Mashkiiziibiing, or Bad River Reservation, sprawls across 124,654 acres of land in what-is-now northern Wisconsin, the largest of six Ojibwe-governed territories in the state. To illustrate its position within the Great Lakes region, former tribal chairman Michael Wiggins Jr. took out a blank piece of paper and drew a map that resembled an eagle mid-flight. The western wing and head formed Lake Superior; the eastern wing was made up of Georgian Bay and Lake Huron. Lake Michigan was a fish dangling from its talons. Further away, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario formed two spheres, resembling hatchlings. “This is the Thunder Bay Nest: the freshwater stronghold of North America,” said Wiggins, as he marked a circle around the map. “It’s the ancestral home of our people, the Anishinaabeg (including the Boodewaadamiig, Odawaag, and Ojibweg). Water people,” he added.
It was a snowy winter morning, and Wiggins had carved out a few hours between meetings to speak with me about the Ojibwe tribe’s fight to protect the region’s wolves. He was seated inside Chief Blackbird Center, the tribal government building in New Odanah, about five miles east of Ashland. A museum dedicated to widely-revered elder Joe Rose, who campaigned for the environment throughout his life, stood in front, the image of a rising red sun illuminating its entrance. Steps away, two flags flickered in the wind: the star-spangled banner and the tribal flag with the eagle motif.
The reservation itself was nestled on a tip of the western wing, nearly 200 miles from “the eagle’s heart, the deepest point of Lake Superior,” said Wiggins. It was established in 1854 after Ojibwe chiefs were coerced into entering a land cession treaty with the United States in exchange for permanent homes and the right to hunt, fish and gather on ceded territories. Negotiated under pressure from timber and mining companies, the agreement opened the region up to large-scale industrial logging that transformed dense forests into cutover terrain. By the early twentieth century, lumber barons and trespassers had cut or burnt down so many trees that people standing at Old Odanah, at the confluence of the Bad and White Rivers, said they could see Mooninwaane’akaaning Minis—or Madeline Island, the tribe’s spiritual centre—about 20 miles away.
Today, more than 70% of reservation land has been restored to wilderness, with forests and wetlands fertile enough to welcome the return of wolves. Since 1997, the Bad River Natural Resources Department has tracked the presence of wolves through radio telemetry, trail cameras and field observations, and found several packs regularly using parts of the reservation as their home. Classified as a “tribally protected species,” the hunting and trapping of wolves is prohibited within the exterior boundaries of the reservation, even as their fate is debated everywhere else. In 2021, a rushed court-ordered wolf hunt in Wisconsin following federal delisting opened questions about who has authority to decide that fate. This has only intensified as the U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a bill that would remove federal protections for grey wolves under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), which is now pending Senate consideration.
Wolves—or Ma’iingan—appear in the Anishinaabe Creation story, sent by the Great Spirit (or God/Mystery) as siblings to the tribe; recognised for their ecological importance long before wildlife biologists identified them as keystone predators. “A long time ago, the animals said: I’ll take care of you, I’ll teach you how to be a good person,” said Edith Leoso, a cultural consultant, who has served as the tribal historic preservation officer at Bad River, at her nearby office. “Wolves teach us how to take care of our families; how to be a community; how to look out for one another. They teach us about diligence, cleanliness and keeping illness away.”
Even though it is rare to see a wolf in its natural habitat, every once in a while, residents at Bad River report hearing a solitary howl in the night. This is followed by a chorus of wails, both high-and-low-pitched, that build up to a crescendo, before falling silent again, dissolving into the night.
‘The wolf is always present’
Outside Chief Blackbird Center, the sun glistened on clusters of snow-capped trees: white pine, poplar, spruce, balsam, red osier, elm and maple. “In our oldest cemetery, near the Highway, you might find a 400-year-old tree, but these ones are still growing back,” said Leoso. Despite the deforestation that had driven much of the region’s wildlife away, Leoso believes wolves never truly left. “The wolf is always present, always watching, but it doesn’t come out in front of you. When you think about that, you realise these animals don’t want to be seen. They knew they had to keep their distance from us—because they knew we were going to kill them,” she said, as she burnt sage to cleanse her office of harmful energies.
