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
Forest County Potawatomi's economic development arm, Potawatomi Ventures, has launched Bwadwét Innovation Community, named from the Bodewadmi word meaning 'the one who starts a fire,' anchoring a fifteen-week entrepreneurship program for tribal adult members. The initiative is a concrete example of the economic diversification beyond gaming that Patty tracks across the twelve nations. WPR's report is brief but the underlying development is substantive, and the Potawatomi Traveling Times provides the tribal-voice detail on the program's design.
Issue 008 · June 28, 2026
Arlene Alloway, known in the community as Nigansekwe, Leading Lady, marked her 98th birthday on May 12 surrounded by family and the Forest County Potawatomi community. The Potawatomi Traveling Times sat with Arlene and her family for a portrait that is exactly what Patty's 'Native People Up Close' frame calls for: a specific elder, a specific community, a life lived on her own terms. At 98, Nigansekwe is a living archive of Bodewadmi history across the twentieth century, and the community's celebration of her is its own kind of sovereignty.
Issue 008 · June 28, 2026
A group of Ashland residents rallied Wednesday against Enbridge's use of municipal Lake Superior water for hydrostatic testing of the Line 5 reroute through Bad River ceded territory. The protest adds a local-community dimension to what has largely been framed as a tribal-versus-pipeline fight, and raises a pointed question: who authorized the city to supply water for a project the Bad River Band is actively challenging in federal court? The Wisconsin Examiner's coverage is the most detailed available this week, though WPR's ongoing beat reporting on the reroute remains the essential running record.
Issue 008 · June 28, 2026
A federal judge has continued the injunction blocking Lac du Flambeau from enforcing its fishing restrictions on the lakes that cross allotment-era roads at the center of the ongoing easement dispute. The ruling keeps the band's access-control strategy on hold while the broader road-dispute litigation works through the courts, and it sits in direct tension with the tribe's sovereign interest in managing its own lands. WPR's coverage, the Native source of record on this beat, is the right place to start.
Issue 008 · June 28, 2026
Michigan is accepting public comment on the proposed Line 5 oil tunnel beneath the Straits of Mackinac, and NARF's updated resource page makes clear what tribal nations and Indigenous communities have long argued: the tunnel project poses direct risks to treaty-protected waters, fisheries, and natural resources. This is the Michigan flank of the same pipeline fight that runs through Mashkiiziibii, and the comment window is a rare moment when organized tribal voice can enter the formal record. NARF is the right source here, and Patty, you may want to flag this for Bad River's legal team if they haven't already.
Issue 008 · June 28, 2026
The National Indian Law Library has released a curated water-resources guide through NARF's Headwaters Report, covering federal Indian water law, tribal water rights adjudications, and the intersection of treaty rights with water infrastructure disputes. For anyone updating a chapter on Wisconsin Ojibwe treaty rights or preparing for a keynote on sovereignty, this is a practical reference tool, not just a press notice. The guide is particularly useful alongside the ongoing Line 5 and manoomin litigation.
Issue 008 · June 28, 2026
The Tohono O'odham Nation has filed a federal lawsuit challenging what it calls an illegal border wall construction on its lands, a fight that directly implicates tribal sovereignty, treaty rights, and the nation's ability to protect sacred sites and family connections that cross the international boundary. ICT's Southwest Bureau has the report. The case is a clean example of the federal government treating tribal land as a resource to be used rather than a sovereign territory to be respected, and it will be worth tracking as it moves through the courts.
Issue 007 · June 21, 2026
The Forest County Potawatomi Community has installed a 150-kilowatt electric vehicle charging station on its own trust land using a National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure grant, the first such project by any Native nation in the country. The Traveling Times reports the hub is fully operational and open to the public. It is a quiet but concrete marker of tribal infrastructure sovereignty: FCP controlling the terms of a federal program on its own land rather than waiting for county or state buildout.
Issue 007 · June 21, 2026
Noden-bem-zet (Wind Walker), son of Patrick Daniels Sr. and Lana Rodriguez, graduated from Crandon High School this spring with gold medals from the Wisconsin School Music Association Solo Ensemble Festival, forensics awards, and four years of academic honors. The Traveling Times named him by his Bodewadmi name first, a small editorial choice that carries real weight. He is exactly the kind of young Wisconsin Native voice Patty's 'Native People Up Close' framework asks us to foreground: a specific person doing specific things, not a symbol.
Issue 007 · June 21, 2026
The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals has dismissed a jurisdictional challenge to the White Earth Nation's permitting process, in a case that tested whether a tribe or the state holds regulatory authority over water use on non-Indian fee land within reservation boundaries. NARF's case review frames this as part of a growing conflict with direct implications for Wisconsin Ojibwe bands, whose ceded-territory water rights face similar pressure from non-Indian landowners. The ruling is a quiet but significant win for tribal water sovereignty, and the legal reasoning will matter to anyone tracking manoomin protection cases.
Issue 007 · June 21, 2026
The Department of Defense has reduced its list of recognized religion codes for military chaplains from more than 200 to just 31, folding Native American religion into a generic 'other' category. ICT broke this story, and the implications are direct: Native service members seeking ceremonial support, smudging, or traditional spiritual care from a chaplain now have no recognized category to anchor that request. For Patty, whose documentary 'Way of the Warrior' traced the spiritual dimensions of Native military service, this is not a bureaucratic footnote. It is a policy that touches the ogichidaa tradition she has spent a career honoring.
