-Chunk land return, a boarding school healing initiative, and a tribal microgrid project. The Ho-Chunk land return is the Wisconsin thread worth pulling, and the microgrid story points toward the energy-sovereignty work tribes are doing independent of federal infrastructure programs. The newscast format is a useful index when the underlying stories haven't yet been reported individually.
Issue 008 · June 28, 2026
The nationwide tour to document first-hand accounts from Indian boarding school survivors is wrapping up in Tulsa, marking the close of a multi-year effort to build an archive of living memory before it is lost. ICT's report is brief, but the underlying project is significant: survivor testimony is the evidentiary foundation for any future federal reckoning, and its preservation is exactly the kind of truth-and-healing work that the boarding school investigation has called for. The conclusion of the tour is a milestone worth noting in any updated chapter treatment of the boarding school era.
Issue 006 · June 14, 2026
Governor Evers signed Assembly Bill 98 into law as 2025 Wisconsin Act 222, guaranteeing that Native students who are tribal members, descendants, or eligible for membership may wear traditional regalia at graduation ceremonies across the state. The Oneida Nation's Kalihwisaks covered the milestone with the kind of community-level specificity that mainstream outlets missed. This is the sort of policy win that took years of advocacy by tribal education directors and families who were told, year after year, that a mortarboard was the only acceptable headgear. It belongs in the record alongside Act 31 as a marker of how Wisconsin's relationship with its Native nations continues to evolve.
Issue 006 · June 14, 2026
ICT's report on tribal leaders calling for sovereignty as federal support wavers is a useful document of the current moment: the federal government has legal obligations to tribal nations that do not disappear when a new administration decides to cut agency budgets. The piece is careful to distinguish between political discretion and treaty-based legal duty, which is the distinction that matters. Worth keeping as a reference point as the 2027 budget cycle approaches.
Issue 006 · June 14, 2026
Deb Haaland, Laguna Pueblo, secured the Democratic nomination for governor of New Mexico on Tuesday, becoming the first Native woman to win a major-party gubernatorial primary in the state. Native Sun News covered the win with the weight it deserves. Haaland's trajectory from the first Native woman confirmed as a cabinet secretary to a gubernatorial candidate represents a shift in what Native political leadership looks like at the highest levels, and it is a story that will matter to every Wisconsin nation watching how sovereignty translates into electoral power.
Issue 006 · June 14, 2026
The second installment of Buffalo Fire's press freedom series looks at Native radio stations as community infrastructure, examining how they can build editorial independence, sustain themselves financially, and serve as information anchors for communities that mainstream media has long ignored or misrepresented. The piece pairs institutional analysis with specific examples of stations that have found ways to stay independent, and it connects to the broader question of what a healthy Native media ecosystem looks like in a moment when federal support for public media is under pressure. Buffalo Fire is doing some of the most careful thinking in Indigenous journalism right now, and this series is worth reading in full. For Patty, whose Tribal Youth Media work has always been premised on the idea that Native communities need to tell their own stories, the question of who controls the infrastructure for that storytelling is not academic.
Issue 006 · June 14, 2026
A court decision clearing the way for a foreign mining company to take land sacred to Apache and other Southwest tribes has drawn a pointed analysis from Native News Online: the U.S. remains out of step with international Indigenous rights standards, including the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, when it comes to protecting sacred sites. The Oak Flat case is not a Wisconsin story, but the legal gap it exposes is directly relevant to every Wisconsin nation that has fought to protect ceremonial and culturally significant lands from extractive industry. The source is Native News Online, which Patty has found inconsistent, but this particular piece cites specific legal comparisons worth tracking.
Issue 006 · June 14, 2026
The Department of Defense reduced its list of recognized religion codes used by military chaplains from more than 200 to just 31, eliminating Native American religion as a named category and folding it into a generic 'other' designation. ICT broke this story, and it deserves to be read by anyone who has watched a Native veteran try to access ceremony in a VA facility or on a military installation. For Patty, whose grandfather Edward DeNomie served in the 32nd Red Arrow Division and whose documentary Way of the Warrior traced the ogichidaa tradition across generations, this is not an abstraction. It is a policy decision that tells Native service members their spiritual practices are not worth naming.
