Native Americans, tribal leaders and other supporters of last week's decision by the U.S. Supreme Court regarding adoption say it affirms their status as a sovereign nation and having a unique cultural identity.

The court upheld the Indian Child Welfare Act in Haaland v. Brackeen. The lawsuit was brought by a Texas couple who challenged the federal law requiring Native American kids up for adoption be placed with Native families whenever possible.

Judith LeBlanc, executive director of the Native Organizers Alliance, said too often a patchwork of decisions has been allowed despite the law applying nationwide.

"The truth is that on a state level and on a local, community level -- even though that's the law of the land -- because it's a law that's not funded, sometimes it was not followed and sometimes we have to fight," LeBlanc explained.

Haaland, the first Native American to serve in a president's Cabinet, praised the decision, noting for centuries U.S. policies have inflicted trauma still felt by Native children, families and communities. In the 7-2 ruling, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented, with Alito arguing cases considered under the Indian Child Welfare Act have often omitted what is in a child's best interest.

With another case involving Native water rights yet to be decided by the high court, LeBlanc pointed out last week's victory was a small win in the larger fight to maintain tribal sovereignty and cultural continuity for generations to come.

"This decision gives us a peek into what a truly robust, multiracial, multinational democracy could look like," LeBlanc contended.

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham agreed with the court's decision, noting the critical importance of sustaining a child's connection to their cultural identity.


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Oral arguments were heard this week in a legal fight over redistricting outcomes for North Dakota tribal lands.

About a year ago, North Dakota was ordered to adopt a new legislative map after the Spirit Lake Tribe and Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, along with some individual voters, filed a lawsuit. They claimed the original map, updated after the 2020 census, illegally diluted Native American voting rights.

Samantha Blencke, senior staff attorney for the Native American Rights Fund, said they are now trying to defend redistricting victories in the appeals process, as state leaders push back on recent developments.

"I think the big point here is these are extreme arguments, they go against decades and decades of precedent," Blencke asserted.

The arguments to which she refers are from the North Dakota Secretary of State's office. In its appeal of the decision to order new political boundaries, it contended private citizens cannot pursue legal action under certain sections of the Voting Rights Act. The state argued its efforts did not violate federal law. Blencke anticipates a decision fairly soon but stressed the legal proceedings have no effect on this fall's election.

However, Blencke pointed out a favorable ruling for the state could affect future elections.

"The Legislature could adopt a new remedial map and propose that to the district court to review, to see if it also remedies the vote dilution," Blencke explained.

But legal groups assisting the tribes do not want to reach that point and would prefer to stick with the court-ordered map. According to the Native American Rights Fund, the 2020 census showed the number of Native voters in North Dakota grew to nearly 6% of the state's voting-age population but added the legislature adopted a district map reducing the number of candidates Native voters could elect in the northeastern part of the state.

By Ben Felder for Investigate Midwest.
Broadcast version by Nadia Ramlagan for Oklahoma News Service reporting for the Investigate Midwest-Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Cole McKinney leapt onto the edge of a metal fence and began banging its side, trying to spook a nearly 700-pound bison into turning around inside its pen. But the bison repeatedly lowered its horned head into the fence, resisting McKinney's order to face the other way.

"This part's not easy," said McKinney, the plant manager at Butcher House Meats, a 19,000-square-foot meat processing facility in Hominy, Oklahoma. Owned and operated by the Osage Nation tribal government, the plant processes mostly bison and cattle.

After about 10 minutes of jumping along the side of the pen, McKinney finally got the bison to turn around and head through a chute leading inside the plant's back door.

"Cows are easier because they will often go right in," McKinney said. "Bison have their own spirit."

Built in 2021, the facility's 10 employees slaughter and package animals for dozens of ranchers in this part of northeast Oklahoma, where cattle mostly scatter along the rolling prairies or clump around its winding creeks. The plant also processes cows and bison from the Osage Nation's own ranch, with some of the meat sold in a store at the front of the building.

The Osage Nation's plant is a source of food and employment in this rural community but it's also an attempt to reverse a multi-decade trend of small and medium-sized meat packing plants closing in response to a consolidating cattle industry.