Between the 19th and mid-20th centuries, grey wolves had been eliminated across the lower-48 states, save for small populations that had survived in northeastern Minnesota and Isle Royale National Park in Michigan.
Early Euro-Americans viewed wolves as rivals for resources, outlaws, or “folk villains,” explained Jon T Coleman, a historian at the University of Notre Dame, in a phone interview with me. Having depleted much of the wolves’ traditional prey—bison, elk and whitetail deer, mostly through overhunting—colonisers viewed the canines as a threat to the livestock they brought with them to the continent. Consequently, some of the earliest colonial legislation were wolf bounty laws, with Massachusetts Bay Colony setting the precedent in 1630, followed by Virginia and New Jersey.
In the settlers’ imagination, the continent they claimed to have ‘discovered’ was terra nullius: empty land, or an unsettled wilderness, “the habitation of savages and wild beasts,” wrote Kentucky pioneer John Filson in 1784. Puritan writers frequently depicted the “howling wilderness” as an antithesis to Eden; while wolves became symbols of “an expression of anger against nature, or proxy for groups of people that were despised,” explained Coleman, who explored this history in his 2004 book Vicious: Wolves and Men in America.
The historian was also struck by how settlers projected their own sense of vulnerability—“however delusional and convenient”—by likening themselves to their livestock, as if they shared their animals’ innocence and bewilderment. Drawing on pastoral imagery from the Bible—of shepherds, sheep, lambs and wolves—settlers imagined themselves as a “spiritual flock” adrift in the wilderness of the New World. “In the course of becoming the most dominant predator on the continent, Euro-Americans often conceived themselves as prey,” wrote Coleman in his book.
As animals that provided little economic value, or use as food, wolves were widely regarded as “vermin” and officially classified as “injurious animals,” along with other top predators like mountain lions and bears—though none were as reviled as wolves, whose reputation had been shaped by medieval European interpretations of Christianity and folklore that cast the animals as Satan’s accomplices on earth, preying on the meek, or ravenous creatures that stalked young children in the woods. Benjamin Corbin, the 19th century bounty hunter who claimed to have killed more than 4,000 wolves across the Old Northwest, put it plainly: “The wolf is the enemy of civilization, and I want to exterminate him.”
In 1865, Wisconsin passed its own wolf bounty law, proposing a five-dollar reward for every kill, which was later revised to ten dollars for pups and 20 for adults. Later, under pressure from national livestock associations, the federal government intervened. It deployed teams of scientists alongside professional hunters and trappers to accelerate extermination efforts under the Bureau of Biological Survey, which would later merge with the Bureau of Fisheries to form what is now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), the agency responsible for overseeing endangered species protection, including wolves.
Methods used to kill wolves included: strychnine-laced bait, snares, steel-jaw traps, cyanide guns, pursuit hounds, and den hunting, in which pups were dug out and clubbed, knifed or shot to death. “In my research, I found many instances of people torturing wolves that went beyond simply eliminating them to making statements. I don’t know how much fear there was of wolves as much as hatred,” said Coleman.
Yet many Native tribes regarded wolves as teachers and guides, relatives, or mirrors of their own societies. For the Anishinaabeg, in particular, the wolves’ fate is understood to be intertwined with their own. “Both have had their land taken from them. Both have been hunted for their wee-nes’-si-see’ (hair). And both have been pushed very close to destruction,” wrote Edward Benton-Banai, one of the founders of the American Indian Movement, in the The Mishomis Book (1979).
“They put bounties on wolves; they put bounties on us,” said Mic Isham, a natural resources specialist and former executive director of the Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission (GLIFWC): an intertribal agency representing 11 Ojibwe governments across Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota. It works to protect their off-reservation rights guaranteed under the treaties of 1836, 1837, 1842 and 1854. Or as Isham put it: “We’re the tail. The tribes are the dog.”
