Background
· 2025
· poynter
On April 22, 2025, Mary Annette Pember of Red Cliff released Medicine River with Pantheon, weaving her mother Bernice Rabideaux's experience as a five-year-old at St. Mary's Catholic Indian Boarding School in Odanah with archival research on the federal boarding school system. St. Mary's operated on the Bad River reservation from 1883 to 1969 under the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, who have since begun a Truth and Healing process that included a repatriation ceremony with the Bad River Tribe.
Background
· 2021
· history-com
Public Law 959, signed in August 1956, pushed thousands of reservation-rooted Native people to Milwaukee, Chicago, Minneapolis, and other Midwestern cities under federal vocational training and job-placement programs. The relocation program ran through the 1970s and is the proximate cause of Milwaukee's urban Native population growth, the founding of the Indian Council of the Elderly, and ultimately the AIM takeover that birthed the Indian Community School. The federal Indian Boarding School Initiative under Secretary Deb Haaland (2021-) has named relocation as a kindred coercive policy in its forthcoming report; urban Indian families today carry both legacies in the same generations.
Background
· 2020
· lco-tribe
Edward Benton-Banai walked on November 30, 2020, at age 89 in Hayward, Wisconsin. A Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe of the Fish Clan, Grand Chief of the Three Fires Midewiwin Lodge since 1986, and a co-founder of the American Indian Movement, he wrote The Mishomis Book in 1979 from the Teachings of the Seven Grandfathers. The book remains the most widely used Anishinaabe primer in North America.
Background
· 2016
· nps
In July 2016, longtime Effigy Mounds superintendent Thomas Munson was sentenced for the 1990 theft of bones of 41 Native Americans from the monument's collection, a theft he carried out to evade NAGPRA. A 2015 Park Service report also found that Superintendent Phyllis Ewing oversaw more than $3 million in illegal construction that desecrated archaeological resources during her 1999-2009 tenure. The reckoning reset NPS tribal consultation across the Upper Midwest and brought the Ho-Chunk, Iowa, and Upper Sioux into active co-stewardship at the site.