Forest Home Cemetery in Milwaukee is developing a care plan after two mounds were recently identified on the property. Elsewhere in the state, volunteers with the the Effigy Mounds Initiative work to preserve mounds by cataloguing them and removing invasive vegetation.
The post Wisconsin groups seek to preserve Indigenous mounds, including recent rediscovery appeared first on WPR.
After securing key state permits, hurdles remain for Enbridge’s controverial plan to reroute Line 5 around the Bad River tribe’s reservation, including legal challenges and calls from tribal leaders to deny federal approval of the project.
The post Eyes on federal agencies after state issues permits for Line 5 reroute appeared first on WPR.
Lynda Hagen was elevating her broken foot at home in Mercer, Wisconsin, in November 2023 when she got a call from the local school district. Another student had assaulted her 10-year-old son Nate, the district administrator told her.
Hagen threw on a sweatshirt, slipped on her walking cast with her husband’s help and rushed to her car.
With tears streaming down her cheeks, she drove to Mercer’s public K-12 school and district building, worried about Nate’s condition and angry it had come to this.
“I had just felt four years of frustration just come flying out,” she recalled.
She said Nate, an enrolled member of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, had faced years of bullying and racism at school, much of it surrounding his Native identity. It escalated during his third-grade year despite Hagen’s complaints to school and district officials, she said.
After Hagen learned more about the November assault and Nate received even more threats at school, she, her husband and her four children decided for Nate’s safety to leave Mercer, population roughly 1,600, not far from the Lac du Flambeau tribe’s reservation.
Now, as Nate adjusts to a new school and continues to recover from the injuries he suffered, Hagen said she is speaking out in hopes that schools will take such bullying more seriously.
“My Native American, tribally enrolled child went to a school that, from the moment he stepped on the bus, until the moment he got off the bus, they were responsible for his safety,” Hagen said. “And they failed him in every aspect.”
Nate isn’t alone. Studies have shown that Native American students experience systemically high rates of violence and threats at school — a long-lasting problem. WXPR also spoke with an adult Lac du Flambeau tribe member who recalled enduring school bullying during her childhood.
“When you have Indigenous children and you see the things that happen across Indian Country or across the nation, you always hope that never happens to my kid,” Hagen said. “And then it does.”
Classmates had teased Nate since kindergarten. They made fun of his long braided hair, a custom in many Native American cultures, and they called him homophobic, transphobic and racist slurs, Hagen wrote in a since-dismissed complaint to the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights and in a letter to the district.
A classmate allegedly told him to “go back to where he came from” and broke six pairs of his glasses, she wrote, and Nate allegedly faced multiple threats to cut off his braid.
Hagen told WXPR that the district offered little help.
Then came Nov. 29 of last year, when Nate and his friends played a recess game of keepaway in the school gym.
His alleged longtime bully interrupted them and kicked their volleyball across the room, according to reports by Mercer School District Administrator Renae McMurray and the Iron County Sheriff’s Office — both of which cited video footage of the incident.
After a brief skirmish over the ball, Nate’s classmate grabbed him by the neck and pulled him toward the floor. The sheriff’s office report described a chokehold of 5 or 6 seconds that “caused him to cough, choke and made it hard to breathe.”
After another student pushed the classmate off of Nate, the aggressor “grabs Nate’s hair and pushes him back toward the floor,” McMurray’s report said. Lynda Hagen, who was shown the footage, used stronger words. She said the classmate grabbed Nate’s braid and “thrashed his body back and forth,” until Nate’s two friends broke the boys apart. When the classmate let go, Nate’s head slammed against the ground and “bounced off the floor like a basketball,” Hagen said.
In an interview, Nate recalled the aftermath.
“I was on the ground trying to get my breath, and my head was hurting, because I hit my head and my shoulder was hurting too,” Nate told WXPR.
The video showed no teacher around to intervene, Hagen said. Neither report from the district and sheriff’s office mentions adult intervention.
Two students later independently corroborated that the aggressor called Nate “gay,” McMurray’s report said.
Nate’s friends lifted him up and supported him as he walked to the office, where Nate said he was told to calm down and not overreact. There, McMurray called Lynda Hagen, who rushed over.
Hagen expressed surprise that school officials didn’t more closely check on his injuries or call law enforcement. Hagen called the sheriff’s office when she arrived at the school.
The school district’s student handbook says in cases of accidents, illness or concussions, personnel should administer first aid, if trained to do so, and summon medical help.
“All students, administrators, teachers, staff, and all other school personnel share responsibility for avoiding, discouraging, and reporting any form of harassment,” it says.
Hagen suspects Nate would have been treated differently if he weren’t Native.
