About this brief

The Weekly Brief is a private newsletter for one reader: Patricia "Patty" Loew, citizen of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe (Mashkiiziibii). Each Sunday it publishes a curated read of the past week in Indian Country, organized into Wisconsin and continental sections.

How it's made

Brooks Braga (Patty's son) produces the brief with help from Anthropic's Claude model as an editorial-research assistant. Every Sunday a small program on a server pulls fresh stories from a curated list of Indigenous publications, tribal newspapers, and federal and legal sources, then asks Claude to select roughly twelve to eighteen items, group them into the brief's sections, and summarize each in Patty's voice. The final issue is published as a static web page that is permanent and backlinkable.

The voice

The brief's editorial voice is calibrated against Patty's own writing across four books: Indian Nations of Wisconsin (2001/2013), Native People of Wisconsin (2003/2015), Seventh Generation Earth Ethics (2014), and the family Storyworth. The same naming conventions she uses appear here: Ojibwe rather than Chippewa, Mesquakie rather than Fox, Haudenosaunee rather than Iroquois, manoomin for wild rice, Mashkiiziibii for Bad River. The 5 R's framework she teaches in journalism, Respect, Relationship, Responsibility, Reciprocity, and Reflection, anchors how the brief evaluates a story.

How to use the archive

Every story is tagged by tribe, topic, and named person. Click any tag and you'll see every appearance of that subject across the brief's full history. The Nations, Topics, and People pages are the entrances to that archive. The Archive page lists every issue.

Sources

Tier 1 is Wisconsin tribal voices: Mazina'igan, Potawatomi Traveling Times, Kalihwisaks, Mohican News, the news pages of Wisconsin's twelve nations. Tier 2 is national Indigenous press: ICT, Native News Online, High Country News Indigenous Affairs, NDN Collective, Native Sun News Today, Buffalo's Fire, Grist Indigenous, Indianz.com. Tier 3 is Wisconsin and regional general press where they cover tribal beats: Wisconsin Examiner, Wisconsin Watch, WPR. Tier 4 is federal and legal: BIA, DOI, NARF, NCAI.

A note on News from Indian Country: Paul DeMain's Hayward newspaper, which Patty thanks in the acknowledgments to Indian Nations of Wisconsin, ceased publication in 2019. We miss it.

The book workshop

A second section of this site, the workshop, will help with the next edition of Indian Nations of Wisconsin and a refresh of the Native People of Wisconsin textbook. It pairs the accumulated brief archive with the full text of both books so Patty can ask, for example, "draft an updated last paragraph for the Crandon mine section in my voice" or "what's changed for Lac du Flambeau since 2013." Coming online after Issue 1.