Reading Time: 2 minutes

As red sand filled the cracks along the sidewalks in front of the Electa Quinney Institute for American Indian Education on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus, community members stood in quiet solidarity as drums beat. 

The pouring of red sand marked another year of remembrance and healing for missing and murdered Indigenous women and relatives, referred to as MMIWR.

The symbolic act of pouring sand was part of the HIR Wellness Institute’s ninth annual Community Activated Medicine & Red Sand Events on Nov. 14.

HIR Wellness, located at 3136 W. Kilbourn Ave., was founded in 2017 by Leah Denny, who serves as CEO. The organization provides a range of free mental health, wellness services and additional programming for the Indigenous community. The Electa Quinney Institute, where the event was held, was founded in 2010 to support the Native American community on campus at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Started in 2017, the event has provided a sacred space for community grief and collective healing in honor of MMIWR through art, storytelling and community care.

Each year, the HIR Wellness Institute collaborates with the Red Sand Project to host the event. The Red Sand Project was designed to raise public awareness about human trafficking and modern slavery, using the red sand to represent those who have fallen through systemic cracks. 

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Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership between CatchLight Local and Report for America.

A sacred space for healing: Event honors missing and murdered Indigenous women and relatives 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.

Reading Time: 8 minutes

Laurie Doxtator starts each morning with affirmations.

“It’s OK to say no,” she thinks to herself while breathing in and breathing out, slowly grounding herself. 

“I’m proud of me waking up sober today.” 

“It’s a good day to start a new day.” 

The exercise plays an important role in keeping Doxtator clean from the drugs and alcohol that long controlled her life. She has built the routine through hard work, perseverance and the support of people around her — helping her stay alive. All the while she practices what she preaches to others seeking recovery: “Do this for you.” 

Doxtator, 61, grew up on the Oneida Reservation and spent time in California before returning to Wisconsin, enduring trauma along the way, including losing multiple family members. 

Three years ago, Doxtator realized she’d been using substances for 50 years, including drinking since age 8. “I realized it ain’t giving me nothing in life,” Doxtator said. “It ain’t gonna bring my children back, it ain’t gonna bring my mom back.”

She moved into a 30-day rehabilitation program but knew she needed more structure and time to heal. That led her to Amanda’s House, a sober living home in Green Bay for women and their children that allows them to stay as long as they need.

Doxtator spent most mornings at Amanda’s House in the craft room with her friend and fellow resident Ashley Bryan, carefully creating Diamond Dotz art pieces. 

Doxtator saw many people come and go during more than three years at the home, and she’s grateful to have felt their support. Bryan jokingly calls her “the OG” — a nod to Doxtator’s long tenure there.

Others call her “grandma” while asking how she’s doing. Doxtator enjoys the nickname, which prompts her to wonder what life would have looked like as a grandmother had her late sons raised children.

Jewelry on Doxtator’s hands and the tattoos spanning her arms tell pieces of her life’s story.

One ring belonged to her late mother, whose birth date is tattooed below a red rose on her upper right arm, which she calls her “memorial arm.” Doxtator still deals with the grief from losing her parents and regrets that she hadn’t sobered up when her mom was still living.

Another ring belonged to her older brother, Duane, who died this year on Mother’s Day. Below the rose of their mother, the tattooed words ROCK & ROLL memorialize Duane’s love of music.  

More scripted names and dates honor the children Doxtator lost — one in an accidental drowning and one to alcoholism. 

The turtle tattoos on Doxtator’s arm nod to her Oneida Nation membership and her family’s Turtle Clan history. 

Her newest tattoo, a hummingbird, represents the community she’s found at the Recovery Nest, part of the Oneida Comprehensive Health Division, which offers holistic healing and growth for those seeking recovery. Six other women joined her in getting that tattoo.

Even in sobriety, Doxtator struggles with the weight of her past trauma. 

