White Earth Nation

Eva also is a dancer, so I'm excited to hear what you all may talk about.

And Amber is a first degree descendant of White Earth Nation in Minnesota and grew up in southeastern Wisconsin.

I love Wisconsin and that area.

I went to UW-Madison for my master's.

It's based on my reservation vaguely, but it isn't exactly right because I wanted to be able to play around with different things.

But a big part of my reservation got sold to white settlers.

So there's a really large settler population on White Earth Nation.

So I was thinking about how that adds its own layers to your relationship to land.

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.

But the financial and social risks are staggering, and that forces everyday voters to weigh a massive short-term economic injection against long-term sustainability.

And we're seeing that exact tension play out with the White Earth Nation in Minnesota, but from a completely different angle.

Yeah.

This is a fascinating case.

Exactly.

This removes the land from local tax rolls and exempts it from local and state zoning laws, which is a necessary but massive hurdle for establishing a tribal gaming facility.

But the internal dynamics of the White Earth Nation project are what make this so compelling to me.

Back in August, there was a change in tribal leadership.

[laughs]

I'm a member of the White Earth Nation-

[laughs]

... and my family is the Wolf Clan.

Tafoya may pull it out.

Well, Peggy Flanagan wrote on Twitter that her Ojibwe name is Giziwiwaydamukwe, which means "speaks in a loud and clear voice woman." She says, "I'm going to be Minnesota's voice in the US Senate, not Donald Trump's." Peggy Flanagan is a member of the White Earth Band of Native Americans.

She also wears a hijab when talking to Somali migrants.

I'm Mike Slater for the podcast Politics by Faith.

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.