Issue 007 · June 21, 2026
The Senate Committee on Indian Affairs has scheduled a nomination hearing for Mark Cruz, a citizen of the Klamath Tribes, to lead the Indian Health Service. IHS has operated without a confirmed director through much of the past decade, and the hearing comes as tribal health programs face budget uncertainty under the current administration. Cruz's Klamath citizenship is notable: the Klamath Tribes have their own history of termination and restoration that shapes how any member of that nation understands federal trust responsibility from the inside.
Issue 007 · June 21, 2026
The United States is running critically short of benzathine penicillin G, the sole FDA-approved treatment for congenital syphilis, and ICT reports that Indigenous babies have had the highest rates of the disease in recent years, disproportionate to their share of the population. The shortage compounds an already severe health disparity, and it arrives as IHS budget uncertainty makes tribal health infrastructure more fragile. This is the kind of story where the crisis frame is unavoidable, but the underlying cause is federal supply-chain failure, not community failure.
Issue 007 · June 21, 2026
Oregon Governor Tina Kotek has approved the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation's request to retrocede civil jurisdiction of tribal matters back to the tribe, the first such action in Oregon's history. The move reverses a piece of the termination-era Public Law 280, which transferred civil and criminal jurisdiction over tribal lands to states without tribal consent. Retrocession has been a slow, state-by-state process across the country, and Oregon's action is a meaningful marker of that arc, relevant to any Wisconsin reader tracking how PL 280 states handle sovereignty restoration.
Issue 007 · June 21, 2026
Native News Online's feature on the proposed Indigenous School of Medicine (ISOM) is the most substantive long-form piece in this week's candidate pool. The school's founders want to train physicians whose education integrates ceremony, culture, and Indigenous healing practices alongside Western clinical training, a model that would address the IHS physician shortage while producing doctors who understand the communities they serve from the inside. The piece names specific architects of the proposal and engages the real tension between accreditation requirements and Indigenous pedagogical values. It is not a press release dressed as a feature: it sits with the difficulty. Given the IHS director hearing scheduled for this week and the congenital syphilis shortage story, the timing is right to think hard about what Indigenous health sovereignty actually requires at the institutional level.
Issue 007 · June 21, 2026
Bailey Skenandore's Sweetgrass Salon in Milwaukee's Third Ward is one of a tiny number of urban Native-owned hair salons in the United States, and ICT's profile lets her speak plainly about what hair means in Indigenous communities and what entrepreneurship means on her own terms. The piece pairs naturally with the Diaz beadwork story this week: two Oneida women, both in Milwaukee, both building businesses that carry cultural meaning without being reducible to it. Patty, you may want to hold both pieces together when you update the Oneida chapter's urban-community section.
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
On May 5, members of the Forest County Potawatomi and Sokaogon Chippewa communities joined for their MMIP Day observance, beginning with educational displays and ceremony at the Potawatomi Community Center before walking together to Mole Lake. The joint walk between two neighboring Wisconsin nations is exactly the kind of inter-community solidarity that rarely makes mainstream news but matters deeply to understanding how MMIW advocacy has taken root across the state. The Potawatomi Traveling Times documented it with the community detail it deserved.
Issue 006 · June 14, 2026
The 8th Annual Walk for Recovery on May 15 brought members of the Forest County Potawatomi and Sokaogon Chippewa communities together for a roughly ten-mile walk from Mole Lake to the FCP Potawatomi Community Center. Recovery walks like this one are a form of community medicine, and the fact that two neighboring nations have been doing this together for eight years running is a story of sustained solidarity that deserves to be named. The Potawatomi Traveling Times covered it as the community event it was.
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
ICT's profile of Rosa Alvarez, tribal secretary of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe and a former foster youth who now advocates for ICWA protections, is the kind of story Patty's journalism ethics demand: not a policy explainer, but a person. Alvarez describes her family's experiences across generations in the child welfare system, and what it meant when ICWA provided a framework for keeping Native children connected to their nations. As ICWA faces continued legal pressure, her voice is the one that should lead the coverage.
Issue 006 · June 14, 2026
Adjustments to kinship care reimbursement rules are allowing more Native families to qualify for support when caring for relatives, and state officials report a measurable increase in Native foster homes as a result. ICT covered this as a quiet but real ICWA-adjacent win: when the financial barriers to keeping children within their extended family networks are lowered, more children stay connected to their nations. The story is light on specific voices, but the policy direction is worth tracking.
Issue 006 · June 14, 2026
Donald Warne, a physician and longtime advocate for Native health equity, is leading a feasibility study for an Indigenous School of Medicine in Rapid City with a target opening of 2030. As of 2024, just 0.3 percent of practicing physicians in the United States are Native American. ICT covered this with the institutional detail it requires, and the story is worth watching: a Native medical school would be a landmark institution of the kind that reshapes what the next generation of Native health care looks like.