She planned to die by suicide in July. But Bryan found out about it and intervened, prompting Amanda’s House Executive Director Paula Jolly to send Doxtator to Iris Place, the National Alliance on Mental Illness Fox Valley’s peer-run crisis center in Appleton, where she recovered. 

“I came out and they could tell the whole difference in me,” Doxtator said. “I needed that break.”

Trauma that unfolds early in someone’s life can affect them decades later — even when they don’t vividly remember, Jolly explained, citing research by psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk.  

Doxtator’s visit to Iris Place reinforced the importance of daily routines and surrounding herself with supportive people.

She keeps a list of everybody in her life who might help her in different ways, organizing them by categories, such as “emotional support.” She keeps the numbers for a crisis center and her recovery coaches saved in her phone. At Bryan’s suggestion, Doxtator downloaded Snapchat, where women from Amanda’s House send funny selfies to each other. 

When other Amanda’s House residents leave for work, Doxtator spends time with her brother, Earl “Nuck” Elm, or visits the Recovery Nest. 

Doxtator spent much of last summer sewing a ribboned vest and beading a turtle pendant for this year’s KUNHI-YO’ “I’m Healthy” conference, sponsored by Oneida Behavioral Health’s Tribal Opioid Response Team. There, Doxtator was invited to walk in an August fashion show featuring people who attend the Recovery Nest. 

Ahead of the show, Doxtator was up at 4 a.m. due to her nerves. Bryan, who works as a hair stylist, was curling Doxtator’s hair in the Amanda’s House craft room. 

“Oh, you look so pretty,” Bryan exclaimed after finishing. 

“Oh no, Ashley no,” Doxtator said apprehensively. 

“You’re gonna be OK.”

“You sure?”

“You’re brave. You’ve done a lot harder things in your life. This is gonna be fun and you’re gonna enjoy yourself,” Bryan said before the pair hugged and said goodbye. 

Surrounded by friends and family, Doxtator heard cheering, clapping and a whistle as she walked into the show. Wearing her handmade outfit and her biggest smile, she waved to the crowd. 

Stephanie Skenandore, Doxtator’s lifelong friend and recovery coach, recorded a video on her phone from the side of the room after walking in the show herself. Skenandore, who has been in recovery for 33 years and shares the same recovery date with Doxtator, said she was proud of Doxtator for seeking her support when Duane died earlier this year. 

People in recovery often unhealthily dwell on their past mistakes — flaws that others can’t see, Skenandore said, connecting that process to the fashion show. It’s like focusing on a sewing imperfection that only the sewer will see.  

Recovery takes practice and creativity, she added. “There is no one specific way, and there is no perfect way.” 

When people like Doxtator first show up to Recovery Nest, Skenandore helps them set goals by asking them questions like, “How do you see a life looking into the future without the drugs and the alcohol? How do you want that to look for yourself?” 

She discourages people from viewing themselves as failures and helps them navigate life differently. 

Skenandore said Doxtator’s handmade vest and pendant illustrated her creativity. 

After the fashion show, event organizers played a prerecorded video in which Doxtator shared her life story. Doxtator watched at a conference room table with her brother. When Doxtator appeared on screen, she picked up a napkin to wipe away her tears. A woman clapped at the mention of Doxtator’s years of sobriety before walking over to give her a hug.

“I came from nothing and built a community,” Doxtator said after the video ended. “It wasn’t easy.” 

Doxtator moved out of Amanda’s House on Oct. 17. Nuck and her cousin helped take her boxes to a storage unit. 

Doxtator’s long hair was now cut shorter than it had ever been. “I’m going on a new journey out in the world, so I want to have a new style look,” Doxtator said. 

“When you start looking at it from the time she came to the time now, she’s grown so much,” Jolly said. “I don’t want her to leave but it’s time. We’re technically holding her back. It’s time for her to move on.” 

Doxtator said she’s in awe of her own progress but knows that leaving won’t be easy. The old forces of addiction lurk outside of the support of Amanda’s House and will try to draw her back in. 

She said she’s determined to avoid returning to drugs and alcohol — and becoming the “same old Laurie: stealing, lying.”  

