Stories from The Weekly Brief tagged with any of this chapter's themes,
most recent first. Each new issue's tagged stories appear here automatically.
Issue 018 · September 6, 2026
The Stockbridge-Munsee Tribal Council formally authorized Cultural Affairs to coordinate the community's participation in the third edition of Indian Nations of Wisconsin: Histories of Endurance and Renewal, with Cultural Affairs serving as the primary liaison. This is exactly the kind of institutional endorsement that makes the revision process work, and it signals that the Mohican chapter will have active community input. Patty, this one goes straight to the workshop.
Issue 018 · September 6, 2026
The Quinney Homecoming Celebration, held August 5 at the Stockbridge-Munsee Community, welcomed back more than 25 cultural belongings connected to Sachem John B. Austin Quinney, a foundational figure in Mohican history. The event included preservation workshops and community ceremony, a model of what NAGPRA repatriation looks like when it is led by the community rather than by the institution. Sachem Quinney's name and legacy are woven through the Stockbridge-Munsee chapter; these objects coming home is a material fact worth noting in the next revision.
Issue 018 · September 6, 2026
A Stockbridge-Munsee tribal member describes their experience as a fellow with the Tribe's Historic Preservation Office, visiting Revolutionary War battlefields, burial sites, and ancestral homelands in the east for the first time. This is the kind of story Patty's 'Native People Up Close' framework was built for: an ordinary person doing the extraordinary work of reconnecting a community to its history. The Historic Preservation Office's active homeland-reconnection work is worth a sentence in the Stockbridge-Munsee chapter.
Issue 018 · September 6, 2026
Title VI Coordinator Don King secured a grant from Running Strong for American Indian Youth to fund culturally centered activities for students in the Bowler School District, which serves Stockbridge-Munsee community members. The funding supports programming that connects students to their heritage inside a public school setting, a quiet example of Act 31-adjacent work happening at the district level. Worth tracking as the education landscape for Wisconsin tribal students continues to evolve.
Issue 016 · August 23, 2026
Governor Tony Evers joined the Stockbridge-Munsee Community Band of Mohican Indians on July 30 at North Star Mohican Casino and Resort to unveil the last set of dual-language highway signs, completing a statewide initiative that now recognizes all twelve Wisconsin tribal nations in their own languages along state highways. The signs are a small but visible act of sovereignty on the public landscape. For the Stockbridge-Munsee, whose Mohican and Munsee languages were traditionally considered one tongue before colonial dispersal, seeing those words on a state road sign carries weight that a press release cannot fully convey.
Issue 016 · August 23, 2026
On August 5, the Stockbridge-Munsee Community celebrated the return of twenty-five cultural items belonging to Sachems John and Austin Quinney, repatriated from the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian and welcomed home during the 2026 Language and Culture Camp. John Quinney's 1854 Fourth of July address, reprinted in full in this month's Mohican News, is a foundational document of Mohican political thought; bringing his material belongings home alongside a living language camp is the kind of convergence that makes repatriation feel like more than paperwork. The Mohican News has also been running Quinney's address in full this summer, a reminder that the community is actively curating its own intellectual archive.
Issue 016 · August 23, 2026
Stockbridge-Munsee veterans joined Native American veterans from across Wisconsin at the Highgrounds Veterans Memorial Park in Neillsville on June 25, where eight of Wisconsin's federally recognized nations were represented. The gathering is a reminder that the ogichidaa tradition runs through every Wisconsin nation, not only the Ojibwe bands Patty documented in Way of the Warrior. The Mohican News coverage names specific veterans and their service branches, the kind of granular honoring that institutional press releases rarely manage.
Issue 016 · August 23, 2026
Mayme 'Pat' Melva Davids, age 95, of the Stockbridge-Munsee Community passed to the spirit world on May 12, 2026, as the second-eldest tribal member. Born in 1930, she lived on the reservation for most of her life and was remembered as a devoted community presence across nearly a century of Mohican history. Patty, you will recognize the Davids name: Dorothy 'Dot' Davids, the Stockbridge-Munsee educator who appears in Indian Nations of Wisconsin, was part of this same family network that has anchored Mohican civic and cultural life for generations. Pat Davids carried that continuity quietly, the kind of elder whose presence is felt most fully in her absence.