McMurray’s report, dated three weeks after the assault, said Nate’s alleged bully was disciplined but did not elaborate. It is unclear whether the classmate faced criminal consequences since many juvenile criminal records are confidential.
Nate was given a safety plan to keep him separate from the other classmate, McMurray’s report said.
Outside of Mercer’s single school district, research shows systematic differences in how schools have treated Native children compared to white students.
Few Native educators work in Wisconsin public school districts, according to the state Department of Public Instruction. Meanwhile, Wisconsin in past years has been a national leader in referring Native students to law enforcement — doing so at rates far higher than those of white students, causing ripple effects later in children’s lives.
Lac du Flambeau tribe member Jordan Edwards, 35, recalled routinely facing racist bullying and disproportional discipline during her school years in the Crandon area, about 80 miles southeast of Mercer.
She recalled a student one day yelling racial slurs — calling her and her friends “dirty savages” who didn’t belong at the school — while they sat in the lunchroom. School officials “allowed it to happen and watched it,” she said.
After one of her Native friends punched the bully, Edwards said the friend was the only one who faced discipline.
“It was the norm when we were in school. It’s like you either stood up for yourself and got in trouble, or you sat back and you just took it, because nothing would happen when you would report an issue,” Edwards said.
Such behavior, Edwards said, will persist “until more and more people are willing to stand up.” Until then, bullied students in rural communities will be left with few opportunities to be safe at school.
“When we’re in these small communities the closest school is almost 20 miles away,” Edwards said. “So it’s like going to another school isn’t an option.”
Chase Iron Eyes is the executive director of the Sacred Defense Fund, a Native-led nonprofit dedicated to protecting lands, waters and Indigenous communities. He’s an enrolled member of Oglala Lakota and Standing Rock Sioux tribes.
Iron Eyes said such stories are common for Native families across the country who “go through these cyclic episodes of violence and bullying.”
His messages to those children and their parents: “To stay strong, to hang in there — that they’re not alone.”
The safety plan Nate’s school approved following the assault sought to keep his alleged bully at a distance during the school day. Nate would also occasionally check in with trusted staff.
It didn’t prevent the classmate from threatening Nate’s life on the last day of the 2023-2024 school year, the family said — a brief encounter that Nate’s older brother witnessed.
The encounter helped convince the family to uproot to a different town, where Nate now attends a different school. WXPR agreed to withhold the name of the town for the family’s safety.
Almost a year after the assault, Nate suffers from nightmares and daily severe headaches, as well as neck, shoulder and lower back pain that his doctors say could be lifelong, according to medical records his mother shared with WXPR. He was recently referred to a pediatric neurosurgeon.
The family in April signed a legal settlement with the Mercer School District for terms that remained undisclosed.
Asked for details, McMurray said in an email: “the Parents and School District have worked collaboratively to resolve the concerns brought forward by the Parents. The School District has expanded its library and provided training to staff related to Native American culture.”
McMurray couldn’t respond further, she said, due to privacy laws around student information.
The Lac du Flambeau Tribal Education Department says it remains committed to the safety of tribal members across various schools.
“In the past we have provided resources to the Mercer school district to facilitate the protection and success of Native students in their schools, but we are currently unaware of if those resources are being utilized,” the department told WXPR in an email. “We are and have been willing to work with them again at any point if they are interested, in the same manner we are willing to work with any and all area schools.”
At the new school and in a new community, Nate and his family are trying to move on and heal. The school has more Native students than Mercer did.
Nate’s uncle and godfather got him involved in Big Drum, a ceremony that Nate is trying out.
“He’s being more grounded in his Native American culture and roots,” his mother said.
A Lac du Flambeau tribe child was violently bullied at school. Now his mother is speaking out. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
The Sny Magill Unit of Effigy Mounds National Monument near Clayton, Iowa, is a hidden wonder.
A dozen miles downstream from the park’s visitor center along the Mississippi River, the path starts with a turn you might miss if you’re not looking closely. Follow that path under a railroad bridge to a boat landing, then go by foot through the woods until the floodplain opens out flat in front of you, revealing more than 100 sacred mounds built by Native Americans thousands of years ago.
These ceremonial and burial mounds are one of the densest collections still existing in North America. It’s clear the people who built them had a special connection to the river valley cradled between the bluffs of the Driftless region and wanted to add their own features to it, said park superintendent Susan Snow.
Today, though, that river has significantly eroded the bank they built on, eating away at some of the mounds at the water’s edge.
It’s a product both of climate change, which is causing wetter conditions across the upper Midwest, and engineered alterations to the river’s flow. There’s now an urgent need to protect the mounds from further damage, Snow said. A multimillion-dollar bank stabilization project proposed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could accomplish that.