Today, cattle ranchers across the country have fewer processors to sell to, which many say has deflated their profits. Those who have tried to remain independent often don't have a small meatpacker nearby to do business with.

But the impact of consolidation has been especially jarring in America's tribal communities, where the rate of plant closures has exceeded the national average.

Since 1990, beef processing plants on America's tribal lands and reservations have closed at nearly double the rate of the national average, according to data from the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Services division, which monitors meat, poultry and egg production sites.

In Oklahoma, which ranks second in the nation for beef cow inventory and first in the percentage of Native American residents, 60% of the cattle processing plants that have closed since 1990 were in the state's tribal areas.

From 1980 to 2022, the number of all animal processing facilities in Oklahoma declined from 201 to 82, with more than 70% of those closed plants located in tribal areas, according to the USDA's Livestock Slaughter Annual Summary report.

The USDA currently inspects 722 beef processing facilities across the country, less than half the number of plants that were open in 1980. Today, just 28 cattle processing plants are within tribal lands. Two-thirds of those plants are in Oklahoma.

"There is in this region and in this country far too little capacity for meat processing and it's in the hands of far too few people and far too few corporations," said Chuck Hoskin, the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, which opened its own meat processing facility in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, in 2022.

Over the past four years, the Osage, Cherokee and Muscogee (Creek) nations have opened USDA-inspected processing plants in eastern Oklahoma, joining the Quapaw Nation, which opened its own facility seven years ago. Another tribe, the Choctaw Nation, has invested in a recently opened facility in southern Oklahoma.

Supply chain challenges during the early months of COVID-19 inspired many of the tribes to build their own plants, and some used federal pandemic relief funds for initial construction. Using cattle and bison from their own ranches, the tribes are processing meat to supply their daycare centers, senior homes and hotels, as well as some low-income meal programs they operate with federal funding.

However, each plant also processes meat for area ranchers, offering custom cuts and packaging services that have not existed in some communities for many years.

"A lot of ranchers around here were having to travel 40 or 50 miles to get to the nearest processors, but since opening, we have cut down that drive for a lot of ranchers in the area," said Adrian Sinclair, the plant manager at 1839 Cherokee Meat Co., the Cherokee Nation's plant named after the year it formed its constitution. "We are hearing all the time how this (facility) has eased diesel costs and reduced the stress on the animal by not traveling quite as far."

Some Cherokee ranchers raising cattle just for their own family's consumption started commercial operations because the new USDA-inspected facility was close enough to be cost-effective.

"This plant made it easier to (produce) cows because closer is better, closer is cheaper," said Jill Hough, an Osage citizen whose family began processing its herd at the Osage Nation's facility.

According to 2022 USDA figures, bison and beef make up the largest agricultural sector for Native American communities nationwide, accounting for 39% of all Indian agriculture production.

Operating a meat processing facility can give tribal governments more control over their cattle industries, said Chris Roper, a technical assistance director with the Flower Hill Institute, a nonprofit that works with tribes on food sovereignty issues.

Roper once worked for the Quapaw Nation, an Oklahoma tribe that built a meat processing plant in 2017. At the time, it was one of the few tribal-owned facilities in the country. Today, he estimates there are at least 12.

"But there are about a dozen others that are currently working on a new plant that hasn't opened yet," said Roper, who helps tribes across the country plan and build meatpacking facilities. "I think there is a lot of momentum around this, and I project that over the next five years, there will be 50-plus (tribal-owned) plants."

Forced into Oklahoma, tribes built a cattle industry

After being forced to relocate from Kansas to present day northern Oklahoma in the late 1880s, the Osage people struggled to grow crops on their new land. However, its high-nutrient grass made it a prime stop for cattle drives on the way from Texas to the stockyards of Kansas City.

By 1898, the Osage Nation leased more than 431,000 acres to cattle drivers and later raised its own herds, creating a burgeoning livestock industry that attracted new railroad lines.

"Arguably, without Osage grass leases, Oklahoma's modern economy may not have reached its admirable level since fewer homesteaders and businesses would have been able to settle there due to a lack of available transportation," wrote Athena Stephanopoulos in her 2007 research paper, "How the Cows Came Home as Dinner," a history on the Osage cattle industry.