Issue 005 · June 7, 2026
The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition is celebrating a Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling affirming that the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act applies to the case before it, a decision the coalition calls historic. The ruling matters because it extends NAGPRA's reach into contexts that institutions had argued were outside its scope, and it arrives as the Army prepares its ninth year of disinterment operations at Carlisle Barracks (candidate 233). Together these two items mark a week of real, if incremental, movement on boarding school accountability.
Issue 005 · June 7, 2026
The U.S. Army will conduct its ninth consecutive year of disinterment operations at Carlisle Barracks beginning September 1, 2026, actively working to reunite Native families with children who died at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. The Army says it is in contact with families and nations to coordinate returns. Nine years of this work means the process is now institutionalized enough to have its own calendar, which is both a measure of progress and a measure of how many children were buried there to begin with.
Issue 004 · May 31, 2026
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit confirmed that NAGPRA applies to children's remains held by the U.S. Army at Carlisle Barracks, ruling in favor of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska's effort to repatriate two boys who died at the school. NARF, which litigated the case, calls it a victory for every tribe whose children were buried far from home. The ruling has direct implications for Wisconsin nations — the Menominee, Ho-Chunk, Oneida, and Ojibwe bands all had children taken to federal boarding schools, and Carlisle held some of them.
Issue 002 · May 17, 2026
ICT's coverage of the Fourth Circuit NAGPRA ruling centers the Winnebago Tribe's own voice, quoting tribal members on what it means to finally have a legal path to bring their children home from Carlisle. The ruling confirms that the Army cannot hide behind procedural arguments to avoid its repatriation obligations under federal law. Pair with the NARF account above for the full picture.
Issue 001 · May 10, 2026
Wisconsin's tribal nations and commercial gambling interests are at odds over a state legislative proposal to legalize online sports betting, with tribes arguing the bill would undercut the exclusivity provisions in their gaming compacts. WPR has been tracking this story, which sits at the intersection of sovereignty, economic development, and the state's long-standing compact relationships with tribal governments. The compacts were hard-won; any erosion of exclusivity has real fiscal consequences for nations whose governmental programs depend on gaming revenue.
Issue 001 · May 10, 2026
In a striking win for Indigenous land protection, Pete Lien and Sons formally withdrew its permit to drill for graphite near Pe' Sla, the high mountain meadow at the heart of Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota creation stories, after a week of direct action occupation, a federal temporary restraining order, and sustained legal pressure from NDN Collective and allied tribes. NDN Collective's own announcement is the primary source here, and it is worth reading in full: the organization names the specific combination of forces that produced the outcome, which is a model worth studying. The win is real, though the underlying permit framework that allowed the drilling application in the first place remains unchanged.
Issue 001 · May 10, 2026
Native News Online reports that the controversial immigration detention facility built in the Florida Everglades, which critics dubbed 'Alligator Alcatraz,' may be shut down following sustained resistance from the Miccosukee Tribe and allied environmental and Native advocates who argued the facility threatened both the ecosystem and tribal sacred sites. The story is a useful reminder that tribal resistance to federal land use decisions takes many forms and that the Miccosukee have been among the most consistent defenders of Everglades ecology for generations.
Issue 001 · May 10, 2026
Grist's Indigenous coverage this week frames the Pe' Sla victory within the larger pattern of Indigenous-led environmental resistance, connecting the Black Hills win to a documented record of Native communities halting or delaying extractive projects. Tristan Ahtone's team at Grist has been building this beat carefully, and the framing here is consistent with the research showing that Indigenous land protection produces measurable climate outcomes. The story is worth reading alongside the NDN Collective primary source.
Issue 001 · May 10, 2026
Native Sun News Today reports that Faith Spotted Eagle, one of the most respected culture carriers in the Oceti Sakowin and a longtime leader in the movement against the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines, will receive an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from South Dakota State University at its 140th commencement. The recognition is overdue and meaningful. Spotted Eagle has spent decades doing the patient, unglamorous work of cultural transmission and political resistance that honorary degrees are supposed to honor.
