Issue 014 · August 9, 2026
Buffalo's Fire, the Native-led journalism outlet now in its tenth year, launched a community-driven database and map for tracking missing relatives this week, inviting families to contribute information directly. The tool is designed to fill the gap left by incomplete federal and state databases. Buffalo's Fire is also hiring two reporters and running a matching donation campaign as it marks its anniversary. The MMIW map is the kind of community-built infrastructure that outlasts any single news cycle.
Issue 013 · August 2, 2026
The Urban Indian Health Institute released a report this week documenting the concrete damage that recent federal funding cuts have done to violence-related programs serving Native people, including MMIW and domestic violence services for urban Indians. The report names specific programs that have lost funding and quantifies the gap in services left behind. This is the kind of story Patty has flagged before: not abstract policy, but specific programs serving specific people, now gone. The source is Native Sun News, which covered the UIHI report directly.
Issue 013 · August 2, 2026
High Country News reports on how one Alaska Native village established a Native-led sexual assault response team in anticipation of the man-camp dynamics that accompany mining booms, a proactive community safety strategy rather than a reactive one. The story is framed around agency and preparation, not victimhood, which is the register Patty's editorial compass favors. The MMIW connection is explicit: mining booms historically correlate with spikes in violence against Native women, and this community decided not to wait for the crisis to arrive.
Issue 012 · July 26, 2026
The Urban Indian Health Institute released a report this week documenting the impact of recent federal funding cuts on violence-related programs serving American Indians and Alaska Natives, including services for survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. The cuts fall hardest on urban Indian health programs, which were already under-resourced. This connects directly to the MMIW beat and to the broader pattern of federal disinvestment that tribal leaders have been tracking across multiple program areas. The source is Native Sun News, which is not on the avoid list, and the underlying UIHI report is the primary document worth pulling.
Issue 012 · July 26, 2026
High Country News reports on how one Alaska Native village established a Native-led sexual assault response team in anticipation of the chaotic boomtown conditions that accompany large mining operations. The piece is grounded in specific community organizing, not victimhood framing: these are women and community members building infrastructure before the crisis arrives. The MMIW connection is explicit, and the model of proactive community response is the kind of agency story Patty's editorial compass points toward.
Issue 012 · July 26, 2026
ICT reports that tribal police departments in Washington state hire officers who were fired from other agencies at a rate four times higher than their share of the overall law enforcement workforce, raising serious questions about tribal public safety and the pipeline of problem officers into Native communities. The story is grounded in data and names the structural dynamic clearly. It connects to MMIW, jurisdictional sovereignty, and the broader question of who is protecting tribal communities.
Issue 011 · July 19, 2026
The Wisconsin Indigenous Riders Awareness Group completed its sixth annual ride honoring Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, People, and those lost to the opioid crisis, traveling from Lac du Flambeau to the Sokaogon Chippewa Community at Mole Lake, the Potawatomi Traveling Times reports. Riders stopped at Bodwéwadmi sacred sites along the route, weaving ceremony into advocacy. The ride's route through the heart of the ceded territory, connecting Ojibwe and Potawatomi communities, reflects exactly what you noted about MMIW: all the nations and urban Natives have embraced this cause, and the grassroots riders are the story, not the press release.
Issue 011 · July 19, 2026
The Gerald L. Ignace Indian Health Center in Milwaukee gathered urban Indigenous community members for a grief vigil, Wisconsin Watch reports, offering a space for remembrance that the city's Native residents rarely find in mainstream institutions. The center, named for a Ho-Chunk leader, has long been a hub for Milwaukee's pan-tribal community, and this vigil reflects the kind of community-sustaining work that rarely makes headlines outside Native publications. For the urban Indians section of any future edition, this is the texture of what the relocation-era institutions have become: not just health clinics, but places of ceremony and belonging.
Issue 010 · July 12, 2026
The Wisconsin Indigenous Riders Awareness Group completed its sixth annual ride this June, traveling from Lac du Flambeau to the Sokaogon Chippewa Community at Mole Lake and stopping at Bodwéwadmi territory along the way. The ride honors missing and murdered Indigenous women and people while also raising awareness of the opioid crisis hitting northern Wisconsin communities. Six years in, this ride has become a recurring act of collective witness across multiple nations, and the route itself maps the geography of Ojibwe and Potawatomi homelands in the north.
Issue 010 · July 12, 2026
The Gerald L. Ignace Indian Health Center in Milwaukee gathered urban Indigenous community members for a grief vigil, offering what the Wisconsin Watch piece calls 'space for remembrance.' In a week heavy with federal noise, this story is a reminder that the Indian Health Center remains one of the most important institutions in Wisconsin's off-reservation Native community, doing the quiet, essential work of holding people together. Patty, you know this place and the people who built it.
Issue 009 · July 5, 2026
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.
Issue 009 · July 5, 2026
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.
Issue 009 · July 5, 2026
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.