Other tribes followed with their own cattle operations, but the growth in white homesteaders led to the depletion of land suitable for grazing.

Before the end of the 19th century, President Grover Cleveland forced the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes Reservation in present-day western Oklahoma to give up 2 million acres of its cattle grazing land to white settlement.

The loss of land for some tribes increased demand for others, including the Osage, whose cattle grazing leases topped 720,ooo acres by 1910.

Over the next several decades, cattle remained a prominent economic engine in the Osage Nation, whose land became home to some of the state's largest ranches, including a few owned by non-Osage citizens.

But by the second half of the 20th century, America's cattle industry was beginning to shift to one dominated by just a handful of producers who built large facilities that often squeezed out smaller packers and limited where ranchers could sell their cows.

Nearly 45 years ago, 84% of cattle in America were slaughtered in processing plants that handled fewer than half a million animals a year. By 1997, those plants were processing just 20% of the nation's cattle, according to a USDA report on meatpacking consolidation.

That consolidation push was led by four companies - Tyson Foods, Cargill, National Beef Packing Company, and JBS - that now slaughter more than 85% of the nation's steers and heifers.

Large slaughter plants were built in western Kansas, eastern Colorado and the Texas Panhandle, which continued to make western Oklahoma a prime cattle ranching region, especially for large feedlots that fatten cattle just before processing. However, that geographic center moved further away from eastern Oklahoma, where most of the state's tribal communities are located.

In Osage County, which is also the boundary for the Osage Nation reservation, annual cattle production from 1970 to 2017 declined by more than 19%, while statewide numbers increased by 3% during the same time, according to USDA figures.

Of the 21 Oklahoma counties with a cattle population decline of at least 10%, 17 are within tribal reservation boundaries.

Roper, the director with the Flower Hill Institute, said consolidation has also increased the likelihood of supply chain challenges for tribal communities, along with hurting the small ranchers who run their own retail businesses.

"These (tribal) communities realized that they can't rely on the consolidated industry and these big plants to keep the stores filled because at some point that supply chain is going to break down," said Roper, pointing to the pandemic as an example.

Workforce training and more funding needed, tribal advocates say

Sinclair, the plant manager at the Cherokee Nation's meat processing facility, walked past a line of hanging beef carcasses inside a refrigerated room but his eyes studied the floor for any meat scraps or other loose items.

"I take sanitation very seriously," Sinclair said with a laugh. "But I'm proud of how clean we keep this facility, very proud."

In the next room, a team of five employees wearing orange aprons broke down a cut of beef, including one worker on a band saw who sliced through a rib section. In another room, two workers used a machine to grind beef chunks into hamburger patties.

Fourteen people work at the plant, most of whom are Cherokee citizens, according to Whitney Dittman, a spokesperson for the tribe.

During the first three months of 2024, the plant processed about 45 cows for independent ranchers in the area, along with 14 sheep and 16 hogs. The plant also processed more than 46 cows from the Cherokee Nation's own ranch.

The numbers are small compared to facilities owned by one of the four major packing companies. Plants operated by Tyson and National Beef in southwest Kansas each slaughter 6,000 head of cattle a day.

But the Cherokee Nation's meat facility has enough capacity to supply 15,000 pounds of ground beef and 3,600 pounds of roast each month to the Cherokee Nation's several food distribution sites across a 14-county region.

Dittman said processing its own meat helped the Cherokee Nation stretch further a $10 million USDA grant to address food insecurity in tribal communities.

"Having this facility allows us to produce the protein that we would normally have to go out and buy from somewhere else," Dittman said. "It's come full circle with Cherokees producing their own protein for other Cherokees."

Advocates for more tribal-owned meat processing facilities say it can enhance the numerous federal food assistance programs operated by tribes and offer more locally produced meat to users of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, what some call food stamps.

Nationwide, one in four Native Americans use federal food assistance programs, according to the Native Farm Bill Coalition.

The federal government provides some funding to help tribes build and expand plants but recent demand has exceeded those amounts.

Last year, 67 tribes applied for more than $350 million in funding through the Indigenous Animal Harvesting Grant program, which had just $50 million in grants to award, according to the Flower Hill Institute.