Issue 001 · May 10, 2026
ICT's account of the Pe' Sla victory is the single best long read of the week, not because it is the longest piece but because it synthesizes the full arc of the fight: the U.S. Forest Service permit issued over tribal objections, the NDN Collective lawsuit alleging NEPA and Religious Freedom Restoration Act violations, the direct-action occupation of the site, the federal temporary restraining order, and finally the withdrawal of the permit by Pete Lien and Sons. ICT names the specific combination of legal, ceremonial, and physical presence that produced the outcome, and it does so with the kind of sourcing that privileges tribal voices over agency statements. Read this alongside the NDN Collective primary release (candidate 7) and the Native Sun News coverage (candidate 132) for the full picture. The story matters beyond its immediate facts: it is a working model of how Indigenous communities can use multiple pressure points simultaneously, and it arrives in a week when Bad River is doing exactly that on Line 5.
Background
· 2025
· beloit-daily-news
After a 1992 federal designation and decades of compact negotiation, the Ho-Chunk Nation's $705 million Beloit casino and conference center is scheduled to open September 2026 on the southeast corner of Willowbrook and Colley roads. The 240,000-square-foot gaming floor will hold 1,500 machines and the hotel will start at 200 rooms. The state compact directs 5 percent of gross gaming revenue to Wisconsin, 1.4 percent to Beloit, and 0.6 percent to Rock County.
Background
· 2023
· madison365
Jon 'White Feather' Greendeer was first elected President of the Ho-Chunk Nation in 2011. In 2023 the Ho-Chunk general electorate returned him to office, this time as a write-in candidate who took 26.1 percent of the primary vote, ousting incumbent Marlon WhiteEagle whose pandemic-era term was marked by gaming shutdowns and budget battles. Greendeer's renewed agenda has centered on the Food is Our Medicine campaign and the Beloit casino build.
Background
· 2023
· WPR Native American coverage
Ho-Chunk tribal leaders now estimate fewer than 40 native Hoocąk speakers remain. The Hoocąk Academy, a Language Apprentice Program training new teachers, the EeCoonį early childhood program, and the Hoocąk Woiperes e-learning platform run out of Black River Falls, anchored by elders and teenagers recording about 1,000 phrases for the app. Hoocąk has been taught in Baraboo, Black River Falls, Tomah, Wisconsin Dells, and Wisconsin Rapids high schools since 2001.
Background
· 2023
· project-muse
Stephen Kantrowitz's 2023 book Citizens of a Stolen Land: A Ho-Chunk History of the Nineteenth-Century United States rewrites the Ho-Chunk into the foreground of the removal-era story Patty's chapter sketches. The book tracks the Wisconsin remnant's refusal to relocate, the splitting of the tribe between Wisconsin and Nebraska, and the legal and political mechanics by which the United States manufactured the Ho-Chunk's invisibility. It is the most significant new scholarship on the Ho-Chunk since Patty's first edition.
Background
· 2022
· hochunk-renaissance
More than 150 years after the 1837 treaty split the tribe into a Nebraska-removed faction and a Wisconsin remnant, the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin and the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska continue a long arc of cultural reconnection. Joint language work between Wisconsin's Hocąk Wazija Haci and the Nebraska-based HoChunk Renaissance has produced shared curriculum and elder recordings, and members of both nations gather across the Missouri River for ceremonial and ceremonial seasons their ancestors traveled by night under cover of darkness.
Background
· 2020
· wisconsin-academy
William Nąąwącekǧize Quackenbush (Deer Clan) serves as the Ho-Chunk Nation's Tribal Historic Preservation Officer and Cultural Resources Division Manager. He has guided interpretation at Effigy Mounds National Monument including the Sny Magill Mound Group and Kingsley Bend, taught mound stewardship through the Wisconsin Academy and the Wisconsin Archeological Society, and is the most consulted Indigenous voice on Wisconsin mound projects.
