Issue 005
The Weekly Brief
For the week of June 7, 2026
The biggest thread running through Indian Country this week is the tension between tribal sovereignty and federal retreat: tribal leaders are pressing Washington on everything from Indian Health Service funding cuts to BIA probate backlogs, even as the Supreme Court's gutting of the Voting Rights Act opens new fronts in the fight for Native political representation. Closer to home, Wisconsin nations are marking MMIW awareness, celebrating a new state law protecting tribal regalia at graduation, and watching the Oneida Nation's food sovereignty work quietly deepen. And out in New Mexico, Deb Haaland's Democratic gubernatorial primary win reminds Indian Country that the pipeline from tribal citizenship to elected office is real and growing.
Listen to this issue
Spoken by Deepgram Aura. The written brief above is the canonical version.
Across the Twelve Nations
A quieter week in Wisconsin, but the stories worth holding are the ones about joy, protection, and community.
Wisconsin Law Now Protects Native Students' Right to Wear Tribal Regalia at Graduation
Governor Tony Evers signed 2025 Wisconsin Act 222, protecting the right of Native students who are tribal members, descendants, or eligible for membership to wear traditional regalia at graduation ceremonies. The Oneida Nation's Kalihwisaks covered the signing with the kind of specific pride that a press release never captures: this is a law that came from Native communities pushing back against schools that had told students to cover their regalia or leave the stage. It is a small but real act of recognition that Native identity belongs in every room, including the one where diplomas are handed out.
Oneida Nation Holds MMIR Walk, Community Members Speak on Loss and Healing
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.
Forest County Potawatomi and Sokaogon Ojibwe Walk Together on MMIP Day
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.
Oneida Nation's 'Mending the Disconnect with Food' Initiative Charts a Path Toward Food Sovereignty
A five-year community grant funded through the Wisconsin Partnership Program at UW School of Medicine and Public Health is working to restore food sovereignty for Oneida families, under the name Mending the Disconnect with Food. The project is doing the slow, generational work of reconnecting people to traditional foods and growing systems that were disrupted by removal and assimilation policies. This is exactly the kind of story that doesn't make the wire services but belongs in the Oneida chapter of the next edition.
Forest County Potawatomi and Sokaogon Communities Mark Eight Years of Recovery Walks Together
The 8th Annual Walk for Recovery on May 15 covered roughly ten miles from the Mole Lake community to the Forest County Potawatomi Community Center, drawing recovery advocates, families, and supporters from both nations. Eight years is not a small thing. It means this walk has outlasted grant cycles, staff turnover, and a pandemic, which is the definition of a community-held practice rather than a program. The collaboration between the Bodewadmi and Ojibwe communities here mirrors the MMIP walk partnership and reflects something durable about how these two nations move through the world together.
Treaty Rights and Water
The Line 5 reroute and the broader pipeline fight stay live this week, alongside a significant Alaska subsistence fishing victory worth tracking for its treaty-rights implications.
A Decade After Standing Rock, the Army Corps Greenlights the Contested Dakota Access Pipeline Segment
The Army Corps of Engineers has approved the long-disputed segment of the Dakota Access Pipeline that runs beneath Lake Oahe, bringing a formal end to the regulatory saga that began with the 2016 Standing Rock protests, though further litigation remains likely. ICT covered this with the context it deserves: the announcement lands as communities prepare for the tenth anniversary of the #NoDAPL encampment, and tribal leaders are clear that the legal fight is not over. For Patty, the Dakota Access decision is a useful frame for the Bad River/Line 5 fight: federal regulatory approval has never meant the end of a pipeline dispute.
NARF Marks Katie John Day: Supreme Court Victory Locks In Alaska Native Subsistence Fishing Rights
The Native American Rights Fund is marking the anniversary of the Supreme Court's ruling in United States v. Alaska, which secured subsistence fishing rights for Alaska Native communities on navigable waters. NARF's reflection on Katie John Day is worth reading alongside the Wisconsin treaty rights beat: the legal architecture that protects Ojibwe spearfishing and manoomin harvesting in the Great Lakes region was built from the same body of federal Indian law that Katie John's decades-long fight helped shape. The ruling is a reminder that treaty and subsistence rights cases move slowly and that the victories, when they come, belong to the communities that refused to quit.