Several indigenous agriculture groups have pushed for Congress to add more support for tribal-led meat production in the next Farm Bill, not just through grants but also access to credit.

"Congress should ensure that loan and loan guarantee opportunities are available for the development of meat, poultry, fish, and seafood processing facilities in Indian Country," the Native Farm Bill Coalition, a group advocating for federal policies, argued in its 2022 "Gaining Ground" report. "Access to credit will assist Tribal communities in developing regional food systems and support tribal member access to traditional, affordable, and nutritional sources of protein."

Abi Fain, chief legal and policy officer for the Intertribal Agriculture Council, said the federal government should also look for ways to increase training for meatpacking jobs and USDA inspectors, especially since it can be hard to fill positions in rural communities, where many tribes are located.

"If you are in Muscogee you may only be 30 minutes from Tulsa," said Fain, referring to the location of Muscogee (Creek) Nation's meat processing center, Looped Square Meat Company, located about 25 miles south of the state's second-largest city. "But in other parts of Indian country that is not the case. In some tribes in South Dakota you may be two hours from the nearest city or nearest town."

Fain said she expects the number of tribal-run meat packing plants to increase, even among tribal communities that have not traditionally been involved in agriculture production.

Gaining more control over local food systems is enticing for tribes when they see the success others are having, she added.

"Food is power," Fain said, "and having control over your food sources is the difference between independence or subjugation."


Ben Felder wrote this article for Investigate Midwest.


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By Spoorthy Raman for Mongabay.
Broadcast version by Mike Moen for Wisconsin News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

In the late summer of 2023, thick stands of wild rice stood tall and shimmered gold in some of Lac du Flambeau’s lakes. The plant has been virtually absent in these lakes for decades, so for Joe Graveen, the sight of grain-filled stalks was a thing of joy, he says. As the wild rice program manager for the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, a tribal band in northern Wisconsin, Graveen was seeing the fruits (or grains, literally) of hard work he and his tribe’s members had put in over the past six years.

“It was the first time that I think a lot of us saw wild rice in a while, in about 20 years or maybe longer,” Graveen says. “It always brings a smile to my face to see our harvesters’ reaction.”

The wild rice only grew here after years of grit and endurance. In late 2017, the band launched a new program to revive wild rice in some of the 260 lakes on their reservation. Leading the program is Graveen, a “ricer” and knowledge keeper who learned about the plant and harvesting methods from his elders. The restoration involved seeding the lakebeds with tons of rice seeds, monitoring water quality, fending off geese from gobbling the young rice plants, and keeping tabs on the lakes’ water levels.

Across the Great Lakes Basin in the U.S. and Canada, there’s a growing interest among many tribes and First Nations to lead efforts to revive wild rice. Closely intertwined with Indigenous culture and identity, wild rice was decimated after the arrival of European settlers. But today, many partners are supporting initiatives to restore wild rice, including federal agencies, state agencies, intertribal agencies, funding initiatives, universities, and NGOs, recognizing the grain’s cultural and ecological significance and vulnerability to climate change.

Manoomin: Gift of the Creator

Northern wild rice (Zizania palustris) is an annual wetland plant native to the Great Lakes. Called manoomin in Anishinaabemowin, it translates to “good berry” or “food that grows on water.” Legend has it that the Anishinaabeg people — a cultural-linguistic group that includes the Ojibwe, Chippewa, Odawa, Potawatomi, Algonquin, Mississauga and other Indigenous peoples — once living near the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, walked south in search of this grain following a prophecy.

“Wild rice is very important to us because of the teachings,” says Roger Labine from the Lac Vieux Desert Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians in Michigan, who hails from the Fish Clan of the Ojibwe Chippewa Nation. “We honor wild rice as a sacred gift from the Creator to identify where we needed to be on Mother Earth.”

The plant grows in the muddy bottoms of shallow, slow-flowing lakes and rivers. The seeds germinate in the spring after being submerged under ice and snow in the winter. By summer, flowers develop into seeds, which are harvested in late summer and early fall. The nutty flavor and long shelf life made the light-brown grain a staple in the Anishinaabe people’s diet.