Background
· 2019
· city-of-madison
In October 2019 the Madison Board of Park Commissioners approved the city's first Burial Mounds Policy, developed with the Ho-Chunk Nation and the Wisconsin Historical Society. The policy governs management of mound groups on city land including the Forest Hill Cemetery group, seven precontact effigy mounds dating from 700 to 1200 CE that are listed on the National Register and the City of Madison's landmarks register. The policy sets the template Bill Quackenbush has built on across Dane County since.
Background
· 2016
· in-these-times
In 2015 the Ho-Chunk Nation's General Council adopted a resolution to amend the tribal constitution to recognize the rights of nature, becoming the first U.S. tribal nation to take that step. By 2020 a working group was integrating the resolution into the constitution, laws, regulations, and tribal processes. The General Council is the fourth branch of Ho-Chunk government, the body in which all enrolled members vote directly.
Background
· 2016
· nps
In July 2016, longtime Effigy Mounds superintendent Thomas Munson was sentenced for the 1990 theft of bones of 41 Native Americans from the monument's collection, a theft he carried out to evade NAGPRA. A 2015 Park Service report also found that Superintendent Phyllis Ewing oversaw more than $3 million in illegal construction that desecrated archaeological resources during her 1999-2009 tenure. The reckoning reset NPS tribal consultation across the Upper Midwest and brought the Ho-Chunk, Iowa, and Upper Sioux into active co-stewardship at the site.
Background
· 2014
· wisconsin-academy
Patty followed Indian Nations of Wisconsin with Native People of Wisconsin (2003), a social studies text for younger readers, and Seventh Generation Earth Ethics (2014), profiles of twelve Indigenous Wisconsin stewards including Joe Rose, Dot Davids, and Walter Bresette, which won the Midwest Book Award for Culture. Her PBS documentary Way of the Warrior aired nationally in 2007 and 2011, drawing on her grandfather Edward DeNomie's WWI service with the 32nd Red Arrow Division. The decade between INW editions produced the body of work the third edition now sits alongside.
Background
· 2025
· poynter
On April 22, 2025, Mary Annette Pember of Red Cliff released Medicine River with Pantheon, weaving her mother Bernice Rabideaux's experience as a five-year-old at St. Mary's Catholic Indian Boarding School in Odanah with archival research on the federal boarding school system. St. Mary's operated on the Bad River reservation from 1883 to 1969 under the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, who have since begun a Truth and Healing process that included a repatriation ceremony with the Bad River Tribe.
Background
· 2021
· history-com
Public Law 959, signed in August 1956, pushed thousands of reservation-rooted Native people to Milwaukee, Chicago, Minneapolis, and other Midwestern cities under federal vocational training and job-placement programs. The relocation program ran through the 1970s and is the proximate cause of Milwaukee's urban Native population growth, the founding of the Indian Council of the Elderly, and ultimately the AIM takeover that birthed the Indian Community School. The federal Indian Boarding School Initiative under Secretary Deb Haaland (2021-) has named relocation as a kindred coercive policy in its forthcoming report; urban Indian families today carry both legacies in the same generations.
Background
· 2020
· lco-tribe
Edward Benton-Banai walked on November 30, 2020, at age 89 in Hayward, Wisconsin. A Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe of the Fish Clan, Grand Chief of the Three Fires Midewiwin Lodge since 1986, and a co-founder of the American Indian Movement, he wrote The Mishomis Book in 1979 from the Teachings of the Seven Grandfathers. The book remains the most widely used Anishinaabe primer in North America.
Background
· 2024
· northwestern-history
Doug Kiel (Oneida Nation, Northwestern University) is the author of Unsettling Territory: The Resurgence of the Oneida Nation in the Face of Settler Backlash, published by Yale University Press. He co-curated the Field Museum's permanent Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories exhibit (2022) and the Newberry Library's Indigenous Chicago (2024-2025), and has served as expert witness in federal appeals over Oneida land rights. His work is the contemporary scholarly companion to Patty's chapter.