Issue 006 · June 14, 2026
On May 9, the Oneida Nation's Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives Walk stepped off from the Recreation Center and ended at the Oneida Nation Elementary School, where community members Sarah Wunderlich, Sue Doxtator, and others spoke about the losses their families carry. Kalihwisaks covered the walk with names and voices, not statistics. As Patty noted when she saved a similar story last year, every Wisconsin nation and urban Native community has embraced MMIW advocacy in the past decade, and the walk format has become one of the most powerful expressions of that collective grief and resolve.
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 005 · June 7, 2026
The Oneida Nation's Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives Walk stepped off from the Oneida Recreation Center on May 9, ending at the Oneida Nation Elementary School where community members Sarah Wunderlich, Sue Doxtator, and others spoke. The walk is one of dozens happening across Wisconsin's twelve nations this spring, a reminder that MMIW advocacy has moved from national policy conversation into the fabric of tribal community life. Patty, you noted last month that all the nations and urban Natives have embraced MMIW in the last ten years; this is what that looks like on the ground.
Issue 005 · June 7, 2026
On May 5, the Forest County Potawatomi and the Sokaogon Chippewa community at Mole Lake joined forces for an MMIP Awareness Ride and Walk, beginning at the Potawatomi Community Center with educational displays and ceremony before moving together through the landscape. The partnership between these two neighboring nations, one Bodewadmi and one Ojibwe, is itself a story: shared geography and shared grief producing shared action. The walk is the kind of community-built response that doesn't wait for federal task forces.
Issue 004 · May 31, 2026
ICT's coverage of the annual MMIW rally near the Menominee Nation puts a specific family's grief and advocacy at the center, exactly as it should be. Linda Dickenson's murder is one case among many the movement tracks, and her relatives' presence at the rally is the kind of ordinary-people-doing-extraordinary-things story Patty's journalism ethics demand. The piece is careful not to reduce advocacy to statistics.
Issue 004 · May 31, 2026
The Forest County Potawatomi and Sokaogon Chippewa communities marked May 5 together, beginning at the Potawatomi Community Center with educational displays and a shared walk. The joint observance between two neighboring Wisconsin nations reflects the pan-tribal momentum around MMIW that Patty noted when Bad River established its own task force. The Potawatomi Traveling Times carries the community voice here.
Issue 004 · May 31, 2026
The Oneida Nation's Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives Walk on May 9 drew community members from the Recreation Center to the Elementary School, where Sarah Wunderlich and Sue Doxtator spoke. Kalihwisaks names the speakers and the route — the specificity matters. The walk is now a recurring community ritual, not a one-time event.
Issue 003 · May 24, 2026
ICT profiled a Menominee Nation family whose advocacy for missing and murdered Indigenous women centers on the murder of Linda Dickenson, one case among many that the movement works to prevent from being forgotten. The piece foregrounds the family's voice, not an agency spokesperson, and traces how grief becomes sustained public action. Patty, you noted in an earlier issue that MMIW advocacy has become central to virtually every Wisconsin nation over the past decade; this is that story at the human scale.
Issue 002 · May 17, 2026
The Bad River Tribal Governing Board voted to create a formal Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives task force and designated May 5 as the Band's Tribal Day of Awareness, joining a growing number of Wisconsin nations formalizing their MMIW commitments in tribal law. The Wisconsin Examiner covered the vote, which took place in the same week as the national MMIP day of awareness. This is the kind of governance action that belongs in the Bad River section of the Ojibwe chapter.
Issue 002 · May 17, 2026
ICT's coverage of the annual MMIW rally centers the family of Linda Dickenson, a Menominee woman whose murder remains a defining case for Wisconsin's MMIW movement, and the advocates who gather each year to demand accountability. The piece foregrounds ordinary voices, exactly the register Patty's journalism ethics call for: not the task force announcement, but the family still waiting for answers. This is the human counterpart to the Bad River task force story in the Wisconsin section.
Issue 001 · May 10, 2026
The Bad River Band's governing board voted this week to formally recognize May 5 as a Tribal Day of Awareness for missing and murdered Indigenous women and relatives, and authorized the creation of a new tribal task force to address the crisis. The Wisconsin Examiner covered the vote, though the story would benefit from a direct quote from a Bad River council member or advocate. This is a meaningful institutional step: a task force with a home community mandate carries more weight than a state-level working group, and it grounds the national MMIW conversation in the specific geography and kinship networks of Mashkiiziibii.
Issue 001 · May 10, 2026
ICT reports on the third annual Walk for Missing and Murdered Indigenous People hosted by the Alaska Native Science and Engineering Program at the University of Alaska Anchorage, drawing relatives, friends, and supporters to raise visibility for Alaska Native victims. The Alaska MMIW crisis has its own distinct geography and jurisdictional tangle, with vast rural distances and limited law enforcement presence compounding the federal gaps that affect tribal communities everywhere. The walk is a community act of witness, and ICT names it as such.
Background
· 2026
· Wisconsin Examiner
On April 22, 2026, the Bad River Tribal Council voted to formalize May 5 as a Bad River Tribal Day of Awareness for missing and murdered Indigenous women and relatives and authorized the creation of a tribal task force. Gina Jensen, who represents the tribe's police commission, noted that the murder rate for Indigenous women is ten times the national average. More than fifty community members walked the annual MMIW/R route inside the reservation that week, the route marked by red dresses on garden stakes.