Issue 016 · August 23, 2026
Governor Tony Evers joined the Stockbridge-Munsee Community Band of Mohican Indians on July 30 at North Star Mohican Casino and Resort to unveil the last set of dual-language highway signs, completing a statewide initiative that now recognizes all twelve Wisconsin tribal nations in their own languages along state highways. The signs are a small but visible act of sovereignty on the public landscape. For the Stockbridge-Munsee, whose Mohican and Munsee languages were traditionally considered one tongue before colonial dispersal, seeing those words on a state road sign carries weight that a press release cannot fully convey.
Issue 016 · August 23, 2026
On August 5, the Stockbridge-Munsee Community celebrated the return of twenty-five cultural items belonging to Sachems John and Austin Quinney, repatriated from the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian and welcomed home during the 2026 Language and Culture Camp. John Quinney's 1854 Fourth of July address, reprinted in full in this month's Mohican News, is a foundational document of Mohican political thought; bringing his material belongings home alongside a living language camp is the kind of convergence that makes repatriation feel like more than paperwork. The Mohican News has also been running Quinney's address in full this summer, a reminder that the community is actively curating its own intellectual archive.
Issue 016 · August 23, 2026
Wisconsin Public Radio's Native American bureau followed a Red Cliff elder through the process of constructing a birchbark canoe using traditional methods, a practice that connects directly to the Anishinaabe relationship with the Great Lakes watershed. This is the kind of story Patty, you have argued for your entire career: craft as living knowledge, not museum artifact. Wayne Valliere at Lac du Flambeau has been the most prominent public face of this tradition, but Red Cliff elders carrying the same knowledge deserve equal visibility.
Issue 015 · August 16, 2026
Governor Evers joined the Stockbridge-Munsee Community at North Star Mohican Casino on July 30 to unveil the final set of dual-language highway signs, completing a statewide program that now recognizes all eleven federally recognized Wisconsin tribes in their own languages. For the Stockbridge-Munsee, seeing Mohican and Munsee words on state infrastructure is a small but visible assertion of presence on ancestral land. The initiative is the kind of quiet, durable sovereignty act that outlasts any single legislative session. Worth noting for the language revitalization section of the Stockbridge-Munsee chapter.
Issue 015 · August 16, 2026
The Cultural Affairs department introduced a new recurring column in the Mohican News sharing Mohican and Munsee vocabulary with the community, opening with the four seasons in both languages. The column notes that Mohican and Munsee were traditionally distinct but related languages, a distinction that matters for revitalization work. Small, consistent community-facing language exposure like this is how immersion cultures get built from the ground up, one issue at a time.
Issue 015 · August 16, 2026
Sam Alloway, a Forest County Potawatomi elder who has served as Cultural Preservation Division Administrator, sat down for an extended interview on the tribe's Journey Together series, tracing his career from the housing department in 1977 through decades of cultural work. Alloway's longevity in cultural preservation roles means he has watched the Bodewadmi language and ceremonial life navigate the full arc of the self-determination era. The interview is available on YouTube and is the kind of primary-source oral history that belongs in any serious account of FCP's institutional development.
Issue 014 · August 9, 2026
Governor Evers joined the Stockbridge-Munsee Community at North Star Mohican Casino on July 30 to unveil the final set of dual-language highway signs, completing a statewide project that places Mohican and other Wisconsin tribal languages on public roads across the state. The signs are a visible, everyday assertion of presence and continuity. That the Mohican Nation is the last community in the statewide rollout is worth noting: the Stockbridge-Munsee have been here, and the signs now say so in two languages.
Issue 007 · June 21, 2026
Noden-bem-zet (Wind Walker), son of Patrick Daniels Sr. and Lana Rodriguez, graduated from Crandon High School this spring with gold medals from the Wisconsin School Music Association Solo Ensemble Festival, forensics awards, and four years of academic honors. The Traveling Times named him by his Bodewadmi name first, a small editorial choice that carries real weight. He is exactly the kind of young Wisconsin Native voice Patty's 'Native People Up Close' framework asks us to foreground: a specific person doing specific things, not a symbol.
Issue 003 · May 24, 2026
The Billy Daniels Maple Sugar Camp, established around 1993 by one of the first certified Bodewadmi tribal language and cultural teachers, has been revived following Daniels' passing in November 2020 at age 88. The Forest County Potawatomi Cultural Preservation Department is leading the revival, bringing youth back to the iskigamizigan and reconnecting them to the Bodwéwadmimwen vocabulary that Daniels spent his life teaching. This is mino-bimaadiziwin expressed as land practice: a language teacher's life work continuing through the trees he tapped.
Issue 003 · May 24, 2026
The Forest County Potawatomi Language Department hosted a three-day Language Immersion Event that brought together language staff from the Prairie Band, Nottawasseppi Huron Band, and Pokagon Band Potawatomi communities, with participants staying fully immersed in Bodwéwadmimwen for the duration. The Potawatomi Traveling Times account is worth reading slowly: it describes not a classroom exercise but a living network of speakers and learners across multiple communities, working together to strengthen a language that connects them all. The piece also touches on the pedagogical choices the immersion team made, the intergenerational dynamics in the room, and what it means to spend three days inside a language that the boarding school era nearly erased. For the third edition of Indian Nations of Wisconsin, the Forest County Potawatomi language program is one of the most active and collaborative in the state, and this gathering is evidence of that.
Issue 002 · May 17, 2026
Kimberly Blaeser, White Earth Ojibwe poet and former Wisconsin Poet Laureate, has received a National Book Foundation prize for her collection 'Ancient Light,' a body of work that braids Anishinaabemowin, photographic image, and lyric poetry into something genuinely new in American letters. WPR's coverage is the right source. Blaeser's work belongs in the same conversation as the language revitalization programs Patty has tracked across the twelve nations, and her national recognition is the kind of milestone the third edition should name.
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.
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
· forest-county-potawatomi
Tribal estimates put the number of native Potawatomi (Bodéwadmimwen) speakers at seven. The Forest County Potawatomi Language and Culture Department teaches rotating community classes in Carter, Wabeno, Blackwell, Crandon, and Stone Lake, anchored by elder-led seasonal ceremony and traditional practice. The community has leaned on the broader Potawatomi diaspora, with shared curriculum work between Wisconsin's Forest County community and the Pokagon and Citizen Potawatomi nations.
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
· hochunk-renaissance
More than 150 years after the 1837 treaty split the tribe into a Nebraska-removed faction and a Wisconsin remnant, the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin and the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska continue a long arc of cultural reconnection. Joint language work between Wisconsin's Hocąk Wazija Haci and the Nebraska-based HoChunk Renaissance has produced shared curriculum and elder recordings, and members of both nations gather across the Missouri River for ceremonial and ceremonial seasons their ancestors traveled by night under cover of darkness.
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
· 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
· 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.
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.