Issue 006 · June 14, 2026
Bill Anoatubby, who first took office as Chickasaw Nation Governor in 1987, announced his retirement this week after nearly four decades leading one of the most economically successful tribal nations in the country. ICT and Native Sun News both covered the announcement; the NCAI statement is the institutional voice, but the Native Sun News piece carries the community weight. Anoatubby's tenure spans the entire modern era of tribal self-determination, from the Indian Self-Determination Act's early implementation through the gaming compact era and beyond. His retirement marks the end of a chapter that shaped what tribal governance looks like across Indian Country.
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
Funded through a Wisconsin Partnership Program grant with UW School of Medicine and Public Health, the Oneida Nation's Mending the Disconnect with Food initiative is working to restore food sovereignty for Oneida families across a five-year community grant cycle. The project connects traditional food knowledge with contemporary health outcomes in ways that reflect the Oneida understanding that mino-bimaadiziwin, a good life, is inseparable from what you eat and how it was grown. Kalihwisaks framed this as a community-driven effort, not a public health intervention imposed from outside.
Issue 006 · June 14, 2026
A Michigan House committee took testimony on legislation that would create a separate hunting and fishing regulatory authority for the Upper Peninsula, a proposal that tribal nations and treaty-rights advocates are watching closely. The Great Lakes Ojibwe bands have treaty-protected rights that cross the Wisconsin-Michigan border, and any restructuring of state fish and wildlife authority in the UP carries potential consequences for GLIFWC's co-management framework. ICT covered the committee hearing; no vote was taken.
Issue 006 · June 14, 2026
The Native American Rights Fund's reflection on the Katie John Day Supreme Court victory, which secured Alaska Native subsistence fishing rights on federal public lands, is worth reading alongside the White Earth water jurisdiction ruling as a pair. Both cases turn on the same fundamental question: when federal Indian law says tribes have priority, does that hold when states push back? The Alaska answer, after decades of litigation, is yes. The Wisconsin manoomin and treaty-fishing cases are still working toward that same clarity.
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
ICT's analysis of the Supreme Court's voting rights ruling finds that Native Americans have lost what one advocate called a 'silent partner' in legislative redistricting fights. South Dakota will not redraw its districts until 2031, but the structural damage is already visible: tribes that relied on Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to challenge diluted districts now face a harder road. The ruling's effects will ripple into Wisconsin, where off-reservation Native voters in northern counties have long been underrepresented in state legislative maps.
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 005 · June 7, 2026
The Army Corps of Engineers has approved the long-disputed segment of the Dakota Access Pipeline that runs beneath Lake Oahe, bringing a formal end to the regulatory saga that began with the 2016 Standing Rock protests, though further litigation remains likely. ICT covered this with the context it deserves: the announcement lands as communities prepare for the tenth anniversary of the #NoDAPL encampment, and tribal leaders are clear that the legal fight is not over. For Patty, the Dakota Access decision is a useful frame for the Bad River/Line 5 fight: federal regulatory approval has never meant the end of a pipeline dispute.
Issue 005 · June 7, 2026
The U.S. Supreme Court vacated the Eighth Circuit's decision in Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians et al. v. Howe, a North Dakota voting rights case in which the lower court had stripped private individuals of the right to sue under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. NARF, which litigated the case, called the ruling a significant correction. The case matters beyond North Dakota: the Eighth Circuit's original ruling had threatened to gut private enforcement of voting rights across the region, and the Supreme Court's remand keeps that door open. Native voting rights and treaty rights are not separate issues.
Issue 005 · June 7, 2026
At a Senate Indian Affairs Committee budget hearing, tribal health leaders pressed agency officials on Indian Health Service funding cuts, with clean water access and hospital construction emerging as the most urgent concerns. The FY 2027 budget requests $9.1 billion in discretionary IHS funding, but advocates say that number falls far short of what the trust responsibility requires. For Wisconsin readers: IHS underfunding affects every one of the twelve nations, and the gap between what the federal government is legally obligated to provide and what it actually appropriates has been a defining feature of tribal health for generations.
Issue 005 · June 7, 2026
The business councils of the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes have formally condemned Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon for calling on lawmakers to reexamine electoral boundaries on the Wind River Indian Reservation following the Supreme Court's voting rights ruling. The tribes' statement used the phrase 'direct attack on Native voting,' and Wyoming lawmakers appear unmoved by Gordon's push, at least for now. The episode is a clean illustration of how the Louisiana v. Callais ruling is already being weaponized against Native political power.
Issue 005 · June 7, 2026
President Trump signed the Tribal Trust Land Homeownership Act, a new federal law aimed at reducing mortgage processing delays on tribal trust land, and tribal housing leaders are calling it one of the most significant policy shifts for Native homeownership in years. The delays have long been a structural barrier: trust land's legal status means conventional mortgage processes don't apply cleanly, leaving families in limbo. Whether the implementation matches the promise is the next question, but the underlying problem is real and the law addresses it directly.
Issue 005 · June 7, 2026
The Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe marked the return of approximately 3,400 acres known as the Cloquet Forestry Center through Minnesota's state bonding bill, a transfer that tribal leaders called historic. Native News Online covered the signing ceremony, which brought together tribal and state officials for what amounts to one of the larger land returns to a Lake Superior Ojibwe band in recent memory. The Cloquet land sits within the Band's ceded territory and has ecological significance for manoomin and other traditional resources. For Patty, this story sits at the intersection of several beats she tracks closely: land back, Lake Superior Ojibwe treaty territory, and the slow, grinding work of restoring what removal took. It is also a useful counterpoint to the pipeline and mining fights: sometimes the land comes back. The piece is worth reading in full alongside the NARF voting rights and IHS funding stories this week, as a reminder that sovereignty is exercised in many registers at once.