“If I go back out, I know I’m gonna die, there’s no choice in the matter,” she said.

As she approached her back-to-back dates of her move and her three-year sobriety anniversary, Doxtator started researching Gamblers Anonymous meetings. 

“It’s hard for me right now, that’s one of my downfalls right now, gambling,” Doxtator said. “I used to be real bad before, but I know that I can (get through) it again.” 

As her recovery progresses, Doxtator has grown more comfortable in sharing her story, with the hope of helping others, including during a recent Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. When a newcomer visited, “we told her to keep coming back,” Doxtator said. “It works if you work it. We said we’re proud of you for coming in.” 

Jolly offered Doxtator a standing invitation to return to Amanda’s House to share her story with the next group of residents.  

In the meantime, saying goodbye was hard, Doxtator said. She has yet to unpack a pile of boxes at her brother’s house, where she hasn’t yet slept much. 

There’s so much to get used to. She knows it will take time. But she tells herself she’ll succeed as long as she keeps working on herself, remembering that every day is a new day. 

Need help for yourself or a loved one? 

If you are looking for local information on substance use, call 211 or reach the Wisconsin Addiction Recovery Helpline at 833-944-4673. Additional information is available at 211’s addiction helplife or findtreatment.gov.

If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health crisis: call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or contact a Wisconsin county crisis line.

‘I came from nothing and built a community’: After years of healing, woman takes next step in sobriety 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.

Reading Time: 9 minutes

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• Pulaski High School students have kept their community informed through the Pulaski News for more than 80 years.

• As local news has dwindled nationwide, the Pulaski News has become a fixture in the community.

• The publication’s niche is positive news on community members, but some wish it included independent, critical coverage. One thing it’s missing is coverage of village board meetings, for example. 

• Educators say students learn soft skills, like how to communicate with others, through their work on the paper.

“The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn’t introduce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead.”

Three weeks into the school year at Pulaski High School, six teenagers sit around a cluster of desks, listening intently as journalism instructor Amy Tubbs taught them the mechanics of writing a news story. 

While Tubbs knows it might sound harsh, the task of hooking readers carries weight for the students. For more than eight decades, Pulaski High School’s student newspaper has been the community’s newspaper of record, as the only news outlet consistently covering the rural village. 

As local news has dwindled across the country, Pulaski News has become a fixture of the community, a tool to prepare students for the workforce and the last official source keeping residents informed about hyperlocal happenings. 

Through routine practice with writing, interviewing, photography and media literacy, the teenagers secure skills that prepare them for life after high school. Students say working for the paper helps them feel closer to their northeast Wisconsin community. 

“I joined last year because I really love writing, and I saw this as an opportunity to get to do that,” sophomore Dellah Hall said. “I’m now able to write not just for school and grades, but this is for the community.”

Along the way, the paper has secured a level of community buy-in that might feel foreign to some news organizations today, as trust in news declines. Students nurture this by regularly sharing feel-good stories.

For example, freshman Neville Nguyen is writing a profile on a well-known “legend of Pulaski”: an 84-year-old woman who runs the local McDonald’s drive-through every morning. Nguyen’s article is going to be published in the Pulaski News’ Thanksgiving edition, an annual feature that highlights someone who has something for which to be thankful. 

“Its own kind of niche … That’s not necessarily something that a bigger paper is going to pick up … There’s definitely very much a hometown kind of feel to it,” Tubbs said. 

‘Pulaski needs a newspaper’

Roughly 20 miles outside of Green Bay, the village of Pulaski sits amid an expanse of farmland. The modest 3,700-person town straddles Brown, Oconto and Shawano counties. 

The area has a turbulent history with local news. Residents saw a flurry of different papers stumbling to provide the headlines before Pulaski High School took the reins in the 1940s.

During the 1920s, residents relied on the Pulaski Herald. Archives of the Herald are sparse, but they show it ceased publication by the 1930s, when a resident launched the Pulaski Tri-Copa. In 1939, the Tri-Copa abruptly announced it would be rebranding, ambiguously citing “skirmishes” over the previous year.

