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 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 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 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 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.
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.