Supreme Court Sends Turtle Mountain Voting Rights Case Back to the Eighth Circuit, Rejecting Erroneous Ruling
The U.S. Supreme Court vacated the Eighth Circuit's decision in Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians et al. v. Howe, a North Dakota voting rights case in which the lower court had stripped private individuals of the right to sue under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. NARF, which litigated the case, called the ruling a significant correction. The case matters beyond North Dakota: the Eighth Circuit's original ruling had threatened to gut private enforcement of voting rights across the region, and the Supreme Court's remand keeps that door open. Native voting rights and treaty rights are not separate issues.
Indian Country
Federal policy, sovereignty, ICWA, and the courts: a busy week for the continental beat.
Tribal Leaders Press Washington as Federal Support for Sovereignty Wavers
ICT's reporting this week captures tribal leaders from across Indian Country calling for the federal government to honor its trust responsibility as agency budgets shrink and staffing at BIA and IHS erodes. The trust responsibility is a legal obligation, not a discretionary program, and tribal leaders are making that point loudly at Senate hearings and in public statements. The story is worth reading alongside the IHS budget hearing coverage (candidate 276): together they sketch a federal government that is structurally retreating from obligations it cannot legally abandon.
Clean Water and Hospital Construction Top Tribal Health Concerns at Senate Budget Hearing
At a Senate Indian Affairs Committee budget hearing, tribal health leaders pressed agency officials on Indian Health Service funding cuts, with clean water access and hospital construction emerging as the most urgent concerns. The FY 2027 budget requests $9.1 billion in discretionary IHS funding, but advocates say that number falls far short of what the trust responsibility requires. For Wisconsin readers: IHS underfunding affects every one of the twelve nations, and the gap between what the federal government is legally obligated to provide and what it actually appropriates has been a defining feature of tribal health for generations.
A Pascua Yaqui Foster Youth Turned Tribal Secretary Is Fighting to Keep ICWA Alive
Rosa Alvarez, tribal secretary of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe and a former foster youth, shared her family's multi-generational history with the child welfare system in a profile republished by ICT from The Imprint. Alvarez's story is the kind of testimony that makes ICWA real: she is not an abstraction or a legal brief, she is a person whose family was separated by the same system that ICWA was designed to interrupt. The piece is a useful counterweight to the institutional framing that tends to dominate ICWA coverage.
Rule Changes for Kinship Care Are Boosting the Number of Native Foster Homes
Adjustments to kinship care reimbursement rules are allowing more Native families to access support when they take in relatives or family friends, and a state official says the number of Native foster homes has increased as a result. ICT's reporting frames this as a quiet ICWA-adjacent win: when the financial barriers to kinship placement drop, more children stay within their communities and nations. The story is worth tracking as a model for what implementation, rather than litigation, can accomplish.
Supreme Court's Voting Rights Ruling Leaves Native Redistricting Advocates Worried About 2031
The Supreme Court's decision in Louisiana v. Callais, striking down a minority opportunity district, has Native voting rights advocates in South Dakota and elsewhere worried about what happens when redistricting cycles come around again. ICT's coverage notes that South Dakota won't redraw its districts until 2031, but the legal landscape is already shifting under Native communities' feet. The ruling compounds the Turtle Mountain voting rights case and the Wyoming redistricting fight (candidate 36) into a pattern: Native political representation is under coordinated pressure from multiple directions at once.
Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Denounce Wyoming Governor's 'Direct Attack on Native Voting'
The business councils of the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes have formally condemned Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon for calling on lawmakers to reexamine electoral boundaries on the Wind River Indian Reservation following the Supreme Court's voting rights ruling. The tribes' statement used the phrase 'direct attack on Native voting,' and Wyoming lawmakers appear unmoved by Gordon's push, at least for now. The episode is a clean illustration of how the Louisiana v. Callais ruling is already being weaponized against Native political power.
Fourth Circuit Rules NAGPRA Applies in a Landmark Boarding School Repatriation Case
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.
Army Begins Its Ninth Year of Returning Native Children's Remains from Carlisle Barracks
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.