Issue 004 · May 31, 2026
A federal judge this week ordered work stopped on sections of Enbridge's proposed Line 5 reroute in northern Wisconsin, a significant if partial legal victory for the Bad River Band. The ruling keeps the Band's federal lawsuit — which argues the reroute would cross ceded territory without tribal consent — alive and consequential while the broader case proceeds. WPR's coverage, the preferred source here, frames the legal landscape clearly without flattening the sovereignty stakes. This is the same dispute the brief tracked when Bad River asked the court to halt construction outright; the judge's partial halt is the first concrete relief the Band has won.
Issue 004 · May 31, 2026
The State of Wisconsin filed suit against the Lac du Flambeau Band on April 30, 2026, after the Band issued fishing restrictions on nineteen reservation lakes citing documented declines in walleye and muskellunge populations. The Band's position is straightforward: tribal resource managers are doing exactly what conservation science demands, and the state's lawsuit challenges that authority. Mazinaigan, GLIFWC's publication, is the right source here — it carries the tribal conservation framing that mainstream outlets routinely miss. Patty, this sits directly alongside the earlier federal ruling blocking LdF from restricting off-reservation fishing; the two cases together define a complicated moment for the Band's resource sovereignty.
Issue 004 · May 31, 2026
The six Wisconsin Ojibwe bands expect to file a joint 9th-round biennial stipulation in LCO v. Voigt, consolidating and updating six previous filings dating to 2001. Key changes include a tribal fee waiver for state park access in the ceded territory and expanded harvest opportunities. This is the kind of incremental, durable treaty-rights work that rarely makes mainstream news but shapes daily life in the ceded territory for generations. Mazinaigan carries the full picture.
Issue 004 · May 31, 2026
Preliminary studies and field data from fourteen Wisconsin lakes show that the aquatic herbicide ProcellaCOR causes elevated mortality in manoomin at submerged and floating-leaf stages — the most vulnerable points in the rice's life cycle. Tribes including the Menominee Nation and GLIFWC member bands are pushing back against continued use of the chemical in ceded territory waters. Mazinaigan carries the data; this is the kind of story that will not appear in mainstream Wisconsin media until the damage is done.
Issue 004 · May 31, 2026
The Voigt Intertribal Task Force chair and GLIFWC member tribes are formally pushing back against ProcellaCOR applications in regional waterways, citing potential harm to wild rice, fish, and other subsistence resources. This is the advocacy side of the same story as the field data above — the two pieces together show both the scientific concern and the political response. Mazinaigan again.
Issue 004 · May 31, 2026
The Trump administration's unprecedented reorganization of the USDA Forest Service is generating serious concern at GLIFWC, whose member tribes hold off-reservation treaty rights across millions of acres of National Forest land in the ceded territory. Proposed changes could reduce research capacity and interagency coordination that tribes depend on to monitor and defend those rights. Mazinaigan frames this as a structural threat, not a bureaucratic shuffle.
Issue 004 · May 31, 2026
GLIFWC and Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe University signed an MOU to launch the Nanda-gikenjigeng Program, a new Bachelor of Science in Treaty Natural Resources that integrates Ojibwe worldview with Western scientific methodologies. The program is designed to train the next generation of tribal natural resource managers — the people who will be monitoring those rice beds and fish populations for decades to come. This is mino-bimaadiziwin in institutional form.
Issue 004 · May 31, 2026
Iron County, with support from GLIFWC and the Bad River and Lac du Flambeau Bands, purchased 1,051 acres of undeveloped shoreline, uplands, and islands on the Gile Flowage from Xcel Energy for permanent conservation and public access. The acquisition protects waters within the ceded territory and keeps the land from development. Mazinaigan carries the story with the tribal conservation framing it deserves.
Issue 004 · May 31, 2026
Ann McCammon Soltis retired from GLIFWC in early 2026 after nearly 33 years as director of intergovernmental affairs, a career that included central roles in the Minnesota v. Mille Lacs Band litigation and decades of legal and policy victories for the six Wisconsin Ojibwe bands. Mazinaigan's tribute names her specific contributions — the kind of institutional memory that rarely gets acknowledged in mainstream coverage. Her retirement is a genuine transition moment for the organization that has been the operational backbone of Ojibwe treaty rights since the Voigt Decision aftermath.
Issue 004 · May 31, 2026
The Trump administration is proposing to rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which has protected approximately 60 million acres of National Forest land — including significant portions of the Ojibwe ceded territory in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan — from road construction, timber harvesting, and mineral leasing. GLIFWC's Mazinaigan lays out the tribal opposition with the specificity that the issue demands: these are not abstract wilderness acres but the forests where Ojibwe families hunt, gather, and exercise treaty rights that predate the National Forest system itself. The rollback would open ceded territory forests to the same extractive pressures that the Roadless Rule has held at bay for a quarter century, and GLIFWC's formal opposition letter frames it explicitly as a treaty-rights issue. For the third edition of Indian Nations of Wisconsin, this is the kind of federal policy shift that belongs in the environmental and treaty-rights sections of every Ojibwe band chapter — the Seventh Generation lens applies directly here.
