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.
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
· 2024
· WPR Native American coverage
With fewer than one percent of tribal members functional in the Menominee language and one living first-language speaker left in an unbroken chain, Menomini yoU Inc. broke ground on the 10,000-square-foot Wāsecewan Language Campus near Keshena. The campus will house immersion classrooms, an outdoor cultural space, and the operations of a revitalization movement that took shape during the COVID pandemic through online courses.
Background
· 2024
· wiea
Founded in 1985 to carry on the work of the former Great Lakes Intertribal Council Education sub-committee, the Wisconsin Indian Education Association (WIEA) is the statewide body advocating for Indigenous students and educators across Wisconsin's public school system. WIEA serves on advisory bodies to the State Superintendent and the Department of Public Instruction, and its annual conferences (2024: 'Fostering Teamwork & Collaboration'; 2025: 'Honoring Our Languages') gather Native and non-Native educators around Act 31 implementation, language revitalization, and recruitment of Indigenous teachers. Membership crosses urban-reservation lines and is one of the few statewide infrastructures connecting Milwaukee, Madison, and reservation classrooms.
Background
· 2023
· tribal-college-journal
On December 22, 2023, the Menominee Indian Tribe marked 50 years since President Richard Nixon signed the Menominee Restoration Act, reversing the 1961 termination that had stripped federal recognition, dissolved the reservation into Menominee County, and pushed the people into poverty. The restoration was won by DRUMS, the Determination of Rights and Unity for Menominee Stockholders, founded by Jim White and Ada Deer. The College of Menominee Nation marked the date with a year of programming.
Background
· 2023
· Wisconsin Examiner
Ada Elizabeth Deer of the Menominee Indian Tribe died August 15, 2023, in Fitchburg, Wisconsin, at age 88. The first Menominee to graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1957), the first Native American to earn a Master's in social work from Columbia, the first woman to chair the Menominee tribe after restoration, and the first woman to head the Bureau of Indian Affairs (1993-1997), Deer was the throughline of every Menominee chapter the third edition would build on.
Background
· 2023
· college-of-menominee-nation
Dr. S. Verna Fowler (July 1, 1942 to August 12, 2023) founded the College of Menominee Nation in 1993 in her home's basement with classroom space borrowed from a public high school and an initial cohort of 42 to 49 students. She retired in 2016 after 24 years, having grown the institution to more than 130 faculty and staff, 1,100 alumni, and an annual economic impact of $37 million. The library at CMN now bears her name.
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
· WPR Native American coverage
Ho-Chunk tribal leaders now estimate fewer than 40 native Hoocąk speakers remain. The Hoocąk Academy, a Language Apprentice Program training new teachers, the EeCoonį early childhood program, and the Hoocąk Woiperes e-learning platform run out of Black River Falls, anchored by elders and teenagers recording about 1,000 phrases for the app. Hoocąk has been taught in Baraboo, Black River Falls, Tomah, Wisconsin Dells, and Wisconsin Rapids high schools since 2001.
Background
· 2022
· teach-lang-wisconsin
The Stockbridge-Munsee Community now runs language revitalization programs in both of its recognized languages, Mohican and Munsee. The Cultural Affairs Department has produced an extensive Mohican video series using Total Physical Response, in which words attach to physical movement to aid retention. The programs sit alongside the archives of the Arvid E. Miller Memorial Library and Museum, the largest collection of Mohican documents and artifacts in the world.
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
· 2022
· milwaukee-public-schools
Milwaukee Public Schools operates a First Nations Studies program at the district level, providing curriculum and student support across MPS's hundred-plus schools. The program partners with the Electa Quinney Institute at UW-Milwaukee and Indian Community School in Franklin. For Native families whose children attend regular MPS schools rather than ICS, the First Nations Studies program is the connective tissue: pulling out Native students for cultural programming, supporting Wisconsin Act 31 implementation building-by-building, and keeping urban Indian families and reservation-rooted families in conversation through the school year.
Background
· 2021
· uw-madison-msc
Wunk Sheek, the UW-Madison Indigenous student organization founded in 1968, is one of the oldest Native student groups in the country. Its annual On Wisconsin Spring Powwow draws hundreds of students and Madison-area community members for traditional foods, dancing, music, and vendors. The Indigenous Student Center, established under the American Indian Studies Program in 2009 and transferred to the Multicultural Student Center in 2021, hosts Wunk Sheek and five other Indigenous student organizations. Together they form the Madison-side counterpart to Milwaukee's institutional Native infrastructure — a campus-anchored urban Native presence the chapter doesn't name in its 2013 version.
Background
· 2021
· red-cliff
In 2021 Red Cliff received a $900,000 grant from the federal Administration for Native Americans to create a three-year Ojibwemowin Teaching and Training Program in partnership with the Bayfield School District, the Midwest Indigenous Immersion Network, and the Bad River Band. Dustin 'Gimiwan' Burnette of MIIN, who began as a Bad River adult language instructor in 2020, anchors the curriculum. Bad River Head Start now produces and publishes immersion-classroom books written by language trainees about people and places in Bad River.
Background
· 2018
· us-climate-resilience-toolkit
The College of Menominee Nation's Sustainable Development Institute has built a national reputation since 2009 for tribal climate adaptation research, anchored by an Indigenous six-dimension sustainability framework (land and sovereignty, natural environment, institutions, technology, economy, human perception). SDI led a U.S. Forest Service-supported climate study on the Menominee Forest and now sits at the hub of the Center for First Americans Forestlands partnership, plus the Northeast Climate Science Center.
Background
· 2018
· uw-milwaukee-eqi
Named for Electa Quinney, the first public schoolteacher in Wisconsin and a Stockbridge-Munsee citizen, the Electa Quinney Institute at UW-Milwaukee is a teacher training and Indigenous education research center. Its work partners directly with Indian Community School, Milwaukee Public Schools, and tribal-level education programs across the state. The institute closes a gap the 2013 chapter could not have known would matter so much: how to prepare teachers — Native and non-Native — to serve the urban Native classrooms that Wisconsin's relocation history created.
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.