Issue 008 · June 28, 2026
The nationwide tour to document first-hand accounts from Indian boarding school survivors is wrapping up in Tulsa, marking the close of a multi-year effort to build an archive of living memory before it is lost. ICT's report is brief, but the underlying project is significant: survivor testimony is the evidentiary foundation for any future federal reckoning, and its preservation is exactly the kind of truth-and-healing work that the boarding school investigation has called for. The conclusion of the tour is a milestone worth noting in any updated chapter treatment of the boarding school era.
Issue 008 · June 28, 2026
This week's ICT Newscast packages three significant Indian Country developments: a Ho-Chunk land return, a boarding school healing initiative, and a tribal microgrid project. The Ho-Chunk land return is the Wisconsin thread worth pulling, and the microgrid story points toward the energy-sovereignty work tribes are doing independent of federal infrastructure programs. The newscast format is a useful index when the underlying stories haven't yet been reported individually.
Issue 007 · June 21, 2026
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.
Issue 005 · June 7, 2026
The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition is celebrating a Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling affirming that the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act applies to the case before it, a decision the coalition calls historic. The ruling matters because it extends NAGPRA's reach into contexts that institutions had argued were outside its scope, and it arrives as the Army prepares its ninth year of disinterment operations at Carlisle Barracks (candidate 233). Together these two items mark a week of real, if incremental, movement on boarding school accountability.
Issue 005 · June 7, 2026
The U.S. Army will conduct its ninth consecutive year of disinterment operations at Carlisle Barracks beginning September 1, 2026, actively working to reunite Native families with children who died at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. The Army says it is in contact with families and nations to coordinate returns. Nine years of this work means the process is now institutionalized enough to have its own calendar, which is both a measure of progress and a measure of how many children were buried there to begin with.
Issue 004 · May 31, 2026
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit confirmed that NAGPRA applies to children's remains held by the U.S. Army at Carlisle Barracks, ruling in favor of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska's effort to repatriate two boys who died at the school. NARF, which litigated the case, calls it a victory for every tribe whose children were buried far from home. The ruling has direct implications for Wisconsin nations — the Menominee, Ho-Chunk, Oneida, and Ojibwe bands all had children taken to federal boarding schools, and Carlisle held some of them.
Issue 004 · May 31, 2026
The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition marked the Fourth Circuit ruling as a historic affirmation that the federal government cannot indefinitely hold the remains of Native children who died in its custody. The coalition's statement, carried by Native Sun News, grounds the legal victory in the ongoing work of healing — the ruling is a tool, not an endpoint. Read alongside the NARF piece above for the full picture.
Issue 004 · May 31, 2026
The U.S. Army announced it will begin its ninth consecutive year of disinterment operations at Carlisle Barracks in September 2026, continuing the process of returning Native children's remains to their families and nations. The operation runs alongside the Fourth Circuit NAGPRA ruling this week — the legal and logistical work of repatriation are advancing together. Native News Online carries the announcement; the substance is significant enough to include despite the source's mixed record.
Issue 003 · May 24, 2026
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act applies to the remains of children, a decision that brings the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska closer to repatriating the remains of two boys who died at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. NARF, which litigated the case, called it a victory for all tribes seeking to bring their children home from boarding school cemeteries. The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition also celebrated the ruling, noting it affirms that the federal government cannot use technicalities to avoid its legal obligations to repatriate the youngest victims of the boarding school era.
Issue 002 · May 17, 2026
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit confirmed that NAGPRA's repatriation obligations extend to the remains of children who died at federal boarding schools, a ruling that directly advances the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska's effort to bring home two boys who died at Carlisle Indian Industrial School. NARF, which represented the tribe, calls it a landmark. The decision has implications for every tribal nation still waiting for children's remains held by the Army.
Issue 002 · May 17, 2026
ICT's coverage of the Fourth Circuit NAGPRA ruling centers the Winnebago Tribe's own voice, quoting tribal members on what it means to finally have a legal path to bring their children home from Carlisle. The ruling confirms that the Army cannot hide behind procedural arguments to avoid its repatriation obligations under federal law. Pair with the NARF account above for the full picture.
Background
· 2025
· poynter
On April 22, 2025, Mary Annette Pember of Red Cliff released Medicine River with Pantheon, weaving her mother Bernice Rabideaux's experience as a five-year-old at St. Mary's Catholic Indian Boarding School in Odanah with archival research on the federal boarding school system. St. Mary's operated on the Bad River reservation from 1883 to 1969 under the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, who have since begun a Truth and Healing process that included a repatriation ceremony with the Bad River Tribe.
Background
· 2021
· history-com
Public Law 959, signed in August 1956, pushed thousands of reservation-rooted Native people to Milwaukee, Chicago, Minneapolis, and other Midwestern cities under federal vocational training and job-placement programs. The relocation program ran through the 1970s and is the proximate cause of Milwaukee's urban Native population growth, the founding of the Indian Council of the Elderly, and ultimately the AIM takeover that birthed the Indian Community School. The federal Indian Boarding School Initiative under Secretary Deb Haaland (2021-) has named relocation as a kindred coercive policy in its forthcoming report; urban Indian families today carry both legacies in the same generations.
Background
· 2020
· lco-tribe
Edward Benton-Banai walked on November 30, 2020, at age 89 in Hayward, Wisconsin. A Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe of the Fish Clan, Grand Chief of the Three Fires Midewiwin Lodge since 1986, and a co-founder of the American Indian Movement, he wrote The Mishomis Book in 1979 from the Teachings of the Seven Grandfathers. The book remains the most widely used Anishinaabe primer in North America.
Background
· 2016
· nps
In July 2016, longtime Effigy Mounds superintendent Thomas Munson was sentenced for the 1990 theft of bones of 41 Native Americans from the monument's collection, a theft he carried out to evade NAGPRA. A 2015 Park Service report also found that Superintendent Phyllis Ewing oversaw more than $3 million in illegal construction that desecrated archaeological resources during her 1999-2009 tenure. The reckoning reset NPS tribal consultation across the Upper Midwest and brought the Ho-Chunk, Iowa, and Upper Sioux into active co-stewardship at the site.