Issue 003 · May 24, 2026
Governor Evers signed a $125 million package to address PFAS contamination in Wisconsin's water supplies, with tribes explicitly named among those eligible for grant funding to address private well contamination. Mazinaigan notes that some of the highest PFAS levels in the state have been found near tribal communities. The intersection of water quality, treaty-protected resources, and tribal sovereignty makes this more than a general environmental story.
Issue 003 · May 24, 2026
The Billy Daniels Maple Sugar Camp, established around 1993 by one of the first certified Bodewadmi tribal language and cultural teachers, has been revived following Daniels' passing in November 2020 at age 88. The Forest County Potawatomi Cultural Preservation Department is leading the revival, bringing youth back to the iskigamizigan and reconnecting them to the Bodwéwadmimwen vocabulary that Daniels spent his life teaching. This is mino-bimaadiziwin expressed as land practice: a language teacher's life work continuing through the trees he tapped.
Issue 003 · May 24, 2026
The Forest County Potawatomi Language Department hosted a three-day Language Immersion Event that brought together language staff from the Prairie Band, Nottawasseppi Huron Band, and Pokagon Band Potawatomi communities, with participants staying fully immersed in Bodwéwadmimwen for the duration. The Potawatomi Traveling Times account is worth reading slowly: it describes not a classroom exercise but a living network of speakers and learners across multiple communities, working together to strengthen a language that connects them all. The piece also touches on the pedagogical choices the immersion team made, the intergenerational dynamics in the room, and what it means to spend three days inside a language that the boarding school era nearly erased. For the third edition of Indian Nations of Wisconsin, the Forest County Potawatomi language program is one of the most active and collaborative in the state, and this gathering is evidence of that.
Issue 003 · May 24, 2026
St. Croix Band spearfishers launched onto three lakes on April 10, registering the first 390 walleyes of the 2026 season, near the historical average. Mazinaigan notes that long-term GLIFWC data shows open-water spearfishing has remained within sustainable bounds, a quiet counter-narrative to the crisis framing that has historically surrounded Ojibwe off-reservation harvest. High water from snowmelt and rain slowed the eastern Ceded Territory season, while western Upper Michigan saw a productive stretch between rain events.
Issue 002 · May 17, 2026
The Bad River Band filed a motion asking the court to extend the partial halt into a full construction stop, arguing that any reroute work through the ceded territory threatens treaty-protected resources and the Band's sovereign interests. The motion follows the partial injunction and signals that Mashkiiziibii is not settling for half measures. This is the piece to pair with the partial-halt ruling above.
Issue 002 · May 17, 2026
WPR's explainer maps the procedural steps between the current partial halt and a full construction stop, walking through the injunction standards, the appeals risk, and the timeline pressures Enbridge is using to its advantage. It is the clearest single-source guide to where the litigation stands and what Bad River needs to prove next. Worth keeping close as the court calendar moves.
Issue 002 · May 17, 2026
The Ashland County Board approved an agreement under which the county will be compensated for law enforcement costs incurred while policing protests of Enbridge's Line 5 reroute. The arrangement raises the pointed question of who, ultimately, is paying to police opposition to a private pipeline project on contested ceded territory. WPR's reporting is the right source here.
Issue 002 · May 17, 2026
The Department of Justice filed a brief siding with the Town of Lac du Flambeau's demand that the tribe reimburse it for costs stemming from the 2023 road-closure dispute, a significant federal intervention against the Band's position. The move follows the 2023 easement standoff that drew national attention and complicates the tribe's ongoing legal posture. WPR, which has tracked this dispute from the beginning, has the story.
Issue 002 · May 17, 2026
A federal judge ruled against the Lac du Flambeau Band's attempt to restrict non-tribal fishing on nineteen reservation lakes, finding the tribe had not met the legal standard for such restrictions. The Band had cited declining walleye and muskellunge populations as the basis for the closures. The ruling lands in the same week as the DOJ roads brief, compounding pressure on the Band from multiple federal directions.
Issue 002 · May 17, 2026
WPR's interview with a northern Wisconsin tribal leader makes the case that the priorities of the Ojibwe bands and their neighbors are distinct from the rest of the state, organized around treaty rights, manoomin, and the particular ecology of the Northwoods rather than the policy concerns that dominate Madison and Milwaukee. The framing, 'north of Highway 29 is its own country,' is a useful shorthand for what Patty's Ojibwe chapter has always argued. Lead with the tribal voice here.
Issue 002 · May 17, 2026
ICT reports that the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, the primary international body where tribal nations can raise concerns before the world community, is facing questions about its effectiveness and continuity as the UN grapples with a broader budget crisis. The timing is particularly fraught given the current U.S. administration's posture toward multilateral institutions. For Wisconsin nations whose sovereignty arguments have always had an international dimension, this matters.
Issue 002 · May 17, 2026
NARF's analysis of the April 29 Callais ruling explains that the Supreme Court has effectively dismantled the primary tool tribal nations and other minority communities have used to challenge racially discriminatory district maps. The decision lands as North Dakota tribes are already in litigation over redistricting that dilutes Native voting power. NARF's framing is the right entry point: this is a sovereignty and self-determination story, not just a civil rights one.
