Issue 007
The Weekly Brief
For the week of June 21, 2026
Two legal threads dominated Indian Country this week, and both run through Wisconsin. The federal court order continuing to bar Lac du Flambeau from enforcing its fishing restrictions keeps that band's treaty-rights dispute in an unsettled posture, while NARF's public comment alert on the Line 5 tunnel project reminds us that the Michigan permitting process is the next battlefield for the waters Mashkiiziibii has fought to protect. Nationally, the Department of Defense quietly erased Native American religion as a distinct category for military chaplains, a bureaucratic move with real consequences for Native veterans, and a Senate hearing on the Indian Health Service director nomination signals that IHS leadership remains contested terrain. Closer to home, an Oneida beadwork artist in Milwaukee and a Forest County Potawatomi entrepreneurship launch offer the kind of generational-joy story that belongs alongside the harder news.
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Across the Twelve Nations
A federal judge, a new business incubator, and an Oneida artist in Milwaukee's Third Ward all made news this week.
Federal Judge Again Bars Lac du Flambeau from Restricting Fishing on Ceded Territory Lakes
A federal court has continued its order blocking the Lac du Flambeau Band from enforcing fishing restrictions on nearly twenty lakes in ceded territory, extending a legal standoff that began when the band closed access over allotment-era road easements. The ruling keeps the treaty-rights and road-dispute threads tightly braided: the same land-access grievance that produced the road closures is now shaping how the band can exercise its own regulatory authority over the fishery. WPR's coverage is the source to follow here, and the note Patty flagged on the earlier ruling still applies: this belongs in the LdF section of the Ojibwe chapter, in direct conversation with the road dispute story.
Potawatomi Ventures Launches 'Bwadwét' Entrepreneurship Program for Native Business Owners
Forest County Potawatomi's economic development arm, Potawatomi Ventures, has launched the Bwadwét Innovation Community, named from the Bodewadmi word meaning 'the one who starts a fire,' anchored by a fifteen-week entrepreneurship program for adult tribal members. The initiative connects participants with mentors across business development, human resources, and construction, and is open to FCP citizens looking to build independent enterprises. It is the kind of economic diversification story that sits alongside the Packers-Potawatomi Sportsbook partnership announced in the same issue of the Traveling Times, showing a community moving on multiple economic fronts at once.
Oneida Beadwork Artist Mariah Tyakohelahthè Diaz Carries a Living Tradition into Milwaukee's Third Ward
Wisconsin Watch profiles Mariah Tyakohelahthè Diaz, whose business Ostalókwa by Mariah brings Oneida beading traditions into a contemporary urban setting in Milwaukee's historic Third Ward. Diaz treats beadwork not as heritage performance but as a living creative practice, one she is actively teaching and expanding. The story is a fine example of the urban-Indian beat: a young Oneida woman doing specific, skilled work in a specific Milwaukee neighborhood, not an abstraction about 'keeping culture alive.'
Oneida Salon Owner Bailey Skenandore Builds One of the Few Urban Native-Owned Hair Salons in the Country
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.
Forest County Potawatomi Becomes First Tribe in the U.S. to Build a NEVI-Funded EV Charging Hub on Tribal Trust Land
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.
Menominee Boxer Lew Boyd Inducted into the North American Indigenous Athletics Hall of Fame
Lew Boyd of the Menominee Nation was inducted into the North American Indigenous Athletics Hall of Fame in Green Bay on May 30, recognized for a distinguished amateur boxing career (76-6) and decades of coaching work. The Potawatomi Traveling Times carried the item, a reminder that Indigenous athletic achievement in Wisconsin crosses tribal lines and that Green Bay remains a gathering point for inter-tribal recognition. Boyd's induction is the kind of specific, joyful story that belongs in the brief alongside the legal and policy news.
Treaty Rights, Line 5, and the Waters
Michigan's public comment window on the Line 5 tunnel is open, and NARF is making sure Indian Country knows it.
NARF: Michigan Is Accepting Public Comment on the Line 5 Tunnel Project Right Now
The Native American Rights Fund has posted a direct call to action: Michigan is currently accepting public comment on Enbridge's proposed Line 5 oil tunnel under the Straits of Mackinac, and tribal nations and Indigenous communities have long documented the risks the project poses to the waters, fisheries, and natural resources of the Great Lakes. NARF's framing is clear that this is a treaty-rights issue, not merely an environmental one. For Mashkiiziibii, which has fought the Wisconsin segment of Line 5 through the courts, the Michigan permitting process is the next front. Patty, the comment window will not stay open long.
Eighth Circuit Dismisses Challenge to White Earth Nation's Water Permitting Authority on Non-Indian Fee Land
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.
Indian Country: Federal Policy, Courts, and Sovereignty
The Department of Defense erased a religious category. A Senate hearing on IHS leadership is coming. And the boarding school oral history project is reaching its final stop.
Pentagon Quietly Erases Native American Religion as a Distinct Category for Military Chaplains
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.
Senate Committee to Hold Confirmation Hearing for Mark Cruz as Indian Health Service Director
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.
National Boarding School Oral History Project Reaches Its Final Stop in Tulsa
The nationwide tour to document first-hand survivor accounts from federal Indian boarding schools is concluding in Tulsa, marking the end of a multi-year effort to preserve testimony before more survivors walk on. ICT reports the project has gathered accounts from across the country, building an archive that tribal healing initiatives and truth commissions will draw on for years. The oral history model, centering survivor voice over institutional narrative, is precisely the kind of methodology Patty's own journalism ethics framework privileges.
Indigenous Babies Bear the Highest Burden as the U.S. Runs Short of the Only Drug That Treats Congenital Syphilis
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.
Oregon Governor Retrocedes Civil Jurisdiction to the Umatilla Tribe in a First for the State
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.
People Worth Knowing
Arlene 'Nigansekwe' Alloway, Eldest Member of Forest County Potawatomi, Celebrates Her 98th Birthday
Arlene Alloway, whose Bodewadmi name Nigansekwe means Leading Lady, marked her 98th birthday in May surrounded by family and community at Forest County Potawatomi. The Traveling Times sat down with her and her daughter to document her life, a quiet act of intergenerational record-keeping that the community's own newspaper is doing better than any outside outlet could. At 98, Alloway carries memory of the FCP community across nearly a century of federal policy, from the Indian Reorganization Act era through gaming and sovereignty. She is, in the most literal sense, a living archive.
FCP Graduate Noden-bem-zet Earns Gold Medals in Music and Forensics at Crandon High School
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.
Long Read
One piece worth fifteen minutes this week.
'Healed Healers Heal': The Push for an Indigenous Medical School That Weaves Ceremony into the Curriculum
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.