The Chairman’s Report — Native American Heritage Month, November 2026
Every November, the country sets aside a month for Native American heritage. I appreciate the gesture. But I want to be clear about something from the start: for Anishinaabe people, heritage is not a theme month. It is a living legal reality, written into treaties that the United States signed and that its own Constitution calls the supreme law of the land. This month, I would rather talk about that than about feathers and fry bread.
How a month got on the calendar
Recognition did not arrive as a gift. Native people fought for it for most of a century.
In 1912, Dr. Arthur C. Parker, a Seneca historian, persuaded the Boy Scouts of America to set aside a day for the "First Americans." In 1914, Red Fox James rode more than 4,000 miles on horseback, state to state, collecting endorsements for a national Indian Day — on December 14, 1915, he presented the support of 24 state governments at the White House. New York declared the first state American Indian Day in 1916. It still took until August 3, 1990, for President George H. W. Bush to sign the law designating November as National American Indian Heritage Month.
Read that timeline again. A man rode a horse across a continent to ask this country to acknowledge that we exist. The month exists because our people refused to be forgotten. That is the first lesson of Heritage Month: nothing we have was handed to us.
What a treaty actually is
Here is what too many people get wrong. A treaty was not the United States giving land or rights to the Indians. It was the other way around. Our nations held this continent. In treaty after treaty, we ceded vast territories — and we reserved rights we never gave up: our homelands, and the right to hunt, fish, and gather in the lands we ceded.
The Supreme Court said it plainly in 1905, in United States v. Winans: a treaty is "not a grant of rights to the Indians, but a grant of rights from them — a reservation of those not granted." Sit with that. The rights were ours first. The treaty did not create them. It protected what we kept.
The Treaty of 1855 established the Leech Lake Reservation, my home — the land of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe. Under Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, that treaty is not a historical artifact. It is federal law, as binding today as the day it was signed.
Sugar Point: the last battle, on our lake
If you want to know what treaty rights cost, come to Leech Lake. On October 5, 1898 — within living memory of my grandparents' generation — a federal marshal and roughly 100 soldiers of the 3rd U.S. Infantry came to Sugar Point to arrest an elder named Bugonaygeshig, over charges rooted in the timber-era abuses our people were protesting. The Pillager Anishinaabe who stood with him held their ground. Seven soldiers died, including the commanding officer, Major Melville Wilkinson. Sixteen more were wounded. Not one Ojibwe man was lost. The arrest was never made. Bugonaygeshig was never captured, and he lived out his years on his own land.
Sugar Point is remembered as the last battle between Native nations and the United States Army — and it happened on Leech Lake, over the same question we are still answering: whose law governs our homeland? Ours, and the treaties that recognize it.
The century they tried to end us
The treaties did not stop the pressure. The Nelson Act of 1889 pushed allotment on Minnesota Ojibwe — breaking communal land into individual parcels so the "surplus" could be sold, and our timber with it. Boarding schools took our children and punished them for speaking Ojibwemowin. In 1953, Congress adopted a policy of termination — an attempt to erase tribal governments by resolution. Nation after nation was targeted.
They failed. The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, the self-determination era that followed in the 1970s, and the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe's constitution carried our governments through. And when our reserved rights were tested, the courts — eventually — upheld them. In 1999, in Minnesota v. Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that the hunting, fishing, and gathering rights reserved in the Treaty of 1837 survived everything the state threw at them: statehood, later treaties, and 150 years of pressure. In 2023, the Court upheld the Indian Child Welfare Act in Haaland v. Brackeen, protecting Native children and the nations they belong to.
The lesson is not that the system worked. The lesson is that our ancestors wrote rights into law strong enough to survive a century designed to destroy them — and that every generation since has had to defend them again.
Heritage is a verb
So what does Heritage Month mean at Leech Lake in 2026? It means the language is coming back — I study Ojibwemowin every day, because a language they tried to beat out of our children is a right we are exercising again. It means our youth learning who they are before the world tells them who to be. It means a tribal government that still governs, on land that was never surrendered, under treaties that were never repealed.
It is also why I am running for Chairman of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe in 2028. Treaty rights are not defended in speeches. They are defended by governments that know the law, remember the history, and refuse to blink.
November is Heritage Month. The treaties are forever. Both deserve more than a proclamation — they deserve a people who know exactly what was promised, and who intend to see it kept.
Miigwech for reading. Make some noise. Make a difference.
— Big Dad The Chairman