Issue 002 · May 17, 2026
Mazinaigan's feature on the 2026 maple sugarbush season in the Ceded Territory is the kind of story Patty's journalism ethics were built to honor: specific people, a specific place, a specific practice, and the quiet transmission of knowledge across generations. The season was marked by cooler temperatures and ideal sap-flow conditions, with a fourth-grade class from Hayward visiting Pat Eaten's sugarbush to learn the work firsthand. The iskigamizigan, the sugar camp, is not a relic; it is a living institution that connects Ojibwe families to the land, to each other, and to the seasonal rhythms that mino-bimaadiziwin requires. This is the kind of piece that belongs in the brief not because there is a crisis but because there is joy, and because the joy is the story. It is also a window into the TEK-and-climate conversation Patty has been tracking since Ice Worlds: what happens to the sugarbush as winters shorten and sap-flow windows shift? The 2026 season was good. The question is how many more like it remain.
Issue 002 · May 17, 2026
Kimberly Blaeser, White Earth Ojibwe poet and former Wisconsin Poet Laureate, has received a National Book Foundation prize for her collection 'Ancient Light,' a body of work that braids Anishinaabemowin, photographic image, and lyric poetry into something genuinely new in American letters. WPR's coverage is the right source. Blaeser's work belongs in the same conversation as the language revitalization programs Patty has tracked across the twelve nations, and her national recognition is the kind of milestone the third edition should name.
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
High Country News reports that a 234-mile gas pipeline across Navajo Nation land is moving toward construction after a hearing that community members say they were not adequately notified about. The story echoes Line 5 in its structure: a pipeline company, a federal permitting process, and a tribal community whose consultation rights appear to have been honored in form but not in substance. For the Ice Worlds frame, the Navajo Nation's water and land relationships are as central to its future as manoomin is to the Anishinaabe.
Issue 001 · May 10, 2026
The Native American Rights Fund released its 25-year retrospective on the Tribal Supreme Court Project this week, documenting a quarter century of coordinated advocacy before the nation's highest court on behalf of tribal sovereignty. The report is a useful reference document, and its timing alongside the new ICWA challenge is pointed: the Project exists precisely because the Supreme Court is not a neutral forum, and tribal nations need sustained, coordinated legal strategy to navigate it. Worth downloading for your files.
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
The Native American Rights Fund published a clear-eyed explainer on tribal sovereignty and birthright citizenship, addressing the question of whether current legal debates about the Fourteenth Amendment affect the citizenship status of tribal members. The piece is careful to distinguish tribal citizenship from U.S. citizenship and to ground the analysis in the pre-constitutional existence of tribal nations. It is a useful resource for anyone navigating these questions in a policy or classroom context.
Issue 001 · May 10, 2026
Native News Online reports that Western states are entering summer with critically low water reserves, with consequences that fall disproportionately on tribal communities whose water rights are often junior in practice even when senior in law. The story does not center tribal voices as strongly as it should, but the underlying conditions it describes are directly relevant to the Ice Worlds frame: water scarcity, disrupted seasonal cycles, and the gap between treaty-protected rights and on-the-ground reality.
Issue 001 · May 10, 2026
Native Sun News Today flags that South Dakota Congressman Dusty Johnson's federal bills to expand Missouri River water use for the state do not address the question of who actually holds water rights in that river system, a question that implicates multiple Oceti Sakowin nations whose treaty territories the Missouri runs through. The piece is a good example of the kind of story that only a Native publication is likely to frame this way: the mainstream coverage of the same bills would almost certainly not lead with tribal water rights.
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.
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
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
WPR profiles an Ojibwe jingle dress dancer who is using digital platforms to extend a family tradition of activism, connecting the physical practice of dance to contemporary forms of Indigenous visibility and resistance. The story is exactly the kind of 'Native People Up Close' framing Patty's textbook calls for: a specific person, a specific practice, a specific lineage, no vanishing-race framing in sight. The jingle dress itself carries a healing origin story from the flu pandemic era, which gives the digital extension of that tradition an additional layer of resonance.
Background
· 2024
· forest-county-potawatomi
Since its founding in 1999, the Forest County Potawatomi Foundation has contributed more than $30 million to charitable organizations across Forest County and the five-county Milwaukee region. The Foundation funds art and culture, civic affairs, community development, after-school programs, senior services, and environment, with targeted attention to low-income communities in Milwaukee. It operates from offices on West Kilbourn Avenue alongside the Potawatomi Hotel and Casino.
Background
· 2024
· wikipedia
The Potawatomi Casino Hotel, operated by the Forest County Potawatomi Community, has tripled in size since its first Milwaukee expansion in 2000. A $240 million expansion in 2008 tripled the gaming floor and added a 1,700-space parking garage; a 19-story hotel opened in 2014; and a $190 million renovation of the first two levels recently added new restaurants and a sportsbook. The build-out has anchored the tribe's economic diversification across Milwaukee real estate and renewable energy.