Background
· 2024
· stockbridge-updates
Shannon Holsey has served multiple terms as Tribal President of the Stockbridge-Munsee Community. Her tenure has spanned a long compact dispute with the State of Wisconsin over revenue payments and the Ho-Chunk Beloit casino proposal, a 2019 federal court loss on the rival casino challenge, and ongoing leadership at the National Congress of American Indians, where she has served as a vice president.
Background
· 2023
· tribal-college-journal
On December 22, 2023, the Menominee Indian Tribe marked 50 years since President Richard Nixon signed the Menominee Restoration Act, reversing the 1961 termination that had stripped federal recognition, dissolved the reservation into Menominee County, and pushed the people into poverty. The restoration was won by DRUMS, the Determination of Rights and Unity for Menominee Stockholders, founded by Jim White and Ada Deer. The College of Menominee Nation marked the date with a year of programming.
Background
· 2023
· potawatomi-trail-of-death-association
The Potawatomi Trail of Death of 1838, the forced removal of 859 Potawatomi from Indiana to Kansas during which more than 40 people, mostly children, died, has been commemorated by a Potawatomi-led caravan retracing the 660-mile route every five years since 1988. Eighty historical markers placed by Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, 4-H clubs, and Potawatomi families now mark campsites every 15 to 20 miles across 26 counties in Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas. Wisconsin Potawatomi descendants participate annually.
Background
· 2023
· Wisconsin Examiner
Ada Elizabeth Deer of the Menominee Indian Tribe died August 15, 2023, in Fitchburg, Wisconsin, at age 88. The first Menominee to graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1957), the first Native American to earn a Master's in social work from Columbia, the first woman to chair the Menominee tribe after restoration, and the first woman to head the Bureau of Indian Affairs (1993-1997), Deer was the throughline of every Menominee chapter the third edition would build on.
Background
· 2023
· oneida-nation
Tehassi Hill has served as chairman of the Oneida Nation since August 2017 and is now in his third three-year term. He represents the nation on the Great Lakes Inter-Tribal Council board, sits on Wisconsin's Natural Resources Damage Trustee Council, and is the nation's designee to the EPA's Regional Tribal Operating Committee. His leadership has centered on land buy-back, health care, and natural resources protection.
Background
· 2023
· wisconsin-state-farmer
Bodwéwadmi Ktëgan, the 126-acre Forest County Potawatomi farm near Laona, was established in 2017 to produce a natural and sustainable source of vegetables, fruits, greens, fish, and animal proteins for tribal members. The operation includes aquaponic greenhouses by Ceres (with a second expanded greenhouse online in August 2025) as well as cattle, chicken, tilapia, bison, honey, and maple syrup, all produced without chemical fertilizer or pesticides. A $200,000 USDA grant supports food-box distribution to tribal members beyond elders.
Background
· 2023
· pbs-wisconsin
After more than three decades of treaty-driven land reacquisition, the Oneida Nation now controls a working portfolio that includes Tsyunhehkwa farm, the Oneida Apple Orchard with roughly 4,500 trees, a bison and Black Angus operation, and restored prairie and wetland sites where poor cropland once stood. Chairman Tehassi Hill has framed the buy-back as a generational obligation: restoring not just acreage but ecosystem function.
Background
· 2023
· new-england-public-media
In January 2023 a new Massachusetts law authorized the town of Stockbridge to transfer eighteenth-century documents to the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohicans of Wisconsin, including a 1780 document signed by tribal leaders describing the tribe's efforts to regain control of land distribution. The transfer joined an ongoing repatriation of objects from the Berkshire Museum and other Massachusetts institutions and built on Rose Miron's scholarship of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation Historical Committee's decades of archival activism.
Background
· 2022
· earthjustice
In June 2022, the Michigan State Historic Preservation Review Board voted unanimously to support the nomination of Anaem Omot, the Menominee cultural landscape bisected by the Menominee River between Wisconsin and Michigan, to the National Register of Historic Places. The district includes burial mounds, garden beds, and dance rings. The vote followed years of advocacy by Menominee historians, scientists, and tribal leaders, and arrived alongside the tribe's defeat of the Back Forty open-pit mine on the same river.
