Issue 001 · May 10, 2026
The Bad River Band's governing board voted this week to formally recognize May 5 as a Tribal Day of Awareness for missing and murdered Indigenous women and relatives, and authorized the creation of a new tribal task force to address the crisis. The Wisconsin Examiner covered the vote, though the story would benefit from a direct quote from a Bad River council member or advocate. This is a meaningful institutional step: a task force with a home community mandate carries more weight than a state-level working group, and it grounds the national MMIW conversation in the specific geography and kinship networks of Mashkiiziibii.
Issue 001 · May 10, 2026
The Bad River Band filed a motion in federal court this week seeking to halt construction on Enbridge's proposed Line 5 reroute through Ashland and Iron counties, arguing the project should not proceed while the tribe's underlying easement lawsuit remains unresolved. WPR's Native American coverage has the story, though the tribal filing itself is the document worth tracking down. This is the central legal front in a fight that has defined Bad River's public life for years, and the motion signals the band is not prepared to let construction create facts on the ground while the courts deliberate.
Issue 001 · May 10, 2026
Ashland County approved an agreement this week that would provide county reimbursement for law enforcement costs associated with policing protests of the Enbridge Line 5 reroute project. WPR reported the development without specifying who funds the reimbursement, which is the question worth pressing. The arrangement has a familiar and troubling shape: public safety resources aligned with a private pipeline company's construction timeline, in the homeland of the very tribe whose treaty rights are at the center of the dispute.
Issue 001 · May 10, 2026
Wisconsin's tribal nations and commercial gambling interests are at odds over a state legislative proposal to legalize online sports betting, with tribes arguing the bill would undercut the exclusivity provisions in their gaming compacts. WPR has been tracking this story, which sits at the intersection of sovereignty, economic development, and the state's long-standing compact relationships with tribal governments. The compacts were hard-won; any erosion of exclusivity has real fiscal consequences for nations whose governmental programs depend on gaming revenue.
Issue 001 · May 10, 2026
WPR's explainer this week lays out the procedural terrain for Bad River's emergency motion to stop Enbridge construction, walking through the Bayfield County court proceedings and the federal case running in parallel. It is a useful primer, though it would be stronger with more direct tribal voice. The core tension the piece surfaces is real: construction is advancing on the ground while the legal question of whether the reroute can proceed at all remains genuinely open.
Issue 001 · May 10, 2026
WPR's conversation with a northern Wisconsin tribal leader this week surfaced the persistent frustration that state and federal policy is made by people who rarely travel north of Highway 29, let alone understand what treaty-protected resources mean to communities whose livelihoods and spiritual lives depend on them. The framing is one Patty, you will recognize from your own fieldwork: the geography of neglect is not accidental. The piece is worth reading alongside the Line 5 and fishing-restriction stories as a reminder of the political context in which those legal fights unfold.
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
· 2026
· Wisconsin Examiner
On April 22, 2026, the Bad River Tribal Council voted to formalize May 5 as a Bad River Tribal Day of Awareness for missing and murdered Indigenous women and relatives and authorized the creation of a tribal task force. Gina Jensen, who represents the tribe's police commission, noted that the murder rate for Indigenous women is ten times the national average. More than fifty community members walked the annual MMIW/R route inside the reservation that week, the route marked by red dresses on garden stakes.
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
· 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
· midwest-environmental-justice-network
On June 23, 2023, U.S. District Judge William Conley ordered Enbridge to cease operating Line 5 on the Bad River reservation by June 2026 and to pay the Band $5.1 million for nine years of trespass, with continuing quarterly payments. The court found the pipeline a 'public nuisance' carrying an imminent threat of rupture that could contaminate the Band's drinking water and the manoomin sloughs. It was the first U.S. court order to shut down a major operating oil pipeline on tribal land.
Background
· 2023
· WPR Native American coverage
On January 25, 2023, the six Wisconsin Ojibwe bands marked 40 years since the Voigt Decision, the 1983 federal appeals court ruling that reaffirmed treaty rights to hunt, fish, and gather on ceded territory under the 1837 and 1842 treaties. Voigt is the legal foundation under every subsequent treaty case in Wisconsin, from the spear fishing battles of the 1980s to the wolf hunt lawsuits to the Line 5 trespass ruling. Northwoods tribal leaders reflected on the violence the original ruling provoked at the boat landings and on what has been built since.
Background
· 2022
· indigenous-climate-resilience-network
Research across the Great Lakes region has confirmed that manoomin is now declining roughly 5 to 7 percent annually due to drastic precipitation shifts and rising temperatures, and the species has been deemed the most vulnerable food throughout Anishinaabeg territories. The Bad River sloughs, which hold the largest remaining coastal wild rice bed on the Great Lakes, face accelerating heat, lake-level fluctuation, and algal blooms. Tribal nations are leading restoration grounded in Traditional Ecological Knowledge while agencies belatedly learn from elders.
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
· 2021
· doe-indian-energy
In May 2021 the Bad River Band completed Ishkonige Nawadide, a 500-kilowatt solar array paired with more than 1,000 kilowatt-hours of battery storage powering the Health and Wellness Center, the wastewater treatment plant, and the Chief Blackbird Administration Building. The project was a direct response to the July 2016 flood that knocked out power across the reservation for days and damaged critical infrastructure. Funded through the Department of Energy's Office of Indian Energy.
Background
· 2021
· WPR Native American coverage
Joe Rose, known by his Ojibwe name Moka'ang Giizis (Rising Sun), walked on February 23, 2021, at age 85 from complications of COVID-19. A Bad River tribal elder and Northland College emeritus professor, Rose was a part of virtually every significant environmental and treaty-rights struggle the North Country faced for half a century. He died during the brutal February wolf hunt he had spent decades resisting as a lifelong wolf advocate. Patty called him a second dad.
Background
· 2015
· ICT (Indian Country Today)
On March 24, 2015, Gogebic Taconite president Bill Williams pulled the company's preapplication for the 4.5-mile open-pit iron mine that would have produced eight million tons of taconite annually over the Bad River watershed. Six Wisconsin Ojibwe bands, led by Bad River, had organized the EPA review and grassroots resistance that surfaced the wetlands the company claimed did not exist. Williams cited 'unexpected extensive wetlands' and EPA permit uncertainty.
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.
Background
· 2013
· oil-and-water-dont-mix
In June 2013 the Bad River Tribal Council voted against renewing the 20-year easements that had allowed Enbridge's Line 5 to cross 12 allotment parcels on the reservation. The decision came three years after Enbridge's Line 6B ruptured into Michigan's Kalamazoo River, dumping more than 843,000 gallons of crude. That no vote became the foundation of every Line 5 ruling that followed.
Background
· 2012
· ramsar
On February 2, 2012, the Kakagon and Bad River Sloughs received Ramsar designation as a Wetland of International Importance, the first such site owned by a tribal nation in the United States. The 16,000-acre complex holds the largest natural wild rice bed on the Great Lakes and the last extensive coastal manoomin bed in the region, critical to the genetic diversity of Lake Superior wild rice. Designation came after years of stewardship work with the Wisconsin Wetlands Association and partners.