Background
· 2023
· wxpr
In November 2023 the Forest County Potawatomi Community opened a newly remodeled Health and Wellness Center in Crandon, funded in part by a $4.7 million state Healthcare Infrastructure grant. The renovation added a lobby and registration area, a triage room, additional medical exam rooms, and a drive-thru pharmacy. The facility offers medical, behavioral health, dental, optometry, laboratory, radiology, pharmacy, and weekend walk-in services, anchoring tribal health infrastructure for the post-pandemic decade.
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
· forest-county-potawatomi
Tribal estimates put the number of native Potawatomi (Bodéwadmimwen) speakers at seven. The Forest County Potawatomi Language and Culture Department teaches rotating community classes in Carter, Wabeno, Blackwell, Crandon, and Stone Lake, anchored by elder-led seasonal ceremony and traditional practice. The community has leaned on the broader Potawatomi diaspora, with shared curriculum work between Wisconsin's Forest County community and the Pokagon and Citizen Potawatomi nations.
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
· 2022
· sunvest
During its Milwaukee casino expansions, the Forest County Potawatomi installed heat-recovery wheels that channel warm air back into the heating system, digital energy monitoring, no-water urinals, low-flow fixtures, and skylighting. The tribe has gone on to anchor multiple solar projects across its Forest County properties through SunVest and the Department of Energy's Office of Indian Energy.
Background
· 2018
· forest-county-potawatomi
Ned Daniels Jr. won the Forest County Potawatomi chairmanship in the 2017-2018 election, succeeding longtime chairman Harold 'Gus' Frank. As chair, Daniels works with the five-person Executive Council on tribal administration and external agreements. The Daniels era has overseen the Health and Wellness Center renovation, the launch of the Bodwéwadmi Ktëgan farm, the expansion of tribal solar through the Office of Indian Energy, and continued strategic investment in Milwaukee real estate alongside the Potawatomi Casino Hotel.
Background
· 2015
· indian-community-school
The Indian Community School, born from the 1971 AIM takeover of the abandoned McKinley Coast Guard Station on Milwaukee's lakefront, moved in 2007 to a $35 million, 178-acre campus in Franklin, about thirteen miles from downtown. The Forest County Potawatomi's twenty-year lease and the gaming revenue that followed funded the move and helped sustain the school. ICS serves about 364 Native students K-8, and every kindergartner commits to daily language instruction in Oneida, Menominee, or Ojibwe — a quiet but radical bet on the next generation.
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
· 2003
· itep
In a closing chapter of the long Crandon Mine fight, the Forest County Potawatomi Community partnered with the Sokaogon Chippewa Community to purchase the proposed mine site from Nicolet Minerals, ending decades of threat to the wild rice waters between Mole Lake and the Wolf River headwaters. The tribes hold the land in trust. Walter Bresette's organizing coalition, the Midwest Treaty Network, had built much of the resistance that made the buyout possible.
Background
· 2024
· Wisconsin Examiner
On April 17, 2024, twenty-five years after his death at 51, Walt Bresette was inducted to the Wisconsin Conservation Hall of Fame. A Red Cliff Ojibwe activist, author, and storyteller, Bresette led the 1996 Bad River train blockade against sulfuric acid shipments to the Crandon mine site, co-founded the Midwest Treaty Network, and drove the campaign that produced Wisconsin's Prove It First mining moratorium law. He was a central treaty rights organizer through the spearfishing years.
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
· 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
· midwest-environmental-justice-network
On June 23, 2023, U.S. District Judge William Conley ordered Enbridge to cease operating Line 5 on the Bad River reservation by June 2026 and to pay the Band $5.1 million for nine years of trespass, with continuing quarterly payments. The court found the pipeline a 'public nuisance' carrying an imminent threat of rupture that could contaminate the Band's drinking water and the manoomin sloughs. It was the first U.S. court order to shut down a major operating oil pipeline on tribal land.
Background
· 2023
· WPR Native American coverage
On January 25, 2023, the six Wisconsin Ojibwe bands marked 40 years since the Voigt Decision, the 1983 federal appeals court ruling that reaffirmed treaty rights to hunt, fish, and gather on ceded territory under the 1837 and 1842 treaties. Voigt is the legal foundation under every subsequent treaty case in Wisconsin, from the spear fishing battles of the 1980s to the wolf hunt lawsuits to the Line 5 trespass ruling. Northwoods tribal leaders reflected on the violence the original ruling provoked at the boat landings and on what has been built since.
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
· 2021
· WPR Native American coverage
Joe Rose, known by his Ojibwe name Moka'ang Giizis (Rising Sun), walked on February 23, 2021, at age 85 from complications of COVID-19. A Bad River tribal elder and Northland College emeritus professor, Rose was a part of virtually every significant environmental and treaty-rights struggle the North Country faced for half a century. He died during the brutal February wolf hunt he had spent decades resisting as a lifelong wolf advocate. Patty called him a second dad.
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
· 2015
· ICT (Indian Country Today)
On March 24, 2015, Gogebic Taconite president Bill Williams pulled the company's preapplication for the 4.5-mile open-pit iron mine that would have produced eight million tons of taconite annually over the Bad River watershed. Six Wisconsin Ojibwe bands, led by Bad River, had organized the EPA review and grassroots resistance that surfaced the wetlands the company claimed did not exist. Williams cited 'unexpected extensive wetlands' and EPA permit uncertainty.