Stories about the wolves’ place in Anishinaabe life were passed down through generations, often in secret, as the United States government pursued centuries of forced assimilation, removal and termination policies that steadily eroded Indigenous lifeways. “Even a lot of my own people don’t know about the wolves’ importance, especially the ones who moved to the cities under the government’s urban relocation programmes,” explained Isham. “Moving to the cities, that’s how my dad met my mom,” he added.
Originally from Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation, about 70 miles southwest of Bad River, Isham was born to an Anishinaabe father and a “non-Indian mother” from Milwaukee. “My mother was Catholic, from the sheep-herder religion,” he told me. His father fought in the Vietnam War, returning home “a devastated man,” and his parents divorced soon after. So Isham spent his childhood summers on the reservation with his father’s side of the family and attended school in Milwaukee. “It was a Catholic school, so I’d hear about the ‘devils-red-lurking-in-the-woods’—and I’d be like: ‘Sister, you mean the Native Americans?’” he recounted with a shrug.
In Milwaukee, there were no real woods or wildlife. “You’d walk the railroad tracks and see pigeons and rabbits, throw rocks at them, or you’d go to a park and see fat city squirrels,” Isham recalled. In contrast, on the reservation, he and his brother once killed a porcupine with rocks, and were chastised for it. “My grandma was so mad. That’s when we started getting the indoctrination on how everything’s equal and sacred, how porcupines kept our people alive during the Depression. She told us to clean it and eat it. Throw it on the fire, eat some chunks. So, I was always aware of the differences. In the Catholic religion, you have dominion over everything. In our religion, you’re a small, humble part of it all.”
Struggling with his identity, Isham kept getting into fights with boys both on and off the reservation. “One day, this old guy named Pipe Mustache and my great-grandfather’s brother saw I had a teeny tiny black eye.”
They asked who beat him up. Little Isham puffed out his chest. “Nobody beat me up. They got one lucky punch, and I beat ’em up.”
They asked him what he was fighting for.
“For calling me white.”
“Well, what are you?”
“I’m Ojibwe Indian.”
Isham went on to study at Northland College, a small liberal arts school in Ashland, where he was mentored by Joe Rose, an associate professor of Native American Studies. Among other things, Rose taught him about the importance of wolves and their place in Ojibwe ways of understanding land, kinship, and responsibility.
He carried those lessons with him when he was hired to lead GLIFWC between 2018 to 2023. The commission was formed after brothers Mike and Fred Tribble from Lac Courte Oreilles purposely went off reservation to harvest fish, using the resulting court case against them to reassert a principle that had long been forgotten: that treaties, under the Constitution, remain “the supreme law of the land”. The case forced a reckoning over where state jurisdiction ended and tribal sovereignty began, a boundary that had grown increasingly blurred as hunting and fishing management was gradually transferred to the states.
“There were a lot of people going off reservation all the time, you just had to hide from the wardens,” said Isham. “So, these guys decided they’re gonna go off and get busted and take it all the way through the court system. That’s what they did. They got busted at Chief Lake—right by my house—and took it all the way up.”
In 1983, a federal court ruled in the Tribbles’ favour in what became known as the Voigt Decision, reaffirming the tribe’s off-reservation treaty rights, and establishing that all animals legal to hunt and fish were shared resources.
Today, GLIFWC works with state agencies to devise hunting seasons and management plans—“We don’t say management,” Isham clarified. “Management is what you do to something you have dominion over. But we’re not above or outside the natural world. We’re part of it.” He said he prefers the term “stewardship,” since it implies a system of reciprocal relations between human, animal, and plant life. “Now we’re consumers too, like everyone else. We drive a lot of Priuses around here, and we’re seeing what we can do to reduce our carbon footprint. But people who live the traditional Ojibwe lifestyle are more connected to the earth,” he added. “We use traditional ecological knowledge from thousands of years of observation. We don’t hunt deer till the fireflies come out. We don’t spear certain lakes until the pussy willows are budding, or the frogs are chirping. But because we have to work with the state, we had to learn the Western science ways. With the state, we have to develop seasons, you know? On reservation, it’s Fireflies. Off-reservation, it’s the—what is it?—first Monday after Labour Day.”
