Issue 006
The Weekly Brief
For the week of June 14, 2026
The week's most consequential thread for Indian Country runs through sovereignty under pressure: tribal leaders are pushing back on wavering federal support, the Department of Defense quietly erased Native American religion as a distinct category for military chaplains, and the Oak Flat ruling drew renewed attention to how thin U.S. legal protections for sacred sites really are. In Wisconsin, the Oneida Nation's MMIR Walk and the newly enacted tribal regalia graduation law both signal what Patty has long argued: that Native nations are not waiting for permission to assert their presence and protect their people. Deb Haaland's Democratic primary win in New Mexico offers a different kind of signal, one about what Native political leadership looks like when it moves from federal appointment to electoral mandate.
Across the Wisconsin Nations
A graduation milestone, an MMIR walk, a food sovereignty initiative, and a quiet but significant farewell from the Oneida Business Committee.
Wisconsin's Tribal Regalia Graduation Law Takes Effect, Protecting Native Students' Right to Honor Their Heritage at Commencement
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.
Oneida Nation Holds Annual MMIR Walk; Community Members Speak on Loss and Healing
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.
Forest County Potawatomi and Sokaogon Chippewa Mark MMIP Day Together, Walking from Mole Lake to Potawatomi Community Center
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.
Oneida Nation's 'Mending the Disconnect with Food' Initiative Charts a Five-Year Path Toward Food Sovereignty
Funded through a Wisconsin Partnership Program grant with UW School of Medicine and Public Health, the Oneida Nation's Mending the Disconnect with Food initiative is working to restore food sovereignty for Oneida families across a five-year community grant cycle. The project connects traditional food knowledge with contemporary health outcomes in ways that reflect the Oneida understanding that mino-bimaadiziwin, a good life, is inseparable from what you eat and how it was grown. Kalihwisaks framed this as a community-driven effort, not a public health intervention imposed from outside.
Retiring Oneida Councilman Kirby Metoxen Closes a Chapter, Reprinting His Father Russell's Farewell
Kirby Metoxen's farewell column in Kalihwisaks carries an unusual grace note: he reprinted the farewell message his father, Russell Metoxen, wrote upon completing his own term on the Oneida Business Committee. The intergenerational echo is a small, specific thing, but it is the kind of detail that tells you something true about how Oneida governance works, how families carry civic responsibility across generations, and how a tribal newspaper holds that continuity. Worth a moment of attention.
Forest County Potawatomi and Sokaogon Chippewa Walk Together for Recovery, Covering Ten Miles Between Communities
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.
Treaty Rights, Water, and the Line 5 Watch
No new Line 5 court filings broke this week, but two stories from adjacent beats, tribal water jurisdiction and Upper Peninsula fishing authority, keep the treaty-rights landscape in view.
Eighth Circuit Dismisses Jurisdictional Challenge to White Earth Nation's Water Permitting Authority on Non-Indian Fee Land
The Eighth Circuit dismissed a challenge to the White Earth Nation's authority to regulate water use on non-Indian fee land within reservation boundaries, a ruling that NARF's case review frames as part of a growing conflict between tribal regulatory power and non-Indian landowners. The decision matters well beyond Minnesota: the same jurisdictional question sits underneath Wisconsin Ojibwe water governance disputes, including the ongoing tensions over manoomin protection and sulfide mining near rice waters. NARF's analysis is the right place to read this one.
Michigan Bills to Create a Separate Upper Peninsula Hunting and Fishing Authority Draw Opposition, with Implications for Great Lakes Treaty Rights
A Michigan House committee took testimony on legislation that would create a separate hunting and fishing regulatory authority for the Upper Peninsula, a proposal that tribal nations and treaty-rights advocates are watching closely. The Great Lakes Ojibwe bands have treaty-protected rights that cross the Wisconsin-Michigan border, and any restructuring of state fish and wildlife authority in the UP carries potential consequences for GLIFWC's co-management framework. ICT covered the committee hearing; no vote was taken.
NARF Reflects on the Katie John Day Victory: Supreme Court Secures Alaska Native Subsistence Fishing Rights
The Native American Rights Fund's reflection on the Katie John Day Supreme Court victory, which secured Alaska Native subsistence fishing rights on federal public lands, is worth reading alongside the White Earth water jurisdiction ruling as a pair. Both cases turn on the same fundamental question: when federal Indian law says tribes have priority, does that hold when states push back? The Alaska answer, after decades of litigation, is yes. The Wisconsin manoomin and treaty-fishing cases are still working toward that same clarity.