Background
· 2013
· oil-and-water-dont-mix
In June 2013 the Bad River Tribal Council voted against renewing the 20-year easements that had allowed Enbridge's Line 5 to cross 12 allotment parcels on the reservation. The decision came three years after Enbridge's Line 6B ruptured into Michigan's Kalamazoo River, dumping more than 843,000 gallons of crude. That no vote became the foundation of every Line 5 ruling that followed.
Background
· 2024
· WPR Native American coverage
With fewer than one percent of tribal members functional in the Menominee language and one living first-language speaker left in an unbroken chain, Menomini yoU Inc. broke ground on the 10,000-square-foot Wāsecewan Language Campus near Keshena. The campus will house immersion classrooms, an outdoor cultural space, and the operations of a revitalization movement that took shape during the COVID pandemic through online courses.
Background
· 2024
· wiea
Founded in 1985 to carry on the work of the former Great Lakes Intertribal Council Education sub-committee, the Wisconsin Indian Education Association (WIEA) is the statewide body advocating for Indigenous students and educators across Wisconsin's public school system. WIEA serves on advisory bodies to the State Superintendent and the Department of Public Instruction, and its annual conferences (2024: 'Fostering Teamwork & Collaboration'; 2025: 'Honoring Our Languages') gather Native and non-Native educators around Act 31 implementation, language revitalization, and recruitment of Indigenous teachers. Membership crosses urban-reservation lines and is one of the few statewide infrastructures connecting Milwaukee, Madison, and reservation classrooms.
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
· 2022
· teach-lang-wisconsin
The Stockbridge-Munsee Community now runs language revitalization programs in both of its recognized languages, Mohican and Munsee. The Cultural Affairs Department has produced an extensive Mohican video series using Total Physical Response, in which words attach to physical movement to aid retention. The programs sit alongside the archives of the Arvid E. Miller Memorial Library and Museum, the largest collection of Mohican documents and artifacts in the world.
Background
· 2022
· oneida-nation
The Oneida Nation School System runs a full immersion school on the reservation near Green Bay, the only Iroquois language immersion school in Wisconsin. Oneida is also taught at two nearby public school districts, at St. Norbert College and UW-Green Bay, and through an immersion Head Start program and adult community classes. The Indian Community School, founded in 1969 by three Oneida mothers, remains a model for tribally-run urban schooling in Milwaukee.
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
· 2021
· red-cliff
In 2021 Red Cliff received a $900,000 grant from the federal Administration for Native Americans to create a three-year Ojibwemowin Teaching and Training Program in partnership with the Bayfield School District, the Midwest Indigenous Immersion Network, and the Bad River Band. Dustin 'Gimiwan' Burnette of MIIN, who began as a Bad River adult language instructor in 2020, anchors the curriculum. Bad River Head Start now produces and publishes immersion-classroom books written by language trainees about people and places in Bad River.
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
· 2018
· uw-milwaukee-eqi
Named for Electa Quinney, the first public schoolteacher in Wisconsin and a Stockbridge-Munsee citizen, the Electa Quinney Institute at UW-Milwaukee is a teacher training and Indigenous education research center. Its work partners directly with Indian Community School, Milwaukee Public Schools, and tribal-level education programs across the state. The institute closes a gap the 2013 chapter could not have known would matter so much: how to prepare teachers — Native and non-Native — to serve the urban Native classrooms that Wisconsin's relocation history created.
Background
· 2008
· national-endowment-for-the-arts
The Oneida Hymn Singers of Wisconsin, who have maintained their Oneida-language Christian hymn tradition for nearly nine decades, received a National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship in 2008, the highest honor the United States bestows on its folk and traditional artists. The group, ranging in size from a dozen to more than fifty and in age from teens to over eighty, opened the National Museum of the American Indian in 2004 and carries more than one hundred hymns. Most learn the songs phonetically, the language having outlasted speakers.
Background
· 2025
· oneida-nation
Ernie Stevens Jr. of the Oneida Nation passed suddenly on September 26, 2025, at age 66, six months after his thirteenth re-election as chairman of the Indian Gaming Association. He led IGA for 24 years and served as a councilman on the Oneida Business Committee from 1993 to 1999, working in self-determination and youth advocacy. He was a regular voice at the Native American Basketball Invitational and a fixture of Indian Country sports.
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
· 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
· 2020
· north-star-mohican-casino-resort
Since opening in May 1992 in Bowler, the North Star Mohican Casino Resort has grown into the economic engine of the Stockbridge-Munsee Community, with more than 1,000 slot machines, table games, weekly bingo, a hotel, and tournament golf. The casino sits at the heart of a decades-long compact-and-revenue dispute with the State of Wisconsin, including Stockbridge-Munsee's call on Governor Walker to enforce compact terms after Ho-Chunk's Beloit expansion.
Background
· 2020
· wikipedia
Apesanahkwat (born January 19, 1949) served as tribal chairman of the Menominee Indian Reservation eight times and is widely considered one of the foremost originators of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988. A Vietnam Marine Corps veteran, he is also a champion northern traditional dancer and singer and has acted in Wind River, Northern Exposure, Stolen Women, and Babylon 5. He remains one of the most active orators on tribal sovereignty, education, and language revitalization.
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.