‘A fierce green fire’
Wiggins had seen only wolves in the wild on three occasions. “The first two times were from afar, they’re very skittish,” he recalled. Then, some years ago, while he was out hunting in the woods, a young wolf galloped up to him. “He was in rough shape, didn’t look good, but it was incredible to see him up close. We just looked at each other and never broke stride,” he said with a smile.
That such an encounter could happen at all would have been unthinkable some decades ago. In the winter of 1958, Wisconsin’s so-called “last wolf” (known as Old Two Toes) was killed in the small town of Cornucopia, just months after the state had abolished its archaic wolf bounty law. A vehicle struck him, breaking his back. In an apparent effort to “put it out of its misery,” the occupants got out and beat him over the head with a tire iron, before slitting his throat with a restaurant knife.
Two years later, wolves were officially declared extinct in the state—though by then, mainstream American attitudes had already begun to shift, as postwar industrialisation and urbanisation transformed both the landscape and people living in it. “Wage earners living in apartments own goldfish, not cows,” wrote Coleman in his book, “and as the sting of livestock depredation faded from many Americans’ lives, so did their hatred of wolves.”
That change paved the way for the passage of the landmark Endangered Species Act of 1973, which prohibited the import, export, hunting and killing of all fish and wildlife species considered at risk of extinction, including grey wolves, which the USFWS added to the ESA list in 1974. Violations of the Act could result in criminal penalties of up to one year in prison, along with substantial fines.
As wolf populations rebounded under federal protections in Minnesota—and as forests regenerated and deer populations returned—a handful of wolves began wandering across the border into neighbouring Wisconsin. By the mid-1970s, Wisconsin had been “recolonised,” a term used by scientists to describe wild animal populations naturally reclaiming landscapes from which they had been extirpated. “The couple hundred or so wolves that had survived in northeastern Minnesota started recolonising much of Minnesota, one-third of Wisconsin, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan without direct human intervention,” Adrian Treves, an environmental studies professor, who set up the Carnivore Coexistence Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told me.
Between 1979-80, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) started formally monitoring the population and estimated around 25 wolves in five breeding packs had formed in the state.
Around the same time, a broader Indigenous resurgence was taking shape, marked by the Red Power movement, the introduction of Native American studies in universities, the establishment of dozens of tribal museums, and the passage of foundational legislation including the Indian Civil Rights Act (1968), the Indian Education Act (1972), the American Indian Self-determination and Educational Assistance Act (1975), and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (1978).
For some Anishinaabeg, the timing was not coincidental. Among those who maintain traditional teachings, the wolf’s return and the renewal of Indigenous political and cultural life affirmed a long-held understanding that their lives unfold in parallel. “In European territories, the wolf was associated with danger; it was seen as a pariah,” said Wiggins, who grew up Catholic before reverting to Ojibwe beliefs. “I don’t subscribe to that. I believe what Aldo Leopold wrote: ‘when you alter the land, you alter the people,’” he said, paraphrasing Leopold, the renowned conservationist and professor of game management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who famously wrote about shooting a wolf and being changed by watching “a fierce green fire dying in her eyes” in A Sand County Almanac (1949).
By April 2020, an estimated 1,034 wolves roamed Wisconsin, excluding the small percentage living on tribal reservations.
‘Beware of the numbers game’
Over the past two decades, as wolf populations began to recover, there have been repeated efforts to roll back their legal protections amid lobbying from hunting and livestock associations. Each time, federal agencies justified these moves by pointing to what they call the species’ “successful recovery”—a claim that remains contentious, with some biologists arguing that numbers are beside the point. “Beware of the numbers game,” Treves cautioned. “Interest group rhetoric and some political declarations make it seem like the number of individual wolves is an essential datum, but it’s not a biologically relevant measure of how self-sustaining a wolf population might be relative to the number of packs that successfully reproduce.”
