Issue 018
The Weekly Brief
For the week of September 6, 2026
The dominant thread this week runs through the ceded territories and the waters that sustain them: the fall 2026 issue of Mazina'igan arrived with a full season preview for manoomin, updates on the Enbridge Line 5 spill near Mashkiiziibii, and the 32nd Partners in Fishing gathering at Lac du Flambeau, all reminding us that treaty rights are not abstractions but living relationships between Anishinaabe people and the land. Meanwhile, in Madison, the school board voted to rename an elementary school after Ada Deer, and the Stockbridge-Munsee Tribal Council quietly approved participation in the third edition of Indian Nations of Wisconsin, a development that belongs in your workshop immediately. Nationally, NARF and tribal nations are pressing voting-rights fights on multiple fronts, the Bureau of Indian Education is facing a lawsuit over staffing cuts, and the Trump administration's mail-in voting restrictions are drawing specific concern from Indian Country journalists tracking their disproportionate impact on reservation voters.
Listen to this issue
Spoken by Deepgram Aura. The written brief above is the canonical version.
Across the Twelve Nations
A quieter news week in Wisconsin tribal governance, but three items stand out: one that belongs directly in your workshop, one that honors a giant, and one that tracks the ongoing Lac du Flambeau road and fishing disputes.
Stockbridge-Munsee Tribal Council Approves Participation in Third Edition of Indian Nations of Wisconsin
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.
Madison School District Renames Elementary School After Ada Deer
The Madison Metropolitan School District voted at its August 24 board meeting to rename Conrad A. Elvehjem Elementary as Ada Deer Elementary, honoring the Menominee leader who became the first Native woman to head the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Ada Deer, who walked on in 2023, is named throughout your Menominee chapter as a transformative figure in federal Indian policy and tribal self-determination. A Madison school bearing her name is the kind of civic recognition that belongs in the next edition, and it is the sort of ordinary, durable honor that outlasts any administration.
Stockbridge-Munsee Welcomes Home More Than 25 Repatriated Belongings Tied to Sachem John B. Austin Quinney
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.
Stockbridge-Munsee Fellow Explores Mohican Homelands for the First Time Through Historic Preservation Office
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.
Bowler School District Wins Grant to Support Culturally Centered Programming for Stockbridge-Munsee Students
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.
Treaty Rights, Water, and the Ceded Territories
The fall Mazina'igan is out, and it is dense with ceded-territory science, manoomin outlooks, and Line 5 updates. These are the beats that drive your work, and this week they are well documented.
Line 5 in Wisconsin and Michigan: Drilling Fluid Spill Near Bad River, New Setbacks for Enbridge
Mazina'igan's fall issue reports that Enbridge's Line 5 reroute crew spilled 1,900 gallons of drilling fluid in Iron County near the Bad River Reservation, triggering multiple notices of noncompliance. The piece covers both the Wisconsin reroute fight and parallel developments in Michigan, giving a ceded-territory-wide view of the pipeline's ongoing legal and environmental troubles. This is the primary Native-press account of the spill and belongs alongside the Wisconsin Examiner and WPR coverage you have been tracking.
Manoomin Specialist Kathleen Smith Previews the 2026 Wild Rice Season Across the Ceded Territory
GLIFWC manoomin specialist Kathleen Smith writes in Mazina'igan that the 2026 wild rice season opened with mixed conditions across Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, cautioning that no single weather event or aerial survey tells the full story of a rice bed's health. Her framing is exactly the cyclical, relational approach to time that your books model: the rice teaches us to look at the whole season, not just the headline. This is the kind of grounded, practitioner voice that belongs in the brief.
Ojibwe Elk Hunters Head Into Ninth Consecutive Season in Wisconsin's Ceded Territory
Mazina'igan reports that the Voigt Intertribal Task Force has selected four bands to receive single bull-only tags for the 2026 dagwaagin (fall) elk hunting season, the ninth consecutive year of off-reservation Ojibwe elk hunting in Wisconsin. The slow, careful expansion of this harvest is a treaty-rights success story built on decades of co-management science, and it is the kind of incremental, relationship-based progress that rarely makes mainstream headlines. The Voigt Decision's long aftermath, still unfolding.
