Issue 009
The Weekly Brief
For the week of July 5, 2026
The week of July 4th, 2026 found Indian Country in a complicated posture toward America's 250th birthday: sovereign, clear-eyed, and largely unimpressed with the bunting. The most consequential Wisconsin story remains Line 5, where a drilling fluid spill on the Bad River has now drawn more than 200 Great Lakes businesses into the opposition, and where Ashland residents took to the streets over Enbridge's use of Lake Superior water for construction. On the treaty rights front, the Lac du Flambeau fishing restriction dispute continued its slow grind through federal court, while the Wisconsin Supreme Court weighed in on the Menominee land buyback question. Nationally, the Supreme Court handed Native voters a modest but real win on mail ballots, and the Gerald L. Ignace Indian Health Center in Milwaukee offered a reminder that urban Indian community life is built on grief held together by ceremony.
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Wisconsin Nations
A busy week across the twelve nations, anchored by Line 5 developments at Bad River, the continuing Lac du Flambeau fishing dispute, and a Menominee land ruling from the state's highest court.
Drilling Fluid Spill on Bad River Drives 200-Plus Great Lakes Businesses to Oppose Line 5 Tunnel Permits
A coalition of more than 200 business owners across the Great Lakes region is calling on Michigan environmental regulators to reject permits for Enbridge's Line 5 tunnel, citing a recent drilling fluid spill on the Bad River as evidence that the project poses unacceptable risk. The businesses are urging other owners to add their names before Michigan's public comment window closes. The spill, on Mashkiiziibii's ceded territory, has sharpened the argument that the tunnel's construction phase is itself a threat to the waters and fisheries the Bad River Band has protected for generations. This one belongs alongside the earlier federal court filings in the Bad River section of the Ojibwe chapter.
Ashland Residents Protest Enbridge's Use of Lake Superior Water to Build Line 5 Reroute
Residents of Ashland gathered this week to protest Enbridge's draw on municipal Lake Superior water for Line 5 reroute construction, a detail that puts the pipeline's footprint squarely in the laps of the city's taxpayers and water users. The demonstration follows a pattern of broadening opposition beyond tribal and environmental circles to include neighbors who depend on the same waters the Bad River Band has fought to protect. Patty, this is the kind of story that shows the Seventh Generation argument landing in ordinary civic life, not just in courtrooms.
Federal Judge Again Bars Lac du Flambeau from Enforcing Fishing Restrictions on Nearly Twenty Lakes
A federal judge has continued the bar on Lac du Flambeau's enforcement of fishing restrictions on roughly twenty lakes, keeping in place an earlier ruling that the Band cannot limit access under the terms at issue. The case sits at the intersection of the road easement dispute and treaty-era fishing rights, and it is moving slowly enough that the full legal picture will not be clear for some time. WPR's coverage remains the most reliable running account of this dispute.
Wisconsin Supreme Court Rules on Menominee Land Buyback: What the Decision Means
The Wisconsin Supreme Court has issued a ruling on the Menominee land buyback question, a case with direct implications for how the Mamaceqtaw nation can rebuild its land base within the boundaries of its original homeland. WPR's explainer lays out the legal stakes clearly. The ruling is the kind of landmark the Menominee chapter of Indian Nations of Wisconsin will need to address in the third edition.
Wisconsin Indigenous Riders Complete Sixth Annual MMIW and MMIP Awareness Ride from Lac du Flambeau to Mole Lake
The Wisconsin Indigenous Riders Awareness Group completed its sixth annual ride honoring Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Missing and Murdered Indigenous People, and opioid victims, traveling from Lac du Flambeau to the Sokaogon Chippewa Community at Mole Lake with stops at Bodwéwadmi sites along the route. The ride is now in its sixth year, a sign of how deeply MMIW awareness has taken root across Wisconsin's Ojibwe and Potawatomi communities. Riders moving through the landscape of ceded territory, stopping at community after community, is itself a form of treaty rights exercise.
Gerald L. Ignace Indian Health Center Holds Grief Vigil, Gathering Milwaukee's Urban Native Community in Remembrance
The Gerald L. Ignace Indian Health Center in Milwaukee opened its doors this week for a grief vigil, offering Milwaukee's Indigenous community a structured space for remembrance and collective healing. Wisconsin Watch's Angie Landsverk reported on the gathering, centering the voices of participants who described what it means to grieve in community rather than in isolation. The Ignace Center is one of the anchoring institutions of Milwaukee's urban Native life, and this vigil is exactly the kind of story that belongs alongside the MMIW and urban Indians beats.
Menominee Canoe Travels to the Smithsonian for America's 250th, Carrying the Nation's Story to Washington
A Menominee canoe from Wisconsin is now on display at the Smithsonian Institution as part of the America 250 commemoration, placing the Mamaceqtaw nation's material culture at the center of the national birthday. The canoe's presence in Washington is a quiet assertion of the fact that Indigenous peoples were here long before 1776 and remain here still. WPR's coverage is brief but the story is worth noting.
Treaty Rights and Water
Line 5 dominates, but the Michigan public comment window and the NARF brief on tribal water law resources are both worth your attention this week.
