PRAIRIE ISLAND INDIAN COMMUNITY, Minn. (AP) — Some Native Americans traditionally bestow bald eagle feathers at ceremonies to mark achievements, such as graduations, and as a form of reverence for the bird they hold sacred as a messenger to the Creator.
This year, many are doing so with elevated pride and hope. The bald eagle is now the official bird of the United States, nearly 250 years after it was first used as a symbol of the newly founded nation that's deeply polarized politically today.
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A bald eagle flies over the Mississippi River toward Wisconsin from Lake City, Minn., prime territory for the newly official U.S. national bird, on Wednesday, July 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Giovanna Dell'Orto)
Derek Walking Eagle walks by the Mississippi River before attending a ceremony honoring high school graduates by presenting them with a bald eagle feather at the Prairie Island Indian Community in Minnesota on Wednesday, July 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Giovanna Dell'Orto)
Jayvionna Buck poses for a portrait by the Mississippi River with the new bald eagle feather she received at a ceremony honoring high school graduates like her at the Prairie Island Indian Community in Minnesota on Wednesday, July 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Mark Vancleave)
New graduate Arthur Lockwood, center left, and other members of the Prairie Island Singers perform drumming at a ceremony honoring high school and higher education graduates at the Prairie Island Indian Community in Minnesota on Wednesday, July 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Giovanna Dell'Orto)
A ceremonial staff with eagle feathers stands near the podium at a ceremony honoring high school and higher education graduates at the Prairie Island Indian Community in Minnesota on Wednesday, July 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Giovanna Dell'Orto)
Relatives place bald eagle feathers on the heads of new high school graduates, as a mark of accomplishment and as reverence to the bird they hold sacred, at a ceremony at the Prairie Island Indian Community in Minnesota on Wednesday, July 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Giovanna Dell'Orto)
Angel, a 26-year-old bald eagle from Wisconsin that was too gravely injured to be returned to the wild, serves as "ambassador" to visitors at the National Eagle Center in Wabasha, Minn., on Wednesday, July 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Mark Vancleave)
“The eagle is finally getting the respect it deserves. Maybe when the nation looks at the eagle that way, maybe there will be less division,” said Jim Thunder Hawk. He’s the Dakota culture and language manager for the Prairie Island Indian Community, a small Mdewakanton Sioux band on the banks of the Mississippi River in Minnesota.
This wide, unruffled stretch of water framed by wooded bluffs is prime bald eagle territory. The size of Minnesota’s population of the majestic, white-head-and-tail birds that are exclusive to North America is second only to that of Alaska.
The legislation that made the eagle official came from members of Minnesota’s Congressional delegation. The federal act recognizes the eagles’ centrality in most Indigenous peoples’ “spiritual lives and sacred belief systems,” and a replica of it is on display at the National Eagle Center in Wabasha, Minnesota, 40 miles (65 kilometers) downriver from the Prairie Island community, which partners with the center in eagle care.
“If you grew up in the United States, eagles were a part of your everyday life,” said Tiffany Ploehn, who as the center’s avian care director supervises its four resident bald eagles. “Everyone has some sort of connection.”
A bald eagle, its wings and talons spread wide, has graced the Great Seal of the United States since 1782, and appears on passport covers, the $1 bill, military insignia, and myriad different images in pop culture.
But a prolific collector of eagle memorabilia based in Wabasha realized recently that, while the United States had an official animal (the bison) and flower (the rose), the eagle was getting no formal credit. Several Minnesota legislators sponsored a bill to remedy that and then-President Joe Biden’s signature made it official in December.
With their massive wingspan and stern curved beak, bald eagles are widely used as symbols of strength and power. In reality, they spend 95% of their day perched high in trees, though when they hunt they can spot a rabbit 3 miles (5 kilometers) away, Ploehn said.
For many Native Americans, the soaring eagle represents far more; it delivers their prayers to the Creator and even intercedes on their behalf.
“My grandma told me that we honor eagles because they saved the Ojibwe people when the Creator wanted to turn on them. The eagle, he can fly high, so he went to speak with the Creator to make things right,” said Sadie Erickson, who is Ojibwe and Mdewakanton Sioux.
Erickson and a dozen other high school graduates received a bald eagle feather at an early July celebration by the riverbank at Prairie Island.
Thunder Hawk said a prayer in the Dakota language urging the high school graduates and graduates receiving higher education degrees to “always remember who you are and where you come from.”
