When a small-town Minnesota high school banned its Native American drum group from performing at graduation, the hurt reverberated across Indigenous communities in the Upper Midwest.

A fraught and violent history for centuries disrupted Indigenous people’s lives in the Upper Midwest, barring them from traditional food gathering practices like spearfishing, hunting and harvesting wild rice.

Oral storytelling is crucial to the spiritual traditions of the Ojibwe people of the Upper Midwest and Canada, as is the case with other Native American cultures.

Nontribal hunters and trappers registered 216 wolves as of Thursday afternoon, blowing past the state's kill target of 119. The wolf season began Monday and was supposed to run through Sunday, but the DNR shut it down Wednesday afternoon as it became clear hunters would exceed the target. Hunters and trappers also exceeded their kill targets in the three previous wolf seasons but never by more than 10 animals. The state sold 1,547 permits, which equates to 13 hunters or trappers per wolf in the target number, the highest ratio of any wolf season so far. Animal advocates have been urging the state to move quickly on reintroduction, but state officials say they want to move slowly.