Issue 001 · May 10, 2026
ICT marks the departure of Mary Simon, an Inuk leader who served as Canada's first Indigenous Governor General, being replaced by a former Supreme Court justice. Simon's tenure was consequential: she used the ceremonial platform of the office to advance Indigenous reconciliation conversations at the highest levels of Canadian government. Her exit is worth noting as a moment of transition in the broader continental Indigenous political landscape that Patty tracks.
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
· 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
· 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
· bad-river-film
Mary Mazzio's documentary Bad River opened in March 2024, narrated by Quannah ChasingHorse and Edward Norton and produced by Grant Hill and Allison Abner. The film chronicles the Bad River Band's fight against Enbridge Line 5 inside the longer arc of settler colonialism, the Catholic church's boarding school role, and corporate land use. It won the Environmental Media Association's Best Documentary and earned three Critics' Choice nominations.
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
· project-muse
Stephen Kantrowitz's 2023 book Citizens of a Stolen Land: A Ho-Chunk History of the Nineteenth-Century United States rewrites the Ho-Chunk into the foreground of the removal-era story Patty's chapter sketches. The book tracks the Wisconsin remnant's refusal to relocate, the splitting of the tribe between Wisconsin and Nebraska, and the legal and political mechanics by which the United States manufactured the Ho-Chunk's invisibility. It is the most significant new scholarship on the Ho-Chunk since Patty's first edition.
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
· 2014
· wisconsin-academy
Patty followed Indian Nations of Wisconsin with Native People of Wisconsin (2003), a social studies text for younger readers, and Seventh Generation Earth Ethics (2014), profiles of twelve Indigenous Wisconsin stewards including Joe Rose, Dot Davids, and Walter Bresette, which won the Midwest Book Award for Culture. Her PBS documentary Way of the Warrior aired nationally in 2007 and 2011, drawing on her grandfather Edward DeNomie's WWI service with the 32nd Red Arrow Division. The decade between INW editions produced the body of work the third edition now sits alongside.