Michigan Opens Public Comment on Line 5 Tunnel Permits: NARF Explains What Tribal Nations Stand to Lose
The Native American Rights Fund has published a clear-eyed summary of the risks the proposed Line 5 tunnel poses to tribal nations and Indigenous communities, timed to Michigan's open public comment period on the permits. NARF's framing centers treaty-protected fisheries, water quality, and the rights of nations whose ceded territory the pipeline crosses. Patty, if Bad River or any of the Wisconsin Ojibwe bands are submitting formal comments, this is the legal scaffolding they are working from.
Water Protectors Prepare to Paddle a Traditional Canoe Across Menominee River Homelands, a First in Centuries
ICT reports that water protectors are preparing to paddle a traditional canoe across the Menominee River, a journey that would be the first of its kind in centuries and a direct assertion of the Mamaceqtaw people's relationship to their river homeland. The paddle is framed as both ceremony and advocacy, timed to ongoing fights over the river's health. This is the kind of story that lives at the intersection of treaty rights, cultural continuity, and the Seventh Generation principle.
Indian Country
The Supreme Court gave Native voters a genuine win on mail ballots. The America 250 moment generated serious Indigenous commentary worth tracking. And an Arizona fraud case targeting Native people is as grim as it sounds.
Supreme Court Upholds Mail Ballot Counting for Native Voters Who Face Postal Delays Beyond Their Control
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on June 29 that ballots cast on time must be counted even if they arrive after Election Day, a decision with outsized significance for Native voters on reservations where postal service is slow and in-person voting infrastructure is thin. NARF, which filed an amicus brief in the case, explains the ruling's impact clearly and without boilerplate. This is a real win, and it came from the same court that has spent years narrowing tribal authority in other contexts.
NCAI Calls on States to Protect Native Voting Rights After Supreme Court Mail Ballot Ruling
The National Congress of American Indians issued a statement following the Supreme Court's June 29 mail ballot decision, urging states to implement the ruling in ways that protect Native voters who are disproportionately affected by postal delays and limited access to election infrastructure. NCAI's statement is worth reading alongside the NARF brief for the full picture of how Indian Country is responding to this ruling.
Forty-Two Arrested in $3 Billion Arizona Sober Living Home Fraud That Targeted Native Americans and Left Thousands Dead or Missing
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes announced the arrest of 42 people in 10 separate cases connected to a nearly $3 billion fraud scheme that targeted Native Americans seeking addiction treatment, with charges including manslaughter. The scheme funneled vulnerable people into fraudulent sober living homes where deaths and disappearances followed. This story sits at the intersection of MMIW, health equity, and the predatory targeting of Native communities, and it deserves more national attention than it has received.
Native Consultants on the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library Sought to Amplify Indigenous History. ICT Reports on What They Got.
ICT's reporting on the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in North Dakota examines the complicated position of Native Americans who consulted on the project, hoping to amplify Indigenous history within a monument to a president whose rhetoric about Native people was openly exterminationist. The story is a useful case study in the limits and possibilities of institutional consultation, and it lands in a week when America's 250th birthday has generated a great deal of Indigenous reflection on whose history gets told and how.
NDN Collective: '250 Years of Lies, 500 Years of Uprising' -- A July 4th Reckoning from Indian Country
The NDN Collective published a direct and unsparing reflection on America's 250th anniversary, framing the celebration not as a shared milestone but as a marker of ongoing dispossession and resistance. The piece is representative of a broader current in Indian Country this week, where the America 250 moment has generated serious Indigenous commentary that refuses the triumphalist frame. Worth reading alongside the more measured sovereignty essays from Native News Online.
People
Oneida Beadwork Artist Mariah Tyakohelahthè Diaz Carries Her Nation's Traditions Forward Through Her Business, Ostalókwa
Mariah Tyakohelahthè Diaz, an Oneida beadwork artist from Wisconsin, is building a business called Ostalókwa by Mariah that centers Oneida beading traditions as living practice, not museum artifact. Wisconsin Watch's profile foregrounds Diaz's own voice about what it means to carry these traditions into a new generation and into a commercial context that she controls. This is the kind of story Patty has consistently wanted more of: a specific young Wisconsin Native woman doing specific work, on her own terms.
Potawatomi Ventures Launches Business Accelerator Program for Native Entrepreneurs
Forest County Potawatomi's economic development arm, Potawatomi Ventures, has launched a new business program aimed at Native entrepreneurs, WPR reports. The program is designed to move tribal economic development beyond the casino model and into a broader ecosystem of Native-owned businesses. This is the kind of institutional innovation that belongs in the gaming and economy section of the Potawatomi chapter.
Long Read
One piece worth fifteen minutes of your time this week.
When Federal Funding Failed the Klamath Tribes, the Yurok Nation Stepped In to Restore the Salmon: A Model Worth Watching
High Country News reports on a remarkable act of inter-tribal solidarity: after the Klamath Tribes were blocked from federal salmon restoration funding because salmon had been absent from their lands for more than a century (a Catch-22 written into the grant criteria), the Yurok Tribe stepped in with their own resources to bridge the gap. The story is a case study in how tribal nations navigate a federal funding architecture that was not designed with their actual histories in mind, and in how Indigenous communities find paths around bureaucratic walls that would stop anyone else cold. For a scholar of treaty rights and tribal sovereignty, the structural irony here is worth sitting with: the very absence of the resource the tribe is trying to restore disqualified them from the money to restore it. The Yurok's intervention is an act of mino-bimaadiziwin in practice.