Issue 016 · August 23, 2026
Harold Robert 'Whitey' Bowman, age 72, of Shawano and an enrolled member of the Mohican Nation, passed away peacefully on July 23, 2026, surrounded by family. He served eleven years in the United States Navy during the Vietnam era, reaching the rank of petty officer. His service joins a long line of Stockbridge-Munsee veterans whose military records are being honored this summer through the Banners of Honor project at North Star Mohican Casino Resort. Miigwech for his service.
Issue 015 · August 16, 2026
The Cultural Affairs department introduced a new recurring column in the Mohican News sharing Mohican and Munsee vocabulary with the community, opening with the four seasons in both languages. The column notes that Mohican and Munsee were traditionally distinct but related languages, a distinction that matters for revitalization work. Small, consistent community-facing language exposure like this is how immersion cultures get built from the ground up, one issue at a time.
Issue 015 · August 16, 2026
Ella 'Ellie' Kazik, an enrolled member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians, passed away on May 30, 2026, at the age of 72. She held the distinction of being the first legal secretary for the Stockbridge Tribe and later served for many years as payroll manager, roles that placed her at the center of the tribe's institutional development during a critical period of self-governance expansion. Her work was the kind of foundational administrative labor that makes sovereignty operational, the unglamorous infrastructure behind every tribal program. The Mohican News honored her in its community pages.
Issue 014 · August 9, 2026
Ayasha M. Bowman, a senior at Wausau East High School and enrolled member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Community, took first place in Wisconsin's Seventh District Congressional Art Competition with a piece titled 'Apostle Islands.' The Apostle Islands sit in the heart of Ojibwe treaty territory, and a Mohican student choosing that landscape as her subject is its own quiet statement. Bowman's win is the kind of story that belongs in the brief not as an exception but as an ordinary fact: a young Wisconsin Native woman making art that matters, on her own terms.
Issue 013 · August 2, 2026
With Wisconsin's August primary approaching, NARF issued a clear reminder this week: "Native Vote" shirts are nonpartisan and are generally permitted at polling places, even though some Native voters have been wrongly turned away for wearing them in past elections. The guidance is practical and timely for tribal members in northern Wisconsin counties where poll workers have historically been unfamiliar with Native voting rights. NARF notes that rules vary by state, so tribal election offices should verify local guidance before August 11.
Issue 006 · June 14, 2026
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.
Issue 002 · May 17, 2026
Governor Evers signed legislation directing $125 million to address PFAS contamination in Wisconsin's water supplies, with tribal communities explicitly included among those eligible for grant funding. Mazinaigan notes that some of the highest PFAS levels in the state have been documented near tribal lands. The funding is meaningful but the contamination problem it addresses is not going away.
Issue 001 · May 10, 2026
Wisconsin's tribal nations and commercial gambling interests are at odds over a state legislative proposal to legalize online sports betting, with tribes arguing the bill would undercut the exclusivity provisions in their gaming compacts. WPR has been tracking this story, which sits at the intersection of sovereignty, economic development, and the state's long-standing compact relationships with tribal governments. The compacts were hard-won; any erosion of exclusivity has real fiscal consequences for nations whose governmental programs depend on gaming revenue.
Background
· 2024
· stockbridge-updates
Shannon Holsey has served multiple terms as Tribal President of the Stockbridge-Munsee Community. Her tenure has spanned a long compact dispute with the State of Wisconsin over revenue payments and the Ho-Chunk Beloit casino proposal, a 2019 federal court loss on the rival casino challenge, and ongoing leadership at the National Congress of American Indians, where she has served as a vice president.
Background
· 2023
· heather-bruegl
Heather Bruegl, Oneida Nation citizen and first-line descendant of Stockbridge-Munsee, serves as Director of Cultural Affairs for the Stockbridge-Munsee Community. She curated the touring exhibit Muh-he-con-ne-ok: The People of the Waters That Are Never Still and speaks widely on Indigenous history, policy, and truth-telling in museums. Her doctoral research at UW-Green Bay centers the responsibility of cultural institutions to tell Indigenous history truthfully, and she sits on the boards of the Wisconsin Federation of Museums and AASLH.