In 2012, the USFWS lifted federal protections for grey wolves in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan, citing that the Western Great Lakes wolf populations had surpassed ESA recovery thresholds. Then governor Scott Kevin Walker approved the Wisconsin Act 169, which authorised a wolf hunting and trapping season from mid-November until the end of February. The DNR distributed hunting permits, set quotas, and marked harvesting zones. Although the Wisconsin DNR allocated half of the ceded-territory harvest quota to Ojibwe tribes, the tribal governments chose not to exercise it.
Instead, the Mashkiiziibii Tribal Council and others approved emergency rules prohibiting the hunting and trapping of wolves within reservation boundaries, formally reaffirming long-held beliefs that wolves should be left alone to determine their own population levels.
That year, 117 wolves were killed. The next year, 257 wolves. And in 2014, another 154 wolves were killed before protections were once again restored under pressure from environmental groups.
More recently, towards the tail-end of the first Trump administration in October 2020, the government announced it would delist grey wolves in the lower-48 states. “After more than 45 years as a listed species, the grey wolf has exceeded all conservation goals for recovery,” said then-Secretary of the Interior David L. Bernhardt in a press release. “Today’s announcement simply reflects the determination that this species is neither a threatened nor endangered species based on the specific factors Congress has laid out in the law.”
When news of the delisting reached Mashkiiziibiing, the tribal leadership was dismayed, but not surprised. “Nothing shocks me anymore,” Wiggins said. “I just took it as a threat.”
‘The Garden of Eden is here’
In the weeks leading up to the February 2021 hunt, GLIFWC warned that the state lacked the scientific basis and legal footing to proceed so quickly after the federal delisting, and that authorising a hunt without meaningful consultation with the tribes would violate treaty obligations. Initially, the DNR refused to hold the November-to-February hunt, since the decision came in the middle of the season, and experts said they needed time to revise the Wolf Management Plan.
But the Wisconsin legislature disagreed. On February 11, Jefferson County Circuit Court Judge Bennett J Brantmeier said the DNR had violated state law with its “refusal to immediately establish an open season for the hunting and trapping of wolves” and ruled that a hunt should be held before the end of the month.
Yet no one could have anticipated what followed. “A horror show,” Isham called it.
In less than three days, an estimated 216 wolves were killed. Hunters put up photos of themselves with their kills on social media, posing with rifles on top of piles of dead wolves. They grinned beside carcasses dangling from chains, leaving blood trails in the snow. Some didn’t have licences; others were convicted poachers. Many used outlawed methods like snares, chaser dogs and leg traps; relics of the nineteenth century.
Not only did the February hunt exceed the state-sanctioned quota of 119 kills, forcing the department to call an early end to it, but it took place in the middle of the wolves’ breeding season. “It’s not as simple as going into the woods and killing one wolf. The ripple effect is something that needs to be taken into account,” said Wiggins. “These are highly regimented societies we’re talking about. You kill an alpha; it causes chaos within the pack. There’s infighting and power struggles. Pups die of starvation.”
Later estimates by the Carnivore Coexistence Lab found that 313 to 323 wolves had been killed, including pregnant females. In other words, in less than 72 hours, an estimated one-third of Wisconsin’s wolf population had been wiped out.
In response, Wisconsin’s six Ojibwe governments came together to sue the state to stop the next hunt, scheduled to start that November. The lawsuit was filed on the basis of what Wiggins described as the “clear and very provocative violation” of the treaties of 1837 and 1842 (also known as the Pine Tree and Copper treaties). They argued that their hunting rights carried an implied conservation right and by authorising a rushed wolf hunt in February 2021, without adequate consultation with the tribes, the state had undermined their treaty-protected role as co-managers of the land.
The tribal governments viewed the case as a “fundamental responsibility to try and protect our relatives,” explained Wiggins. “The Spirit put us on different paths, but we were told that what happens to one happens to the other—and the Garden of Eden is here. We’re sitting in it.”