Indian Country: Federal Policy, Courts, and Sovereignty
A week of quiet erosions and one loud one: the Pentagon's removal of Native American religion as a distinct chaplaincy category is the kind of administrative decision that lands differently when you know a veteran.
Pentagon Quietly Removes Native American Religion as a Distinct Category for Military Chaplains, Grouping It as 'Other'
The Department of Defense reduced its list of recognized religion codes used by military chaplains from more than 200 to just 31, eliminating Native American religion as a named category and folding it into a generic 'other' designation. ICT broke this story, and it deserves to be read by anyone who has watched a Native veteran try to access ceremony in a VA facility or on a military installation. For Patty, whose grandfather Edward DeNomie served in the 32nd Red Arrow Division and whose documentary Way of the Warrior traced the ogichidaa tradition across generations, this is not an abstraction. It is a policy decision that tells Native service members their spiritual practices are not worth naming.
Tribal Leaders Remind Washington of the Federal Trust Responsibility as Agency Support Wavers
ICT's report on tribal leaders calling for sovereignty as federal support wavers is a useful document of the current moment: the federal government has legal obligations to tribal nations that do not disappear when a new administration decides to cut agency budgets. The piece is careful to distinguish between political discretion and treaty-based legal duty, which is the distinction that matters. Worth keeping as a reference point as the 2027 budget cycle approaches.
Oak Flat Ruling Exposes How Far U.S. Law Falls Short of Global Standards for Protecting Native Sacred Sites
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.
Rosa Alvarez, Pascua Yaqui Former Foster Youth, Puts a Human Face on What ICWA Protection Means
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.
Supreme Court Voting Rights Ruling Strips Native Americans of a Key Ally in Legislative Redistricting
ICT's analysis of the Supreme Court's voting rights ruling finds that Native Americans have lost what one advocate called a 'silent partner' in legislative redistricting fights. South Dakota will not redraw its districts until 2031, but the structural damage is already visible: tribes that relied on Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to challenge diluted districts now face a harder road. The ruling's effects will ripple into Wisconsin, where off-reservation Native voters in northern counties have long been underrepresented in state legislative maps.
Deb Haaland Wins New Mexico Democratic Gubernatorial Primary in Another Historic First
Deb Haaland, Laguna Pueblo, secured the Democratic nomination for governor of New Mexico on Tuesday, becoming the first Native woman to win a major-party gubernatorial primary in the state. Native Sun News covered the win with the weight it deserves. Haaland's trajectory from the first Native woman confirmed as a cabinet secretary to a gubernatorial candidate represents a shift in what Native political leadership looks like at the highest levels, and it is a story that will matter to every Wisconsin nation watching how sovereignty translates into electoral power.
Rule Changes for Kinship Care Are Boosting the Number of Native Foster Homes, State Officials Report
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.
People Worth Knowing
A Milwaukee Oneida entrepreneur, a proposed Indigenous medical school, and the retirement of one of Indian Country's longest-serving governors.
Bailey Skenandore's Sweetgrass Salon in Milwaukee's Third Ward Is One of the Few Urban Native-Owned Hair Salons in the Country
Bailey Skenandore, Oneida, opened Sweetgrass Salon in Milwaukee's historic Third Ward and has built it into one of the rare urban Native-owned hair salons in the nation. ICT's profile foregrounds what Skenandore says about hair as identity, ceremony, and self-determination, not as a novelty story about a Native business owner but as a portrait of someone doing something specific and meaningful in a city where urban Native presence is often invisible to mainstream media. This is the kind of story Patty's 'Native People Up Close' framework was built for.
A Proposed Indigenous School of Medicine in Rapid City Could Become the First of Its Kind in the Nation
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.
Chickasaw Nation Governor Bill Anoatubby Retires After 39 Years, Closing One of Indian Country's Longest Leadership Tenures
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.
Long Read
Buffalo Fire's Press Freedom Series: How Native Radio Stations Can Strengthen Their Independence and Serve Their Communities
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.