Since mounds should not be rebuilt by modern hands, once they’re gone, they’re gone, said Sunshine Thomas Bear, tribal historic preservation officer for the Winnebago Nation of Nebraska, who are descended from the mound builders.
“All we can do is try to save what we can,” she said.
Nineteen tribal nations are affiliated with the mounds that make up the Sny Magill Unit, including the Ho-Chunk Nation, which has a strong presence in Wisconsin.
“The area itself is part of our homeland,” Bear said. “Our connection to these lands goes back thousands of years.”
Bear said the area around Effigy Mounds National Monument used to have more ancient Indigenous mounds, but many were destroyed in the last 150 years by developers as towns were built. And many other mounds were destroyed in the last century by amateur archaeologists who desecrated the burial mounds and stole artifacts and human remains.
Most of the approximately 106 mounds that are part of the Sny Magill Unit are conical — or round — which are likely burial mounds, said Sheila Oberreuter, the park’s museum technician. Others are effigy mounds taking the shapes of birds and bears. It’s likely that ancient people returned to the area for hundreds, if not thousands, of years for mound building during the Woodland period, Oberreuter said, which occurred between 2,500 and 900 years ago.
Because it is low-lying, the land on which the mounds were built floods seasonally when the Mississippi floods. Sometimes, the mounds themselves are completely underwater, Oberreuter said — something that would seem unbelievable while walking among them, if not for visible high-water marks on nearby trees.
The serene backwater adjacent to the mounds is connected to the Mississippi River’s main channel by Johnson Slough. In recent decades, more water has rushed through the slough and hit the river bank, which Snow estimated has eroded the bank by five to 10 feet since the 1940s.
That’s happening in part because of the construction of the lock and dam system on the upper Mississippi River during the 1930s, which transformed the way the river ran to make shipping easier. By converting the free-flowing river into a series of pools, the lock and dam system causes consistent high water levels in some areas. On top of that, heavier rainfall and more severe, longer-lasting flooding events driven by climate change caused more water to move through the upper Mississippi in the last few decades.
Notes from park staff as early as the 1980s mention mound erosion, Snow said, with the first project proposed to stop it in 1994. Wooden support beams were placed along the bank, but were washed out. Reinforcing those beams didn’t work either. In 2022, large logs made of coconut fiber were placed along the parts of the bank experiencing the worst erosion. The following spring, the river saw near-record flooding, and many of those logs were swept from the bank immediately.
As park staff considered a more permanent solution, they were approached by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has managed the Mississippi River for decades and recently unlocked a new pool of money that funds ecosystem improvements along the river in addition to improvements to navigation for shipping.
The Navigation and Ecosystem Sustainability Program, or NESP, as it’s commonly called, also supports the protection of cultural resources along the river, said Jill Bathke, lead planner of the program. The Sny Magill project would be the first to access it for that protection.
After consulting with tribal officials, the Army Corps put forth a proposed fix: a 2,000-foot-long berm the height of the floodplain, made of large rocks. The corps would place sand scraped out of the main channel behind the rock wall as an added barrier between the water and the mounds. The berm would be designed with current and future climate conditions in mind, Bathke said, a long-term solution to stop the erosion.
Bear and other members of her tribe are serving as consultants on the project, as are William Quackenbush, the tribal historic preservation officer for the Ho-Chunk Nation in Wisconsin, and his tribe. They also lead teams of volunteers to help care for the mounds, including removing invasive European plants and replacing them with native plants that reduce soil erosion.
Some are skeptical of this manmade solution to a manmade problem. There are some tribal partners who’ve expressed that the river should be allowed to keep flowing as it wants to, Oberreuter said. Snow also acknowledged that people have been hesitant about making such a change to the natural bank.
But, she pointed out, “the bank is (already) no longer what it was.”
Construction of the rock berm should begin in 2026. As they build, they’ll have to take care not to harm a population of federally protected freshwater mussels that live buried in the sand at the river bottom. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the land around the Sny Magill Unit and Johnson Slough as part of the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge, will help with that.
When the berm is complete, Snow said, there’ll be a trail atop it that visitors can walk. That may help protect the mounds better than the current way to see them, which is to walk among them, she said.
The Sny Magill Unit has been part of Effigy Mounds National Monument since 1962, Snow said, but it’s not advertised like the rest of the park. That’s in part because there are no staff stationed there to properly guide people through the mounds. But if people visit respectfully, she believes it’s one of the best places to take in the mounds because it’s on a flat, walkable surface, unlike the rest of the park, which is on a blufftop.
For Bear, that education is key to the mounds’ survival. She believes many of those who visit leave with a better understanding of the mounds, and why they need to be protected.
This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.
The Mississippi River is eroding sacred Indigenous mounds in Iowa and Wisconsin is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
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