‘Cold War’
On October 29, 2021, Wiggins travelled to Madison with Marvin Defoe of the Red Cliff Band to present the tribes’ position in the federal court. They were represented by Earthjustice, a nonprofit agency that litigates on environmental issues. Back at the reservations, elders held prayers and ceremonies for their success. “Help can come in any form,” said Wiggins.
About two hours into the proceedings, Wiggins was called to the stand.
“Would you please state your name for the record?”
“My Anishinaabe name is Makade Makawa, meaning Black Bear. My English name is Mike Wiggins, Jr.”
The treaties guaranteed the right to hunt, fish and gather, but an Earthjustice attorney pressed a different question: did they also guarantee a right to conserve.
“Absolutely,” Wiggins replied.
“If you’ve retained a right to get fish, you’ve obviously retained the right to make sure those rivers run and have good fish habitat. If you’ve retained a right for the rest of those plant medicines and all of those other animals that we utilise in our life to be there for us, you’ve retained the right to make sure there’s an ecosystem that’s diverse enough and robust enough to ensure the totality of the world around us… Those weren’t under an umbrella of things that were hunky-dory. Those were agreements that were entered into as acknowledgements of sharing, acknowledgements of autonomy in terms of who we were as Anishinaabeg, and who the feds were, as people that were going to share this home now.”
The judge asked Wiggins why some Ojibweg expressed wanting to participate in the wolf hunt despite what he described as his tribe’s “spiritual connection” with the wolf.
So, Wiggins explained, as best he could.
“In our culture, we honour… that spirit that is in each individual, the decisions that they make…for their life here and how they experience things… With that being said, you know, my mind went across a history of who we are as a people, but also a history of all that we’ve endured coming back through our treaties, coming back through, to be honest, failed federal Indian policy: the boarding school era, the educational efforts of early America that subscribed to ‘kill the Indian, save the man,’ so to speak. There’s been an onslaught on who we are as a people, our culture, our history that has left us—a lot of times, I could say, it left us like our reservation lands were checkerboarded on who we were as individuals and how we recognised ourselves.”
It was the first time the Ojibwe governments had litigated on an issue concerning wolves, but there was a precedent—beginning in 1959, when the Bad River Tribal Council declared “a state of cold war” with the Wisconsin Department of Conservation to protest the arrest of its members for off-reservation hunting and fishing.
In 1921, the Federal Power Commission gave permission to the Wisconsin-Minnesota Power Company to build the Project 108 dam on the Chippewa River, flooding the Lac Courte Oreilles reservation. “That’s when we started to become dependent, so to speak. We didn’t have casinos and stuff like that back then,” said Isham. “Commodities came in, like government cheese, and our people got sick. But when we left the reservation to hunt, we’d get shot at and killed,” said Isham. He told me the story of Joe White, a Lac Courte Oreilles chief, who was killed by a warden after he went to hunt deer off-reservation. “Of course, the warden was acquitted, kinda like what you see today. Although there’s more guilty charges these days because of cell phones.”
Since the 1980s, in particular, the tribes have turned to legal action with growing frequency to reassert their treaty rights—more recently, challenging Enbridge’s Line 5 pipeline reroute through Bad River, defending EPA water quality standards against industry lawsuits, and fighting sulfide-ore mining projects near their waterways.
“Courts are a form of modern-day war,” said Wiggins.
‘Science needs to catch up’
Peter David, a wildlife biologist at GLIFWC, was seated behind his desk, papers scattered around him. In the corner, a laptop bag bore the etched image of a wolf and the words, “Aldo Leopold’s Wolves.”
“If you’ve ever been to Washburn—small community, about 2,000 people, the kind of town tourists drive through and barely notice—and you take that population, divide it in half, and spread it over the entire northern-third of the state, that’s sort of comparable to the density of wolves in Wisconsin,” he said.
This is the example the wildlife biologist offers when confronted with the claim that wolf numbers are too high. “Wolves are so good at self-limiting their own population that the number never gets very high, compared to a lot of other species,” he explained.
