Issue 001 · May 10, 2026
WPR reports that Kimberly Blaeser, a White Earth Ojibwe poet and former Wisconsin Poet Laureate, has received a National Book Foundation prize for her collection 'Ancient Light.' Blaeser's work has long woven Anishinaabemowin, landscape, and memory into forms that resist easy categorization, and this recognition from a major national literary institution is a genuine milestone. Patty, you know her work well, and this is the kind of story that belongs in your files for the next edition of Indian Nations of Wisconsin.
Issue 001 · May 10, 2026
WPR profiles an Ojibwe jingle dress dancer who is using digital platforms to extend a family tradition of activism, connecting the physical practice of dance to contemporary forms of Indigenous visibility and resistance. The story is exactly the kind of 'Native People Up Close' framing Patty's textbook calls for: a specific person, a specific practice, a specific lineage, no vanishing-race framing in sight. The jingle dress itself carries a healing origin story from the flu pandemic era, which gives the digital extension of that tradition an additional layer of resonance.
Issue 001 · May 10, 2026
WPR covers a Wisconsin author whose debut middle-grade novel is being described as an epic Indigenous fantasy, a genre that has been growing in visibility since Rebecca Roanhorse and others demonstrated its commercial and cultural reach. Middle-grade fiction is a particularly important space for Indigenous storytelling because it reaches young readers before the mainstream curriculum has had a chance to flatten Native history into the past tense. The Wisconsin connection makes this especially worth tracking for Patty's Indigenous youth media beat.
Issue 001 · May 10, 2026
ICT's biweekly Indigenous arts and entertainment column this week covers Native fashion, a new 'Borders' documentary series, and a U.S. Postal Service buffalo stamp, offering a useful snapshot of where Indigenous creative work is landing in mainstream cultural spaces right now. The column is a reliable aggregator for this beat, and the 'Borders' series in particular sounds worth tracking as a potential model for the kind of Indigenous-produced documentary work that Ice Worlds is also doing.
Issue 001 · May 10, 2026
High Country News published a reported piece this week on the 'Red Wind commune,' a case study in Indigenous identity fraud and the real harm it causes to Native communities, from diluted cultural authority to legal and financial exploitation. The piece is careful and does not sensationalize, which is the right approach to a story that can easily tip into spectacle. For Patty, who has spent a career insisting on the specificity of tribal citizenship and the difference between self-identification and belonging, this is a story with direct professional relevance.
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
· potawatomi-trail-of-death-association
The Potawatomi Trail of Death of 1838, the forced removal of 859 Potawatomi from Indiana to Kansas during which more than 40 people, mostly children, died, has been commemorated by a Potawatomi-led caravan retracing the 660-mile route every five years since 1988. Eighty historical markers placed by Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, 4-H clubs, and Potawatomi families now mark campsites every 15 to 20 miles across 26 counties in Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas. Wisconsin Potawatomi descendants participate annually.
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
· 2023
· encyclopedia-of-milwaukee
For decades, Indian Summer Festival anchored each September at Henry Maier Festival Park as one of the largest celebrations of Native culture in the Midwest. The festival is documented in the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee as a defining urban Native cultural event. In the most recent festival park calendars, however, Indian Summer is conspicuously absent — and an Incredible India Festival has taken a weekend that culturally adjacent organizers used to share with Indian Summer. The disappearance is worth a third edition's notice: it signals either a planned hiatus, an organizational rupture, or both, and it leaves a hole in the city's public-facing Native cultural calendar.
Background
· 2022
· earthjustice
In June 2022, the Michigan State Historic Preservation Review Board voted unanimously to support the nomination of Anaem Omot, the Menominee cultural landscape bisected by the Menominee River between Wisconsin and Michigan, to the National Register of Historic Places. The district includes burial mounds, garden beds, and dance rings. The vote followed years of advocacy by Menominee historians, scientists, and tribal leaders, and arrived alongside the tribe's defeat of the Back Forty open-pit mine on the same river.
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
· wisconsin-academy
William Nąąwącekǧize Quackenbush (Deer Clan) serves as the Ho-Chunk Nation's Tribal Historic Preservation Officer and Cultural Resources Division Manager. He has guided interpretation at Effigy Mounds National Monument including the Sny Magill Mound Group and Kingsley Bend, taught mound stewardship through the Wisconsin Academy and the Wisconsin Archeological Society, and is the most consulted Indigenous voice on Wisconsin mound projects.
Background
· 2020
· wikipedia
Apesanahkwat (born January 19, 1949) served as tribal chairman of the Menominee Indian Reservation eight times and is widely considered one of the foremost originators of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988. A Vietnam Marine Corps veteran, he is also a champion northern traditional dancer and singer and has acted in Wind River, Northern Exposure, Stolen Women, and Babylon 5. He remains one of the most active orators on tribal sovereignty, education, and language revitalization.
Background
· 2019
· city-of-madison
In October 2019 the Madison Board of Park Commissioners approved the city's first Burial Mounds Policy, developed with the Ho-Chunk Nation and the Wisconsin Historical Society. The policy governs management of mound groups on city land including the Forest Hill Cemetery group, seven precontact effigy mounds dating from 700 to 1200 CE that are listed on the National Register and the City of Madison's landmarks register. The policy sets the template Bill Quackenbush has built on across Dane County since.
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.