Then they lined up and a relative tied a feather — traditionally on the left side, the heart’s side — as tribal members sang and drummed to celebrate them.
“It just feels like I went through a new step of life,” said Jayvionna Buck.
Growing up on Prairie Island, she recalled her mother excitedly pointing out every eagle.
“She would genuinely just yell at me, ‘Eagle!’ But it’s just a special occurrence for us to see,” Buck said. “We love seeing it, and normally when we do, we just offer tobacco to show our respects.”
Some Native Americans honor the eagle by taking it as their ceremonial name. Derek Walking Eagle, whose Lakota name is “Eagle Thunder,” celebrated the graduates wearing a woven medallion representing the bird.
To him, eagles are like relatives that connect him to his future and afterlife.
“Being able to carry on to the spirit world … that’s who guides you. It’s the eagle,” Walking Eagle said.
That deep respect attaches to the feathers, too.
“It’s the highest respect you can bestow on a person, from your family and from your people, from your tribe,” Thunder Hawk said. “We teach the person receiving the feather that they have to honor and respect the eagle. And we tell them why.”
In many Native cultures, killing an eagle is “blasphemous,” he said. It is also a federal offense.
Historically, Sioux warriors would lure an eagle with rabbit or other food, pluck a few feathers and release it, said Thunder Hawk, who grew up in South Dakota.
Today, there’s a nationwide program that legally distributes eagle feathers and parts exclusively to tribal members, though it’s very backlogged. U.S. wildlife and tribal officials worry that killings and illegal trafficking of eagles for their feathers is on the rise, especially in the West.
In Minnesota, eagles are most often harmed by road accidents and eating poison – results of shrinking wildlife habitat that brings them in closer contact with humans, said Lori Arent, interim director of the University of Minnesota’s Raptor Center.
The center treats about 200 injured bald eagles each year. Of those they can save, most are eventually released back into the wild. Permanently disabled birds that lose an eye or whose wings are too badly fractured to fly are cared for there or at other educational institutions like the Wabasha eagle center.
The official designation could help more Americans understand how their behaviors inadvertently harm eagles, Arent said. Littering by a highway, for instance, attracts rodents that lure eagles, which then can be struck by vehicles. Fishing or hunting with tackles and ammunition containing lead exposes the eagles eating those fish or deer remains to fatal metal poisoning.
Humans have lost the ability to coexist in harmony with the natural world, Thunder Hawk said, voicing a concern shared by Indigenous people from the Chilean Andes to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
He hopes more people might now approach the eagle with the same reverence he was taught. It’s what leads him to offer sage or dried red willow bark every time he spots one as a “thank you for allowing me to see you and for you to hear my prayers and my thoughts.”
Erickson, the new graduate, shares that optimism.
“I feel like that kind of shows that we’re strong and united as a country,” she said by the Mississippi, her new feather nestled in her hair.
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
A bald eagle flies over the Mississippi River toward Wisconsin from Lake City, Minn., prime territory for the newly official U.S. national bird, on Wednesday, July 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Giovanna Dell'Orto)
Derek Walking Eagle walks by the Mississippi River before attending a ceremony honoring high school graduates by presenting them with a bald eagle feather at the Prairie Island Indian Community in Minnesota on Wednesday, July 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Giovanna Dell'Orto)
Jayvionna Buck poses for a portrait by the Mississippi River with the new bald eagle feather she received at a ceremony honoring high school graduates like her at the Prairie Island Indian Community in Minnesota on Wednesday, July 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Mark Vancleave)
New graduate Arthur Lockwood, center left, and other members of the Prairie Island Singers perform drumming at a ceremony honoring high school and higher education graduates at the Prairie Island Indian Community in Minnesota on Wednesday, July 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Giovanna Dell'Orto)
A ceremonial staff with eagle feathers stands near the podium at a ceremony honoring high school and higher education graduates at the Prairie Island Indian Community in Minnesota on Wednesday, July 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Giovanna Dell'Orto)
Relatives place bald eagle feathers on the heads of new high school graduates, as a mark of accomplishment and as reverence to the bird they hold sacred, at a ceremony at the Prairie Island Indian Community in Minnesota on Wednesday, July 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Giovanna Dell'Orto)
Angel, a 26-year-old bald eagle from Wisconsin that was too gravely injured to be returned to the wild, serves as "ambassador" to visitors at the National Eagle Center in Wabasha, Minn., on Wednesday, July 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Mark Vancleave)
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty on Friday called on members of the public to send any video or other evidence in the fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis directly to her office.