32nd Annual Partners in Fishing Gathering Brings Ojibwe Tribes, Wisconsin DNR, and Federal Agencies Together at Lac du Flambeau
Approximately 160 representatives from Ojibwe tribes, the State of Wisconsin, and federal agencies gathered at Lac du Flambeau for the 32nd Partners in Fishing event, fishing the Flambeau Chain together and discussing co-management of the ceded territories. The event is a living institution of the Voigt Decision era, a quiet proof that the treaty-rights battles of the 1980s and 1990s produced durable governance relationships. Mazina'igan is the right source for this; the DNR's press release would have told only half the story.
New $5 Million LakeCare Program Puts Tribal Conservation Priorities at the Center of Great Lakes Protection
A four-year initiative called LakeCare, backed by a $5 million National Fish and Wildlife Foundation grant, is launching to protect aquatic ecosystems in Michigan's 1836 and 1842 Ceded Territories from environmental change and shoreline degradation. The program is described in Mazina'igan as frontline-tribal-led, meaning the conservation priorities are set by the communities whose treaty rights depend on healthy waters, not by state or federal agencies working from the outside in. This is the Seventh Generation principle in institutional form.
Red Cliff Elder Marvin DeFoe Jr. Builds Birchbark Canoe on Madeline Island to Honor the 1854 Treaty
On Madeline Island, Red Cliff Ojibwe elder Marvin DeFoe Jr. led the construction of a traditional wiigwaasi-jiimaan (birchbark canoe) to honor the 1854 Treaty and the cultural revitalization it helped inspire, harvesting the birch bark himself and working with community members through the full process. This is Wayne Valliere's tradition carried forward by another master; the canoe as a living argument for treaty rights. Mazina'igan covers it with the specificity it deserves.
Indian Country: Federal Policy, Courts, and Sovereignty
Two NARF actions and a BIE lawsuit dominate the federal beat this week, alongside a significant voting-rights fight in North Dakota and the Lake Ontario renaming controversy.
Tribal Nations and Students Sue the Bureau of Indian Education Over Staff Cuts That Are Gutting Reservation Schools
NARF filed an amended lawsuit on behalf of three tribal nations, including the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, and students challenging federal cuts to Bureau of Indian Education staff and services that are directly harming children in tribal schools. The Prairie Band Potawatomi are Bodewadmi relatives of Wisconsin's Forest County Potawatomi, and the BIE cuts affect reservation schools across Indian Country. This is a sovereignty and education story at once, and NARF's framing is precise: these are treaty obligations, not discretionary programs.
NARF Report: Native Voters Face Compounding Barriers at Every Stage of the Election Process
A new report from the Native American Rights Fund documents significant, layered obstacles to Native voting, from registration through ballot counting, with particular attention to reservation-based voters who face geographic, linguistic, and administrative barriers that compound one another. The report lands in the same week that the Trump administration's mail-in voting restrictions are drawing specific concern from Indian Country journalists, making the timing pointed. NARF is the right source here; their data is the foundation for the litigation that follows.
Turtle Mountain Band and Spirit Lake Tribe Forced to Re-Argue Their Successful Voting-Rights Challenge in North Dakota
The Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and the Spirit Lake Tribe are back in court, forced to re-argue a redistricting challenge they already won, after a procedural ruling sent the case back for reconsideration. NARF represents the plaintiffs, and the case is a reminder that winning a voting-rights case is not the same as securing the right: the legal terrain keeps shifting beneath tribal nations. The pattern is relevant to every Wisconsin nation whose members vote in state and federal elections.
Supreme Court's Mail-Ballot Ruling Could Disproportionately Harm Native Voters, ICT Reports
ICT's coverage of the Supreme Court's mail-in voting ruling focuses specifically on its potential impact on reservation voters, who often depend on mail ballots because of distance from polling places and limited transportation. The piece is a useful complement to the NARF voting-rights report this week. The pattern of federal election-law changes landing hardest on rural and reservation communities is one that deserves tracking through November.
