BALL CLUB — Leech Lake Tribal Council members, Itasca County commissioners, and even state Sen. Mary Kunesh broke ground for a new community and wellness center in Ball Club.
The groundbreaking ceremony on Friday, Sept. 26, marks the third such groundbreaking this year, following the state Legislature’s $24 million investment for three wellness centers on the Leech Lake Reservation in 2023.
Leech Lake Secretary Treasurer Lenny Fineday said the first groundbreaking was in June 2025 in Cass Lake, with an expansion project breaking ground in Kego Lake earlier in September.
“Talk about these wellness centers has been going on for over a decade,” Fineday said. “It took us some time to even get to this point. ... We’re so thankful for the partnership with the state and the benefit that this is going to provide to our local community.”
The new facility will replace Ball Club’s existing community center with two older structures. The new building will continue to serve as a gathering space for parties and funerals, as well as hosting ample space for basketball games, bingo nights, community health clinics and more.
Kunesh, DFL-St. Paul, helped champion the legislation. She said the investment was long overdue, as Indian tribes have still yet to see treaty promises realized.
"They will take our land and in exchange provide housing, health care, education, opportunity to have a trade that would be able to be sustainable for our communities,” Kunesh said. “And we know that our federal government and even our state government never really upheld those agreements.”
Ball Club’s representative on the Tribal Council, Kyle Smith, said these centers serve a huge role in Indigenous communities, from receiving pre-natal care to remembering loved ones at funerary wakes.
"Our communities are very tight-knit,” Smith said. “We rely on families for supports and family gatherings. And it's just a way of life for our Native communities.”
Leech Lake Chairman Faron Jackson described the new buildings and partnerships as symbolic of the continued progress the Leech Lake Band and its neighbors have made.
“When we think about what our relatives before us endured, we've come a long ways and we've got to be thankful for what we have today,” Jackson said. “We don’t have to haul water from a well, we don’t have to go out and cut firewood to keep warm, we don’t have to burn kerosene lamps and use an outdoor bathroom facility.
“These are things that a lot of our relatives had to go through, both Native and non-Native. They all lived that way of life.”
The Leech Lake Band also formally entered into a memorandum of understanding with Itasca County in a special meeting Friday.
The agreement, Fineday explained, aims to move the two governments into a stronger working relationship, to better serve the people of Leech Lake and Itasca County.
"When we work together, our neighbors and our communities are stronger and better off for it,” Fineday said.
Itasca County Commissioner John Johnson commemorated the occasion with a special gift to Jackson: an unfinished pipe he made.
"I hope that this unfinished pipe is as meaningful to you and the Council as it is to me, because I hope it is exactly like the relationship between Itasca County and the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, and that it remains unfinished,” Johnson said.
“A pipe is something that is so sacred in Indigenous country,” Jackson said upon accepting it. “A pipe is one of the highest honors you can receive from someone.”
Construction on the new wellness centers is expected to take about a year.
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