David was just weeks away from retirement when the February 2021 hunt took place, forcing him to postpone his plans. He said that when he started out three decades ago, there were even fewer wolves in Wisconsin. “I’m 60-some years old and—by God!—there were no wolves in the Wisconsin I was born into. Even as late as 1999, there were only about 200 wolves in the state. So, it’s a pretty remarkable recovery,” he said with a smile.
A few years ago, while he was out conducting a wolf survey in Bayfield County, he heard coyotes howling in the night. Within a minute, a wolf pack responded in kind. “To be out there—in that remote spot, in the dark, hearing these two cousins call out to each other—it sends shivers down the spine,” he said.
Outside his office was a stand stacked with pamphlets. One was on the Sandy Lake Tragedy, in which hundreds of Anishinaabe people died of disease and starvation during the removal orders of 1850. Another warned residents about the Enbridge Line 5 pipeline, carrying crude oil from Wisconsin to Ontario. A third pamphlet warned tribal hunters about chronic wasting disease: a fatal, highly contagious neurodegenerative disease found in white-tailed deer, moose, elk and reindeer.
The tribes believe wolves are an important factor in keeping the large herbivore population healthy because they typically hunt the sick animals. “There’s a need for more science on this, but science also needs to catch up,” said David.
Studies over the past 20 years, conducted in Yellowstone National Park, have shown that the reintroduction of wolves has led to the stabilisation of wild elk populations, as wolf packs took out the weak and diseased, leaving more resources for the healthy members of the herds. There have also been studies on scavenger species, such as ravens and other smaller predators, showing how they, too, benefit from the presence of wolves on the land, as they feed on the carcasses left behind. “Biological systems are complicated,” said David. “Where you have populations of large animals—like deer or moose or elk, or others in the ungulate family—the ecology of those systems is much healthier if you have effective predators present.”
When deer populations are high, and nothing is threatening them, they devour many species of plant. When wolves are present (as documented in Yellowstone, as well as north-central Wisconsin), the diversity of plants is greater. “Some of those plants are important medicinal plants for the tribes, so it’s important to keep them on the landscape. And they tend to provide all kinds of habitat benefits for various species of wildlife as well,” he added.
There has also been some modelling work done that suggests wolves may help human health through a process called trophic cascades. “The theory is that wolves reduce the number of coyotes in an area. Without wolves, the coyote population could get very high, and coyotes tend to keep fox populations down, which are what we call the best mousers,” explained David. “They’re the ones feeding on the small rodents that carry many of these ticks that carry diseases”—diseases like Lyme, anaplasmosis, ehrlichiosis, borrelia and Rocky Mountain spotted fever.
‘Joe always said…’
In February 2022, a federal judge in the Northern District of California reversed the USFWS decision and ordered the restoration of federal protections for grey wolves in most of the lower-48 states, barring the Northern Rockies. The threat of delisting, however, has not gone away. Within weeks of the ruling, some Republican lawmakers tried to have it overturned, urging the Biden administration to appeal the decision. Now, the US House of Representatives has passed a bill that would remove federal protections for grey wolves under the ESA, which is pending Senate consideration. If it passes, the tribes might lose their right to refile their lawsuit, which had been dismissed without prejudice.
For Wiggins, though, the fight for wolves will always be tied to Rose, also known as Moka’ang Giizis (Rising Sun), who passed away from COVID-19-related complications on the second day of the February 2021 hunt. He was 85.
It was said when he was a young man, Rose had a vision. “Joe always said that if the wolf should ever vanish from the landscape, the Anishinaabeg will die. We will die. From the loss of spirit, the loneliness of spirit,” said Wiggins. “I’m not sure how much of the relisting was because of our efforts, but Joe would’ve been so happy. He would’ve given me a stern handshake and a clap on the back—he was a big, strapping dude, you know?—and probably added a little ceremony with the pipes to say: ‘thank you’.”
After a short pause for reflection, Wiggins added: “Sometimes I think Joe died to escort all those wolves across to the other side. Other times, I think hundreds of them showed up to help him cross over. Either way I look at it, I find it beautiful.”
A shorter version of this article was published in New Lines Magazine on April 29, 2026. Read it here.