Wyandotte and Wendat Leaders Call Trump's Lake Ontario Renaming a 'Slap in the Face'
Tribal leaders from the Wyandotte and Wendat nations, whose language gave Lake Ontario its name, say they were not consulted before the Trump administration moved to rename the lake, and they are calling the action a direct erasure of Indigenous presence in the Great Lakes region. ICT covers the story with the tribal voices leading, and the companion opinion piece (candidate 108) from ICT makes the deeper argument: placenames carry memory and relationships older than the United States. This is a Great Lakes story with direct resonance for Wisconsin Anishinaabe communities.
Bears Ears Commission Tribes Revive Legal Fight as Trump Administration Again Cuts Utah Monuments
The five tribal nations of the Bears Ears Commission, including the Hopi, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute, Zuni, and Ute Indian Tribe, are back in court alongside Patagonia and environmental groups, challenging the Trump administration's renewed cuts to Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. The Bears Ears fight is the most visible current example of the land-back and co-management principles that animate treaty-rights work in Wisconsin, and it is worth tracking as a bellwether for how federal land management interacts with tribal sovereignty under this administration.
People Worth Knowing
Hundreds Paddle Canoes Across Big Sandy Lake for the 25th Mikwendaagoziwag Memorial, Honoring the Sandy Lake Tragedy
More than 30 canoes carried hundreds of Ojibwe descendants and supporters across Big Sandy Lake in Minnesota to reach the Mikwendaagoziwag Memorial, which GLIFWC and a dozen Ojibwe bands created 25 years ago to commemorate the Sandy Lake Tragedy of 1850, when the federal government's forced removal killed hundreds of Anishinaabe people. The memorial paddle is not a reenactment; it is a living ceremony of remembrance and resistance, organized by communities that have never stopped grieving and never stopped insisting on the truth. Mazina'igan covers it as the community event it is.
Bad River Forester Gena Abramson Plants 400 Cedar Trees Along Denomie Creek to Heal the Reservation Forest
Mashkiiziibii Natural Resources Forester Gena Abramson, working with community volunteers, planted more than 400 giizhik (cedar) trees along Denomie Creek on the Bad River Reservation, replacing a green ash stand facing certain death from the emerald ash borer. The creek carries the name of your grandfather Edward DeNomie's family, and the act of planting cedar there is a quiet form of continuity: one generation healing what another generation built. This is mino-bimaadiziwin in practice, and it is the kind of story that belongs in the brief.
Michigan State Senator Sean McCann, the Only Native Candidate for Congress in Michigan, Pledges to Oppose Line 5
State Senator Sean McCann, the Democratic nominee for Michigan's 4th Congressional District and the only Native American running for Congress in Michigan this fall, has made opposition to Enbridge Line 5 a centerpiece of his campaign. McCann's candidacy is covered in Native News Online, which is not a source we lean on, but the underlying development is substantive: a Native candidate for federal office in a Great Lakes state running explicitly on pipeline opposition is a political fact worth tracking. The Line 5 fight is moving into electoral terrain.
Long Read
One piece worth fifteen minutes of your Sunday morning.
Ten Years After Standing Rock, Exclusive Documents Reveal Digital Mercenaries Targeted Ojibwe and Lakota Protest Communities
High Country News has obtained exclusive documents showing that Enbridge and its contractors hired digital mercenaries to run a coordinated propaganda campaign against Standing Rock protesters, targeting local communities with disinformation designed to stir anti-protest sentiment. The investigation is published on the tenth anniversary of the standoff, and it draws a direct line from the tactics used at Standing Rock to the playbook now being deployed against pipeline opponents elsewhere, including in Wisconsin. For Patty, the Line 5 connection is not abstract: the same corporate infrastructure that ran information operations at Standing Rock has interests in the Bad River watershed. The piece also raises the 5th R, Reflection, hard: what does it mean to have covered Standing Rock without knowing this was happening underneath? High Country News does the journalism here that the mainstream press did not do in 2016.