S andy Smiley loves her home in Michigan’s Keene Township, a rural community of some 680 households, half-an-hour east of Grand Rapids. Her house sits on a 10-acre lot, which she uses as pasture.

A version of this story first appeared in The Cocklebur.. S enate Republican leaders spent their weekend cutting deals, buying votes and otherwise using legislative budget tricks to get their own GOP ...

“If both rural and urban people have the same set of facts with which to express their concerns, perhaps they can reach common conclusions,” writes Gilles Stockton in his new book, Feeding a Divided ...

In 2011, Dakota artist Mona Smith set out to change that with the Bdote Memory Map, which includes a spoken glossary of Dakota terms, resources for educators and videos of Dakota people sharing their ...

Mikey Weinstein didn’t want to fight the Pentagon. But he saw no other choice. As the founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), Weinstein’s battles—in the courts and ...

For the past half century, the Christian Right has been mastering the tools of electoral democracy in order to erode and end it. The methods and the players have evolved over time, but the goal of ...

A pumpkin farm that sells organic produce and boasts acres of sunflowers installs solar panels across its fields in rural Dane County. The state’s largest aluminum mill, located a few miles from Lake ...

Kristina Reser-Jaynes can still recall a time when she’d never heard of school vouchers. Then, a few years ago, the Kickapoo school district in Southwestern Wisconsin that her daughters attend ...

In the wake of the 2024 election, Barn Raiser talks to prominent Native leaders and mentors, who tell us in edited interviews how and why their communities have long endured, even in divisive and ...

In January 2023, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released a 228-page report, underscoring the urgent need to increase native seed supplies to restore damaged ecosystems in ...

The following is the fourth installment of “Reimagining Rural Cartographies,” a new Barn Raiser series exploring innovative and nontraditional forms of mapping. It is guest-edited by Lydia Moran and ...

On the banks of Wounded Knee Creek, a dream died in 1890 in a brutal massacre. Today, 110 years later, on that same creek, a dream was born. That’s the work that Alex White Plume, traditional leader ...