Moriarty said that although her office has collaborated effectively with the FBI in past cases, the Trump administration’s decision to keep the investigation into Wednesday’s killing of Good by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in federal hands concerns her. She said she’s worried that the FBI won’t share evidence with state investigators.
A day after Good was killed in Minneapolis, federal immigration agents shot and wounded two people in a vehicle outside a hospital in Portland on Thursday.
The shooting drew hundreds of protesters to the ICE building at night, and Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield vowed to investigate “whether any federal officer acted outside the scope of their lawful authority” and refer criminal charges to the prosecutor’s office if warranted.
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An Oregon Congresswoman says federal immigration officers should leave Portland after two people were shot Thursday while sitting inside a vehicle outside a hospital.
Rep. Janelle Bynum, a Democrat, laid the blame on Republican President Donald Trump.
“This isn’t law enforcement, it’s state-sponsored terrorism,” Bynum said in a release. “This is the second shooting this week by agents following the orders of a wannabe dictator who is trying to take over cities and rule by instilling terror in the hearts of American people.”
The Department of Homeland Security described one of those wounded in Portland as “a Venezuelan illegal alien affiliated with the transnational Tren de Aragua prostitution ring” who had been involved in a recent shooting in Portland. The statement said that when agents identified themselves to the vehicle occupants, the driver tried to run them over and an agent shot.
The shooting came a day after an ICE agent fatally shot a woman inside her vehicle in Minneapolis.
Hundreds of ICE protests are scheduled across the country this weekend, including several in states like Texas, Kansas, New Mexico, Ohio, and Florida, according to Indivisible, a social movement organization that formed to resist the Trump administration.
The group and its local chapters organized protests last year in all 50 states.
Ezra Levin, co-executive director of Indivisible said he expects the number of protests this week to surpass 1,000.
“This is hitting people who previously were not engaged,” Levin said, pointing out that over the last few days he has seen a rise in veterans, people in rural America, and even some Republican voters speaking out.
“I do not think this is an ideological fight. This is a fight between people who are trying to trash the Constitution through aggressive violent behavior and normal everyday Americans who do not want to be messed with in this way,” he said.
The wife of Renee Good says “kindness radiated out of her.”
Becca Good told MPR News in a statement that they stopped to support neighbors amid immigration enforcement efforts, when Renee was fatally shot Wednesday by an ICE agent in Minneapolis.
“We had whistles. They had guns,” Becca Good said.
Renee Good, 37, was stopped across a street when the agent fired shots into her SUV. Federal officials said the officer acted in self-defense and that the driver pulled toward him.
Court records from a previous incident have identified the agent as Jonathan Ross.
Becca Good said the couple moved to Minnesota to make a better life for themselves and their son.
“There was a strong shared sense here in Minneapolis that we were looking out for each other,” she said. “Here, I had finally found peace and safe harbor. That has been taken from me forever.”
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty on Friday seemed to dispute Vice President JD Vance’s claim that the ICE agent who fatally shot Renee Good had “absolute immunity” earlier this week.
Moriarty said it was too early to tell whether Good’s death would warrant prosecution against the officer that shot her, Jonathan Ross.
When asked to speculate on the Trump administration’s motives for blocking state investigators from a joint investigation into the shooting, Moriarty said she couldn’t “speak to why the Trump administration is doing what it is doing.”
“I can say the ICE officer does not have complete immunity here,” she added.
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said that although her office has collaborated effectively with the FBI in past cases, the Trump administration’s decision to keep the investigation into Wednesday’s killing of Good by an ICE officer in federal hands concerns her. She said she’s worried that the FBI won’t share evidence with state investigators.
Moriarty said she isn’t sure what legal outcome the evidence her office receives from the public might produce. But she said her office is responsible for the investigation, despite the Trump administration’s decision to assign it solely to the FBI.
“We do have jurisdiction to make this decision with what happened in this case,” she said. “It does not matter that it was a federal law enforcement agent.”
Moriarty also said that her office would offer a link for the public to submit videos that captured the fatal shooting.
The Minneapolis school system will offer families the option of remote learning for a month amid federal immigration enforcement in the city, the district said.