“We had this in our wigwams when it was too cold to go hunt and fish and gather,” Labine says. “We could stay in and have nourishment.” A distant relative of domesticated rice (Oryza sativa) from Asia, wild rice is highly nutritious and is packed with more proteins, vitamins and dietary fiber than the former.

As a wetland species, wild rice creates a unique ecosystem, says Jonathan Gilbert, director of biological services for the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission (GLIFWC), an intertribal agency comprised of 11 Ojibwe tribes. “It has a whole bunch of plants and animals and nutrients and energy flow, and it’s diverse.”

The grain is an important food source for many migratory and non-migratory waterfowl, including the locally threatened rusty blackbird (Euphagus carolinus), trumpeter swan (Cygnus buccinator) and common loon (Gavia immer). Wild rice beds serve as fish nurseries: juvenile fish feed on the insects and take cover from predators. Wetland mammals like beavers (Castor canadensis), muskrats (Ondatra zibethicus) and river otters (Lontra canadensis) all call the rice beds home. The plants maintain water quality by absorbing nutrients in the sediments and preventing their buildup.

Wild rice also plays a vital role in the ceremonies of native tribes and First Nations. “We are spiritually connected to it,” Graveen says. “It’s always been a part of who we are as Anishinaabe people.”

Too hot for wild rice?

Historical accounts suggest that until the 1800s, wild rice covered tens of thousands of acres of lakebeds in the region. However, intense logging in the Great Lakes area in the 19^th century clogged waterways and changed the chemistry of the water. Dams altered the water levels in areas with wild rice. Railroads, farmlands and other developments destroyed nearly two-thirds of wetlands in the region — a critical habitat for wild rice. Mining and manufacturing industries spewed toxic chemicals like mercury into the water bodies.

While some of these threats, such as dams and pollution, still exist, wild rice is today most threatened by climate change and the resulting irregular weather patterns it brings: rainstorms, floods, tornadoes, and loss of snow cover. A 2018 GLIFWC climate change vulnerability assessment of species important to the tribes identified manoomin as “extremely vulnerable.”

“Almost all of the concerns [that wild rice face today] tie directly to climate change,” Gilbert says. “I think one of the reasons why the tribes are so concerned about climate effects on wild rice is because they see it as kind of like an existential threat to their identity.”

Rising temperatures are conducive to wild rice diseases, such as brown spot disease, which can reduce seed production by 90%, and pests like rice worms (moth larvae). A lack of snow cover and ice, increasingly common due to climate change, favors invasive and native aquatic plants such as pondweeds, water lilies, hybrid cattails and flowering rush, which can outcompete wild rice.

The race is on to save the beloved manoomin from these threats before the plant and its knowledge keepers vanish.

Reseeding hope with restoration

For centuries, the Anishinaabe people have stewarded wild rice by perfecting harvesting techniques that ensure the annual crop returns every year. A typical harvest starts in the late summer or early fall and is a monthlong affair. It involves two people on a canoe; no motorboats, as they can destroy the rice stands. With a push pole, one steers the canoe through the thick beds, and the other bends each stalk over and taps it with a ricing stick. The ripened grains fall into the bottom of the canoe, while the unripe seeds are left behind to mature.

Although a good rice bed acre can yield more than 500 pounds of seeds, or about 560 kilograms per hectare, hand harvesting captures only a tenth of this amount. The remaining seeds fall to the bottom of the lake, some of which are eaten by the birds and fish, while others grow into new plants. But with thriving rice beds gone, seed banks have vanished, too.

Today, restoration at Lac Vieux Desert involves manually seeding the rice beds, regularly monitoring water quality and level, measuring the stem density of rice beds, and educating owners of summer cabins around the lakes not to destroy wild rice beds. The tribe has also actively engaged with federal and state agencies for monitoring, funding and enforcement against vandalism of wild rice beds.

“We’re going out there like Johnny Appleseed” — an American nurseryman fabled for spreading apple seeds wherever he went — “throwing rice out there on an annual basis,” says Labine, who is also the water resource technician for the Lac Vieux Desert Band. “Last year we put 4,500 pounds [about 2,000 kg] of rice back in.” Restorers must be patient; rice seeds can take up to seven years to germinate.

