White Earth Indian Reservation

These were payments made through the Minnesota Department of Human Services.

This additional two point four million dollars in Medicaid overpayments were made to the White Earth Nation.

I've never heard of them, but Lieutenant Peggy Flanagan is a member.

Now, this payment was made during the Walz-Flanagan administration in twenty nineteen, and a state audit found that those millions in additional payments to White Earth and Leech Lake that year were made after the DHS determined the payment practice did not comply with state and federal legal rep- requirements.

Now, the payments were part of more than twenty-nine million dollars in overpayments made over a decade to the White Earth Nation and the Leak Lake Band-- the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe for medication-assisted treatment programs, which are designed to treat opioid addiction.

In c- in terms of that state audit, the programs combined counseling with medication intended to reduce cravings and withdrawal symptoms.

And Minnesota's Department of Human Services classified the expenditures as overpayments because the department paid White Earth and Leech Lake the U.S. Indian Health Service encounter rate when patients took treatment drugs at home.

The initial overpayment calculation initially included approximately twenty-five million dollars in payments made through December of twenty eighteen, and the total later increased by another three point eight million during the Walz-Flanagan administration in twenty nineteen, which included that two point four million dollars for White Earth and then another one point four million for Leech Lake.

Multitask.

And then White Earth.

White Earth is the one I think is historically wild.

Explain.

Their compact with the state uniquely allows their enterprise, Wabi Gwan Mashkiki, to operate dispensaries off reservation.

My Ojibwe name is Speaks in a Loud and Clear Voice Woman.

I'm Ojibwe and a member of White Earth, and my family's the Wolf Clan.

The, uh, beautiful Somali community, they are part of the fabric of our state.

My daughter is already growing up with fewer rights than I had, fewer rights than my mom had, fewer rights than my grandmother had, and I am not okay with that.

Yeah, absolutely.

I encountered the term survivance when I was in graduate school, and Vizenor, as a White Earth Ojibwe scholar himself, really interrogates the idea that survival and resistance are two things that are mutually opposed.

So for Indigenous peoples generally, you'll hear things like survival is resistance, and in some ways, that's what survivance is g- getting at.

But in other ways, it's very much about the continuity of cultural practice of identity and belonging, regardless of the impositions of colonization.

And for me, survivance has really demonstrated how urban Ojibwe identity has really flourished in the 20th century in Minneapolis because of the ways that we were able to transport Ojibwe ways of knowing and being in the world into the city and to Maintain our tribal affiliations, our tribal belongings, our relationships, both to other community members in Minneapolis, but also back home on home reservations throughout Minnesota.

So that continuity, I think, is really evident within urban Ojibwe history in the Twin Cities because of the ways that it's not just about surviving, it's about the ongoing maintenance of who we are as a people.

And your book draws on the stories and organizing work of White Earth Ojibwe women from the 1930s through 1970s.

So let's start big and broad.

They're seeing themselves in a way that provides hope and possibility.

Um, and I also wanna say that young people, too, I mean, just, like, I think about my own girls, they are so far better [laughs] than all of us, right? But just this deep desire to care for one another, to be kind, to care for the Earth, to think about what's in the future for them.

And, and not be concerned about, um, what, so much about what people think of them.

It's like, who do, what do I wanna be? Who am I?

What, what's happening there?

there?Buffalo rest, uh, restoration initiatives have done so much more, right? Because I- the idea, right, of buffalo restoration, the idea of reclaiming that, is about centering, um, land and centering, um, sovereignty and centering indigenous people.

So you know, Prairie Island Indian community, Shakopee, White Earth.

Absolutely, um, these buffalo restorations is about so much more because it is, again, that reminder, as Nikki said earlier, of coming back to ourselves, of coming back to the things that, um, are really going to ground us in who we are as indigenous folks.