The district provided the update in emails to teachers that were obtained by The Associated Press.
The move comes as the Trump administration sends 2,000 immigration agents to the area and the community responds to the fatal shooting of a local woman earlier this week by a federal agent.
In a letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, U.S. Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith called for a thorough, objective, and impartial investigation of the fatal shooting of a Minneapolis woman by an ICE agent.
“That requires full cooperation with state investigators and local authorities,” the letter read.
The head of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, which investigates officer-involved shootings, said Thursday that it was informed that the FBI and U.S. Justice Department would not work with it on the investigation into Good’s killing.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the state has no jurisdiction.
Department of Homeland Security officials identified the driver as Luis David Nico Moncada and the passenger as Yorlenys Betzabeth Zambrano-Contreras.
Both are from Venezuela and entered the U.S. illegally in 2022 and 2023, respectively, the agency said.
DHS said Moncada was a suspected Tren de Aragua gang member and that since entering the country, he has been arrested for driving under the influence and unauthorized use of a vehicle.
The department said Zambrano-Contreras is associated with the gang and has “played an active role in a Tren de Aragua prostitution ring and was involved with a prior shooting in Portland.”
The two were shot Thursday during an immigration operation outside a hospital in Portland, Oregon.
There was no immediate independent corroboration of any gang affiliation. Telephone numbers for the two could not immediately be located.
Parent-teacher conferences may look different next week at schools in the St. Cloud area due to the presence of ICE agents in the school district, according to the president of the district’s teachers union.
“Many parents do not feel safe coming to our schools because of the fear of being taken away from their schools, their homes, and their workplaces,” said Chris Erickson, a media specialist who is on leave while serving as president of the district’s teachers union.
Erickson said anxiety and fear are being felt by parents, students and educators.
Wendy Marczak, president of the Bloomington Federation of Teachers, said it is difficult to protect children and create an environment where students can learn and thrive “when ICE is stalking your schools.”
“ICE agents deliberately wait outside the school building during drop-off and pickup times, trying to catch parents and take them away,” Marczak said. “The consequences of those actions are devastating. Everyone is scared and angry. Teachers feel helpless to protect their students. Students are not coming to school. Learning is being lost.”
Federal immigration officers are pulling out of a Louisiana crackdown and heading to Minneapolis in an abrupt pivot from an operation that drew protests around New Orleans and aimed to make thousands of arrests, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.
The shift appeared to signal a wind down of the Louisiana deployment that was dubbed “Catahoula Crunch” and began in December with the arrival of more than 200 officers. The operation had been expected to last into February and swiftly raised fears in immigrant communities.
The Trump administration has been surging thousands of federal officers to Minnesota under a sweeping new crackdown tied in part to allegations of fraud involving Somali residents. More than 2,000 officers are taking part in what the Department of Homeland Security has called the biggest immigration enforcement operation ever.
▶ Read more about the shift in operations
“We have seen ICE agents in Roseville circling school property, just waiting for families to pick up their children,” Education Minnesota President Monica Byron told reporters at a Friday morning news conference.
“In greater Minnesota, students in St. Cloud, St. James and Rochester are afraid to go to school for fear of being harassed, assaulted, or worse, by the very people our government was set to protect us,” Byron said.
The union is demanding that ICE operations be kept away from schools “so students, educators and staff can learn and work in safety and peace,” Byron said.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said Friday that its initial focus is reexamining background checks of 5,600 refugees in Minnesota who have not obtained green cards. The effort began mid-December, and USCIS says it involves “intense verification of refugee claims.”
The agency is calling the effort Operation PARRIS, an acronym for Post-Admission Refugee Reverification and Integrity Strengthening. The operation’s geographic scope is unclear, but the Homeland Security Department calls Minnesota “ground zero for the war on fraud.”
Refugees are extensively vetted before entering the United States. They must apply for legal permanent residency one year after arriving.
Hartford Mayor Arunan Arulampalam said a vehicle believed to have been driven by federal officers struck a person in the crowd, knocked them down and drove away without stopping outside the Abraham Ribicoff federal building Thursday night during a protest over Good's killing in Minneapolis. He said the person declined medical attention.
Videos from the scene show protesters trying to block a car and van from leaving a parking garage at the building, then the vehicles driving off slowly through the crowd. Someone then throws an object that smashes a window of the van. Some protesters also said they were pepper-sprayed. No major injuries were reported.