Background
· 2022
· oneida-nation
Across the past decade the Oneida Nation has restored more than 300 acres of wetlands along Duck Creek, established 30 miles of stream buffers, restored 4,000 feet of ditched stream channels, restored 17 miles of stream passage, and created over 500 acres of new forest. The Prairie Valley project, started in 1995 on land that once produced corn, now hosts 67 species of native grasses and flowers. Trout Creek headwaters work since 2018 has restored another 400 acres of prairie, wetland, and forest.
Background
· 2021
· wuwm
On August 14, 1971, Milwaukee AIM activists Herb Powless (Oneida) and Jerome Starr (Ojibwe) occupied the abandoned McKinley Coast Guard Station on Milwaukee's lakefront, citing the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie's provision that abandoned federal property reverts to original inhabitants. The takeover led to the city and BIA handing over the building for use as the original Indian Community School. WUWM, Shepherd Express, and TMJ4 all marked the 50th anniversary in August 2021. The story is the founding myth of urban Indian Milwaukee and a reminder that 'land back' has Wisconsin precedent.
Background
· 2021
· earthjustice
The Menominee Nation's seven-year legal and political fight against the Back Forty open-pit mine along the Menominee River produced a decisive 2021 ruling. Aquila Resources withdrew its Michigan wetlands permits after the tribe's challenge and a court ruled the project would have a probable negative effect on Menominee sacred sites. In December 2021, Aquila was absorbed by Gold Resource Corp; Chairman Ronald Corn Sr. responded that the merger did not change the tribe's opposition.
Background
· 2020
· oneida-nation
Tsyunhehkwa, which translates as Life Sustenance, has grown into the Oneida Nation's flagship sustainable agriculture program. The 80-acre farm near Hobart, directed by Jeff Metoxen, grows white corn and other organic crops, raises grass-fed beef, and serves as an educational model rather than a commercial operation. The nation also runs the Oneida Apple Orchard and a bison and Black Angus operation on land it has bought back.
Background
· 2019
· oneida-nation
In July 2019, Oneida women from the three communities divided by international borders since the 1830s removal received a 30-acre gift of land from a Quaker ally within their traditional homelands in Clinton, New York. As Oneida Wolf Clan Faithkeeper Diane Schenandoah said, reuniting all Oneida on their ancestral homelands was always the original intent of the land claims case. The gift formalized a cross-border reunion that has grown through clan-mother work across two centuries.
Background
· 2017
· wikipedia
Cristina Danforth (Oneida name Kwahlak^ni) served on the Oneida Business Committee for twenty years across roles as Councilwoman, Treasurer, Vice Chairwoman, and Chairwoman, the last role twice. As treasurer she led the balanced budgets and self-funded gaming expansion that transformed the nation's finances. She negotiated gaming compacts for the United Tribes of Wisconsin, the Oneida Compacts, and the New York Land Claims, served as president of the Midwest Alliance of Sovereign Tribes, and preceded Tehassi Hill as chair.
Background
· 2016
· Indianz.com
In 2016 the Menominee Tribal Legislature elected an executive council of women in all three top posts, with Joan Delabreau as chair. Delabreau has served as chairwoman of the Menominee Tribal Legislature four times across the post-Ada Deer generation. Gary Besaw and Ronald Corn Sr. have also held the chair since restoration.
Background
· 2010
· Native American Rights Fund
In 2010 the State of New York and the Stockbridge-Munsee Community settled the tribe's land claim by transferring 330 acres in Sullivan County in the Catskills plus 2 acres in Madison County, in exchange for the tribe's release of its larger 23,000-acre claim near Syracuse. New York granted the tribe rights to develop a Catskills casino, which the tribe withdrew in June 2014 amid competition from Orange County developers. The Sullivan County land remains in the tribe's ancestral Munsee homeland.