“We don’t care to divulge what we have up our sleeve at this time,” the Tri-Copa’s farewell edition read. “It will be more pleasant to surprise you, but take our word for it, you are going to get more paper for your money.”

Two months later, the paper restarted as the Tri County News. It ran for three years before folding due to financial issues brought on by the Great Depression. 

Leaders at Pulaski High School saw an opportunity for their student newspaper, which was roughly four years old, to fill the gap left by the Tri County’s closure. Ahead of the 1942-43 school year, the paper debuted a new title: The Pulaski News. 

“Pulaski needs a newspaper,” the first edition read. “To fill that need; to provide a means of informing the parents and community on the progress of the school; to provide the community proper channels for information, news, and advertising; and give students experience in journalism the Pulaski Board of Education authorized the publishing of a newspaper.”

When Pulaski News began publishing, it was tabloid-sized. A team of students handled the enterprise’s business aspects, including selling ads across the community. 

Today, 83 years’ worth of newspapers — including those early editions — live on a classroom shelf in dozens of hardcover books. In its current iteration, the paper is lengthier and printed in color, but the model remains largely the same.

Although Pulaski’s students fit within a nationwide demographic that consumes much of their news online, the writers still find appeal in the print product’s legacy. Senior Madelyn Rybak said that while she reads the majority of her news online on her phone, writing for Pulaski News makes her want to consume more print stories. Her parents subscribe to the Green Bay Press-Gazette’s print edition, which she reads.

“I like the feeling of holding the newspaper,” Rybak said. “It kind of feels like I’m more connected to the stories… instead of just being behind my phone.” 

A ‘valuable service’

At the front of the Pulaski News’ classroom, a calendar governing the paper is posted on the whiteboard: Students turn in stories one week before the paper is sent to press every other Tuesday. It’s printed on Wednesdays and delivered on Thursdays. The school mails roughly 1,000 copies to subscribers, who pay $30 or $35 annually. Eight local businesses sell another 100 copies for $1 each.

Each semester, roughly a dozen students work on the paper for class credit. Course enrollment is fueled largely by word-of-mouth between friends or parents encouraging their teenagers to follow in their footsteps. In the summer, students vie for five part-time positions that pay $11 per hour. 

The operation has felt increasingly crucial as Pulaski feels the national trend of thinning local news coverage. 

Nearby papers once covered Pulaski more closely than they do today. Now, regional news outlets sometimes drop in for flashier stories, such as crime issues, but there’s no source of consistent information about local events beyond what the students publish.  

“You’ve seen other local papers close and their communities really don’t have anything,” said Bob Van Enkenvoort, the school district’s communications coordinator and the paper’s editor. “So the district sees this as a valuable community service.” 

Though the students fill a hyperlocal information gap, relying on a school-sponsored paper means the town still lacks independent, critical coverage — like an increasing number of places across the U.S. 

“It doesn’t really have a good feel for political issues in town, so the community is not all that well served, as far as coverage of local village issues like the village board meetings or growth in the village, so that’s sort of a negative,” said Steve Peplinski, a local resident creating a digital archive of Pulaski’s newspapers for the village’s museum. Peplinski wrote for Pulaski News himself when he was in high school. 

While the school district’s administration doesn’t decide what Pulaski News covers — “I’ve never really had anyone say ‘you can’t do this’ or ‘you can do this.’ That’s my decision,” Van Enkenvoort said — the staff generally doesn’t wade into hard news. 

Outside of the routine sports, local events and school news, the staff has carved out a niche creating more “positive stories”: They profile interesting community members and spotlight Pulaski alumni doing good deeds. 

While some might have trepidation when it comes to speaking with journalists, that “hometown” feel of the paper has resulted in a deep trust among local residents. 

“It’s well known in the community,” Van Enkenvoort said. “People understand what the mission is, so I think they are willing to work with the students.”