The work has resulted in 14 sites of thriving beds where members can harvest manoomin. The band has restarted ceremonies involving the sacred grain. While yields vary annually, the effort has gained momentum, with all 12 tribes in Michigan having similar restoration programs. “There’s a big movement, just like reviving our language,” Labine says.

In late 2023, Michigan recognized wild rice as the state’s native grain after years of tribes pursuing protections for it. Labine says he hopes this recognition can further education and outreach efforts. The Michigan Wild Rice Initiative, a tribal collective, is working toward developing a statewide wild rice stewardship plan by the end of February 2024.

In Lac du Flambeau, the tribe seeded 3,500 lbs (about 1,600 kg) of wild rice in the last two years, resulting in the 2023 bumper yield. The return of wild rice in the reservation has meant restarting manoomin feasts, where community members gather to celebrate harvests. Now, the tribe is looking at how to ensure the yields stay.

“We’re looking at trying to get good data, and then, eventually, we’ll develop a management plan for wild rice,” says Graveen, who’s seeking the help of computer engineering researcher Josiah Hester from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Using sensors and artificial intelligence, Hester’s team is building wild rice monitoring infrastructure that captures real-time data on water quality, waterfowl activity, water levels, wakes from boat activity, and ice sheet thickness in the lakes. Machine-learning algorithms then churn through the sensor data, images and audio to predict the environmental trends, which, combined with Graveen’s traditional ecological knowledge, can determine if the rice beds can sustain an abundant harvest in the coming year.

“We’re building this for this urgent critical problem around rice and climate disaster mitigation,” says Hester, who adds he understands the importance of traditional ecological knowledge as a Hawaiian native. For Graveen, the real-time monitoring system means spending less time in the field. “If we can cut down our time, I’m all for it — I’m just a one-man operation right now.”

In Minnesota, the 1854 Authority, an intertribal agency working with the Bois Forte and Grand Portage bands, began a wild rice restoration program in the St. Louis River estuary. By 2025, the program aims to restore at least 275 acres (111 hectares). Besides monitoring water quality, the agency has installed nearly 50 enclosures around the beds to prevent ducks and geese from eating the plants. So far, more than 80,000 lbs (36,300 kg) of wild rice has been seeded, covering 260 acres (105 hectares). In 2023 alone, the agency seeded 12,547 lbs (5,691 kg) of the grain, covering 61 acres (25 hectares).

The agency has also started wild rice camps for students and resource managers to learn more about Minnesota’s state grain, a status conferred on wild rice in 1977. “In addition to restoring rice, we are trying to restore people’s knowledge and appreciation of rice,” says Darren Vogt, director of resource management at the 1854 Authority.

The Keweenaw Bay Indian Community in Michigan has similarly seeded thousands of pounds of wild rice seed in lakes within Baraga county over the past decade, reviving rice beds in lakes ravaged by pollution. On the Canadian side of the border, Plenty Canada, a local NGO working with First Nations in Eastern Ontario, has seeded a few lakebeds in the region with wild rice since 2018 under pilot projects.

While the ecological benefits of wild rice restoration have yet to be scientifically measured, Graveen, who fishes, hunts and traps, says he’s seen the return of waterfowl and other wildlife in the lake after restoration.

The way forward

Despite tasting success, restoration programs face funding challenges and are dependent on periodic grants for which there’s lots of competition. Often, the natural resources departments at the tribes, which usually run such programs, are short-staffed, with a handful of people managing many species, including manoomin. As most wetlands have been lost, very little land is available for restoration. But the tribes’ persistence has meant wild rice restoration is now the focus of federal and state departments.

“I’m seeing a lot more attention being paid to wild rice these days, from not only the tribes but the states as well,” Gilbert says.

For the tribes, being at the discussion table with federal and state agencies, university researchers, and funders — something that wasn’t the case for several decades — is a win. While Graveen says he’s convinced that wild rice may not return to its past glory, success for him is tribes working together on policy and management at the state and federal levels.

“It’s going to take everybody to bring back wild rice,” Labine says.


Spoorthy Raman wrote this article for Mongabay.


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