Deb Haaland Wins New Mexico Democratic Gubernatorial Primary
Deb Haaland, Laguna Pueblo, former U.S. Secretary of the Interior and one of the first two Native women elected to Congress, clinched the Democratic nomination for governor of New Mexico on Tuesday night. Native Sun News covered the victory with the weight it deserves: if Haaland wins in November, she would be the first Native American governor of New Mexico and one of the very few in U.S. history. The Native Organizers Alliance Action Fund called it another historic milestone; what it actually is, is a woman who has been doing this work for decades reaching the next threshold.
New Federal Law Targets Mortgage Delays on Tribal Trust Land, Tribal Housing Leaders Call It Significant
President Trump signed the Tribal Trust Land Homeownership Act, a new federal law aimed at reducing mortgage processing delays on tribal trust land, and tribal housing leaders are calling it one of the most significant policy shifts for Native homeownership in years. The delays have long been a structural barrier: trust land's legal status means conventional mortgage processes don't apply cleanly, leaving families in limbo. Whether the implementation matches the promise is the next question, but the underlying problem is real and the law addresses it directly.
People
Anishinaabe Hockey Star Abby Roque Leads Montreal to the Women's Professional Championship
Abby Roque, Anishinaabe from Sault Ste. Marie, led the Montreal team to the Professional Women's Hockey League championship this week, facing off against another top Indigenous player in the finals. ICT covered the matchup as the story it is: two Indigenous women at the top of their sport, competing against each other at the highest level, in a league that didn't exist a few years ago. Roque is the kind of figure Patty's 'Native People Up Close' framework was built for: a person doing extraordinary things in an ordinary professional context, not a symbol.
Ojibwe Filmmaker Alex Nystrom Makes a Short Film About Grief and Death
WPR's Native American coverage profiles Ojibwe filmmaker Alex Nystrom, whose short film explores grief and death through an Indigenous lens. WPR is the right source to lead with here. Nystrom is doing the work that Patty's Tribal Youth Media initiative was designed to make possible: a young Native filmmaker with a camera, a story, and the craft to tell it. The subject matter, grief and death, is not incidental; it is the territory that Indigenous filmmakers return to because it is where community and ceremony and loss all live together.
Retiring Oneida Councilman Kirby Metoxen Reflects on Intergenerational Service
Retiring Oneida Business Committee Councilman Kirby Metoxen published a farewell column in Kalihwisaks that reprints a farewell message his father Russell Metoxen wrote upon completing his own term on Council. The pairing is quietly remarkable: two generations of Oneida leadership, the same words, the same commitment, the same community. Kirby Metoxen's departure is routine governance, but the intergenerational frame he chose for his farewell is the kind of detail that belongs in a portrait of how Oneida governance actually works.
A Proposed Indigenous Medical School in Rapid City Could Be the First of Its Kind in the Nation
Donald Warne, a physician and advocate, is leading the push for an Indigenous School of Medicine in Rapid City, South Dakota, with a feasibility study funded and a target opening of 2030. As of 2024, only 0.3 percent of practicing physicians in the United States are Native American; the school is designed to change that pipeline. ICT's coverage names Warne specifically and describes the institutional vision clearly. This is the kind of institution-building story that belongs in the brief not as a press release but as a marker of what Indian Country is building for the seventh generation.
Long Read
One piece worth fifteen minutes of your Sunday morning.
Fond du Lac Band Celebrates the Return of 3,400 Acres of the Cloquet Forestry Center
The Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe marked the return of approximately 3,400 acres known as the Cloquet Forestry Center through Minnesota's state bonding bill, a transfer that tribal leaders called historic. Native News Online covered the signing ceremony, which brought together tribal and state officials for what amounts to one of the larger land returns to a Lake Superior Ojibwe band in recent memory. The Cloquet land sits within the Band's ceded territory and has ecological significance for manoomin and other traditional resources. For Patty, this story sits at the intersection of several beats she tracks closely: land back, Lake Superior Ojibwe treaty territory, and the slow, grinding work of restoring what removal took. It is also a useful counterpoint to the pipeline and mining fights: sometimes the land comes back. The piece is worth reading in full alongside the NARF voting rights and IHS funding stories this week, as a reminder that sovereignty is exercised in many registers at once.