Background
· 2023
· new-england-public-media
In January 2023 a new Massachusetts law authorized the town of Stockbridge to transfer eighteenth-century documents to the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohicans of Wisconsin, including a 1780 document signed by tribal leaders describing the tribe's efforts to regain control of land distribution. The transfer joined an ongoing repatriation of objects from the Berkshire Museum and other Massachusetts institutions and built on Rose Miron's scholarship of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation Historical Committee's decades of archival activism.
Background
· 2022
· teach-lang-wisconsin
The Stockbridge-Munsee Community now runs language revitalization programs in both of its recognized languages, Mohican and Munsee. The Cultural Affairs Department has produced an extensive Mohican video series using Total Physical Response, in which words attach to physical movement to aid retention. The programs sit alongside the archives of the Arvid E. Miller Memorial Library and Museum, the largest collection of Mohican documents and artifacts in the world.
Background
· 2020
· north-star-mohican-casino-resort
Since opening in May 1992 in Bowler, the North Star Mohican Casino Resort has grown into the economic engine of the Stockbridge-Munsee Community, with more than 1,000 slot machines, table games, weekly bingo, a hotel, and tournament golf. The casino sits at the heart of a decades-long compact-and-revenue dispute with the State of Wisconsin, including Stockbridge-Munsee's call on Governor Walker to enforce compact terms after Ho-Chunk's Beloit expansion.
Background
· 2018
· uw-milwaukee-eqi
Named for Electa Quinney, the first public schoolteacher in Wisconsin and a Stockbridge-Munsee citizen, the Electa Quinney Institute at UW-Milwaukee is a teacher training and Indigenous education research center. Its work partners directly with Indian Community School, Milwaukee Public Schools, and tribal-level education programs across the state. The institute closes a gap the 2013 chapter could not have known would matter so much: how to prepare teachers — Native and non-Native — to serve the urban Native classrooms that Wisconsin's relocation history created.
Background
· 2014
· wisconsin-academy
Patty followed Indian Nations of Wisconsin with Native People of Wisconsin (2003), a social studies text for younger readers, and Seventh Generation Earth Ethics (2014), profiles of twelve Indigenous Wisconsin stewards including Joe Rose, Dot Davids, and Walter Bresette, which won the Midwest Book Award for Culture. Her PBS documentary Way of the Warrior aired nationally in 2007 and 2011, drawing on her grandfather Edward DeNomie's WWI service with the 32nd Red Arrow Division. The decade between INW editions produced the body of work the third edition now sits alongside.
Background
· 2010
· Native American Rights Fund
In 2010 the State of New York and the Stockbridge-Munsee Community settled the tribe's land claim by transferring 330 acres in Sullivan County in the Catskills plus 2 acres in Madison County, in exchange for the tribe's release of its larger 23,000-acre claim near Syracuse. New York granted the tribe rights to develop a Catskills casino, which the tribe withdrew in June 2014 amid competition from Orange County developers. The Sullivan County land remains in the tribe's ancestral Munsee homeland.
Background
· 2024
· brothertown-indian-nation
Formed in the 1700s under the leadership of Samson Occom from communities descended from Pequot, Narragansett, Montauk, Tunxis, Niantic, and Mohegan tribes, the Brothertown Indian Nation now centers its community in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. The nation operates under a constitutional government and holds its annual powwow the first Saturday in April, a community picnic in July, and a Homecoming gathering the third Saturday in October. Tribal officials continue to coordinate the congressional restoration effort with Wisconsin's delegation.
Background
· 2023
· brothertown-indian-nation
Following the BIA denial, the Brothertown Indian Nation pivoted to the only remaining path: congressional restoration. The tribe has worked with Wisconsin congressional delegates to introduce restoration bills and has continued to operate from its Fond du Lac County base. The 3,137-member nation traces continuous community to the 1839 termination and before, with leadership consistently arguing that descent verification and community continuity are not in genuine dispute.
Background
· 2012
· Bureau of Indian Affairs press releases
In August 2009, Acting Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary George Skibine issued a proposed finding against acknowledging the Brothertown Indian Nation. The September 2012 final determination confirmed the denial, holding that the 1839 Act of Congress had terminated the federal relationship and that only a new act of Congress could restore it. The Brothertown are the only one of Wisconsin's twelve tribes that remain without federal recognition.