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 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
· 2025
· oneida-nation
Ernie Stevens Jr. of the Oneida Nation passed suddenly on September 26, 2025, at age 66, six months after his thirteenth re-election as chairman of the Indian Gaming Association. He led IGA for 24 years and served as a councilman on the Oneida Business Committee from 1993 to 1999, working in self-determination and youth advocacy. He was a regular voice at the Native American Basketball Invitational and a fixture of Indian Country sports.
Background
· 2024
· northwestern-history
Doug Kiel (Oneida Nation, Northwestern University) is the author of Unsettling Territory: The Resurgence of the Oneida Nation in the Face of Settler Backlash, published by Yale University Press. He co-curated the Field Museum's permanent Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories exhibit (2022) and the Newberry Library's Indigenous Chicago (2024-2025), and has served as expert witness in federal appeals over Oneida land rights. His work is the contemporary scholarly companion to Patty's chapter.
Background
· 2023
· oneida-nation
Tehassi Hill has served as chairman of the Oneida Nation since August 2017 and is now in his third three-year term. He represents the nation on the Great Lakes Inter-Tribal Council board, sits on Wisconsin's Natural Resources Damage Trustee Council, and is the nation's designee to the EPA's Regional Tribal Operating Committee. His leadership has centered on land buy-back, health care, and natural resources protection.
Background
· 2023
· pbs-wisconsin
After more than three decades of treaty-driven land reacquisition, the Oneida Nation now controls a working portfolio that includes Tsyunhehkwa farm, the Oneida Apple Orchard with roughly 4,500 trees, a bison and Black Angus operation, and restored prairie and wetland sites where poor cropland once stood. Chairman Tehassi Hill has framed the buy-back as a generational obligation: restoring not just acreage but ecosystem function.
Background
· 2022
· oneida-nation
Across the past decade the Oneida Nation has restored more than 300 acres of wetlands along Duck Creek, established 30 miles of stream buffers, restored 4,000 feet of ditched stream channels, restored 17 miles of stream passage, and created over 500 acres of new forest. The Prairie Valley project, started in 1995 on land that once produced corn, now hosts 67 species of native grasses and flowers. Trout Creek headwaters work since 2018 has restored another 400 acres of prairie, wetland, and forest.
Background
· 2022
· oneida-nation
The Oneida Nation School System runs a full immersion school on the reservation near Green Bay, the only Iroquois language immersion school in Wisconsin. Oneida is also taught at two nearby public school districts, at St. Norbert College and UW-Green Bay, and through an immersion Head Start program and adult community classes. The Indian Community School, founded in 1969 by three Oneida mothers, remains a model for tribally-run urban schooling in Milwaukee.
Background
· 2021
· wuwm
On August 14, 1971, Milwaukee AIM activists Herb Powless (Oneida) and Jerome Starr (Ojibwe) occupied the abandoned McKinley Coast Guard Station on Milwaukee's lakefront, citing the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie's provision that abandoned federal property reverts to original inhabitants. The takeover led to the city and BIA handing over the building for use as the original Indian Community School. WUWM, Shepherd Express, and TMJ4 all marked the 50th anniversary in August 2021. The story is the founding myth of urban Indian Milwaukee and a reminder that 'land back' has Wisconsin precedent.
Background
· 2020
· poetry-foundation
Roberta J. Hill (born 1947), Oneida poet and Professor of English and American Indian Studies at UW-Madison, has anchored the Oneida literary canon across the post-INW decades. Her collections Star Quilt, Philadelphia Flowers, Her Fierce Resistance, and Cicadas: New and Selected Poetry carry dispossession and forced migration through formal iambic structures while keeping Oneida cadence intact. Her scholarly work on her grandmother Lillie Rosa Minoka-Hill, the first Native woman physician in Wisconsin, is also foundational.
Background
· 2020
· oneida-nation
Tsyunhehkwa, which translates as Life Sustenance, has grown into the Oneida Nation's flagship sustainable agriculture program. The 80-acre farm near Hobart, directed by Jeff Metoxen, grows white corn and other organic crops, raises grass-fed beef, and serves as an educational model rather than a commercial operation. The nation also runs the Oneida Apple Orchard and a bison and Black Angus operation on land it has bought back.
Background
· 2019
· oneida-nation
In July 2019, Oneida women from the three communities divided by international borders since the 1830s removal received a 30-acre gift of land from a Quaker ally within their traditional homelands in Clinton, New York. As Oneida Wolf Clan Faithkeeper Diane Schenandoah said, reuniting all Oneida on their ancestral homelands was always the original intent of the land claims case. The gift formalized a cross-border reunion that has grown through clan-mother work across two centuries.
Background
· 2017
· wikipedia
Cristina Danforth (Oneida name Kwahlak^ni) served on the Oneida Business Committee for twenty years across roles as Councilwoman, Treasurer, Vice Chairwoman, and Chairwoman, the last role twice. As treasurer she led the balanced budgets and self-funded gaming expansion that transformed the nation's finances. She negotiated gaming compacts for the United Tribes of Wisconsin, the Oneida Compacts, and the New York Land Claims, served as president of the Midwest Alliance of Sovereign Tribes, and preceded Tehassi Hill as chair.
Background
· 2015
· indian-community-school
The Indian Community School, born from the 1971 AIM takeover of the abandoned McKinley Coast Guard Station on Milwaukee's lakefront, moved in 2007 to a $35 million, 178-acre campus in Franklin, about thirteen miles from downtown. The Forest County Potawatomi's twenty-year lease and the gaming revenue that followed funded the move and helped sustain the school. ICS serves about 364 Native students K-8, and every kindergartner commits to daily language instruction in Oneida, Menominee, or Ojibwe — a quiet but radical bet on the next generation.
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
· 2008
· national-endowment-for-the-arts
The Oneida Hymn Singers of Wisconsin, who have maintained their Oneida-language Christian hymn tradition for nearly nine decades, received a National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship in 2008, the highest honor the United States bestows on its folk and traditional artists. The group, ranging in size from a dozen to more than fifty and in age from teens to over eighty, opened the National Museum of the American Indian in 2004 and carries more than one hundred hymns. Most learn the songs phonetically, the language having outlasted speakers.