Though Pulaski News is district-funded, the paper isn’t immune to the turbulence plaguing journalism today. The subscriber base skews older, and every obituary that publishes is a possible patron, Van Enkenvoort said. 

Securing soft skills

The first time Morgan Stewart, a 15-year-old sophomore, picked up the phone to call a subject for her story, she was so terrified that she shook. But over time, those nerves dissipated, and she’s found herself growing into more of a “people person.”

“I think I want to pursue doing journalism,” Stewart said. “I didn’t have much of a plan coming into high school, but after doing this … (Van Enkenvoort) has helped me a lot to find what I love most about Pulaski News, and it’s opened my eyes a lot to the future and what it holds for me.”

There’s always a learning curve at the start of a semester. Students are typically scared to make cold calls. They sometimes try to text community members, only to realize they’re messaging a landline. For their first class assignment, students write profiles about one another to practice asking good questions. 

With a few notable exceptions, many students who participate in the Pulaski News aren’t planning to go into the journalism field. But through the routine — and sometimes uncomfortable — work, they learn many “soft skills,” or traits that allow them to communicate and work well with others, Tubbs and Van Enkenvoort said. 

“We tend to try to get them away from their phones and talk to people face-to-face, so they get used to talking to adults and having to think on their feet and have conversations, which will help them when they’re interviewing for colleges or interviewing for jobs,” Van Enkenvoort said. “A lot of them are just not that comfortable with it at the start, but they get better and they feel more comfortable once they do.”

On paper, the experience allows Pulaski students to complete a class that the state considers “post-secondary preparation,” or training for life after high school. In the 2023-24 school year, 39% of Pulaski High School students participated in a “work-based learning program” like Pulaski News, far above the state average of 9%.

Connecting students to community

While stories on sports games and district updates are commonplace in Pulaski News,  students also devise the creative stories that fill the paper. In the process, many become more closely engrained in their community. 

Rybak is from Hobart, a roughly 20-minute drive from Pulaski, so she isn’t as familiar with the area as some of her classmates. Working for the paper has helped change that. When there’s pressure to come up with a story pitch, she finds herself scouring the internet and local organizations’ websites for events.

“We encourage the students to try to come up with story ideas for two reasons,” Van Enkenvoort said. “We need everybody’s eyes and ears out in the community. But also, if they come up with a story and they’re excited about it, they typically do a really good job on it.”

At the end of the year, Tubbs asks students to share their favorite stories. Without fail, it’s always the ones centering community members. 

That’s true for Rybak, whose standout story last year was a front-page feature on Pulaski’s summer school program. She interviewed four teachers, the program director and students who attended classes. 

“Our summer school doesn’t really get recognition, even though there’s a lot that goes into it,” Rybak said. “I kind of liked the feeling that I was shining a light on the people who do a lot of work in our community.”

“(The paper) makes me more aware of what’s going on in the community,” she said. “Through interviewing people who I would literally never talk to otherwise, it just helps me get to know the people there that I wouldn’t have known.”

Miranda Dunlap reports on pathways to success in northeast Wisconsin, working in partnership with Open Campus.

Meet the teens keeping this northeast Wisconsin village from becoming a news desert 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.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Angel Perez, 65, has been fishing the waters of Milwaukee for more than 25 years. Everyday during his breaks from work at the Harley-Davidson Museum, he comes down to his fishing spot underneath the Sixth Street Viaduct and casts away. One day, Perez caught seven bluegills in the Menomonee River. Perez says that everyone needs to have something to help them relax, and for him, it’s fishing.

Perez said he was introduced to fishing early in his life by several mentors while growing up in the Wrigleyville neighborhood in Chicago. Now, Perez hopes to be a mentor for kids in Milwaukee, and that’s why in 2026 he plans on starting a camp called Urban Fishing with Angel.

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Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership between CatchLight Local and Report for America.

Hooked on the city: Milwaukee’s Angel Perez finds solace in urban fishing 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.