“What we saw last night was a peaceful vigil in the city of Hartford turned violent,” Arulampalam, a Democrat, said at a news conference Friday. “And that violence didn’t come from the city of Hartford. That violence is a direct result of the lawlessness and recklessness of the Trump administration that has occurred over the past year.”
Arulampalam said city police are investigating.
Officials with the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not immediately return messages seeking comment Friday morning.
Mulaney said in a post on the social platform X that postponing the shows “feels unfair to the audience.”
“Still, I don’t feel comfortable asking thousands of people each night to leave their homes, gather at the venue, and then make their way home when the situation is so unsafe,” he wrote.
He called the situation in Minneapolis “heartbreaking.”
Hundreds of people have been protesting in Minneapolis since Good was killed.
Shows had been scheduled Friday through Sunday at the Armory event center. Tickets for those performances will be honored April 10-12.
The Somali American Leadership Task Force says the 2:30 p.m. CT event at 34th Street and Portland Avenue will be peaceful and is being organized by Somali neighbors to show community solidarity and condemn ICE operations in Minnesota. Hundreds of people have been protesting in Minneapolis against ICE since Good was killed.
Court records from a previous incident in Bloomington, Minnesota, have identified the ICE agent who shot Good as Jonathan Ross.
The federal agent is an Iraq War veteran who has served for nearly two decades in the Border Patrol and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to records obtained Thursday by The Associated Press.
Jonathan Ross has served as a deportation officer with ICE since 2015, records show. He was seriously injured last summer when he was dragged by the vehicle of a fleeing suspect whom he shot with a Taser.
Federal officials have not named the officer who shot Good, a 37-year-old mother who was shot as she tried to drive away from federal agents. But Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the agent who shot Good had been dragged by a vehicle last June, and a department spokesperson confirmed Noem was referring to the Bloomington, Minnesota, case in which documents identified the injured officer as Ross.
Attempts to reach Ross, 43, at phone numbers and email addresses associated with him were not immediately successful.
▶ Read more about Ross
Federal officials say an immigration officer acted in self-defense when he fatally shot Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three in Minneapolis. But videos of the incident from different angles tell a far more complicated story, and policing experts say some of the choices the officer made defy practices nearly every law enforcement agency has followed for decades.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem described the incident as an “act of domestic terrorism” carried out against ICE officers by a woman who “attempted to run them over and rammed them with her vehicle. An officer of ours acted quickly and defensively, shot, to protect himself and the people around him.”
But it’s unclear in the videos if the car makes contact with the officer.
Sharon Fairley, a law professor and criminal justice expert at the University of Chicago, said the investigation into what happened will have to examine whether the officer acted reasonably, both in firing his gun and in the moments leading up to it.
▶ Read more of the AP’s analysis of the Minnesota shooting
As anger and outrage spilled out onto Minneapolis’ streets over the fatal shooting of a woman by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, a new shooting by federal officers in Oregon left two people wounded, sparked additional protests and elicited more scrutiny of enforcement operations across the U.S.
The shooting in Portland, Oregon, took place outside a hospital Thursday afternoon. A man and woman were shot inside a vehicle, and their conditions were not immediately known. The FBI and the Oregon Department of Justice were investigating. Mayor Keith Wilson and the city council called on ICE to end all operations in the city until a full investigation is completed. Hundreds protested Thursday night at the ICE building.
Just as it did following Wednesday’s shooting in Minneapolis, the Department of Homeland Security defended the actions of the officers in Portland, saying it occurred after a Venezuelan man with alleged gang ties and who was involved in a recent shooting tried to “weaponize” his vehicle to hit the officers. It was not yet clear if witness video corroborates that account.
▶ Read more about the reactions in Portland and Minneapolis
Protesters gather across the street from the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building as protesters gather in Minneapolis, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026.(AP Photo/Adam Bettcher)
Protesters stand off against law enforcement outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland, Ore., Thursday, Jan. 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Jenny Kane)
People gather around a makeshift memorial honoring Renee Good who was fatally shot by a federal law enforcement agent near the site of the shooting in Minneapolis, Thursday, Jan. 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Tom Baker)
Federal agents and police clash with protesters outside the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, in Minneapolis, Minn., on Thursday, Jan. 8, 2026. (Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press via AP)
Protesters are arrested by federal agents outside the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Adam Bettcher)
