seen from United States
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Please please please, I’m begging people, start talking about indonesia occupied papua. Over the last 50 years Indonesia has killed over 500,000 native Papuans in their occupation of the west half of the island.
This is also a genocide that should be talked about. It needs to be addressed, but it’s ignored on the global stage.
Free Papua!
Wikipedia editors push offensive language to delegitimize some Native American Tribes
Article Text As Follows:
Wikipedia editors push offensive language to delegitimize some Native American Tribes
By Sherry Robinson
Special to The Independent
ALBUQUERQUE — When Lily Gladstone won a Golden Globe and Oscar nomination for her role in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” the public recognized a Native American actress. But to Wikipedia readers, she is an American actress whose father was Blackfeet and Nez Perce and whose mother was white.
Three long-time editors at the online encyclopedia argued that even though Gladstone grew up on the Blackfeet reservation, she couldn’t be called Native American unless she was an enrolled member of the tribe. When Gladstone’s uncle weighed in to say she was enrolled, they dismissed his comments. She is still, in Wikipedia’s view, “an American actress.”
In recent years, outside of a national debate in Indian Country over fake tribes, a handful of Wikipedia editors have been deciding who is Native American and who isn’t.
Look behind the curtain of the sprawling site and you will find a network of 265,000 volunteer editors writing and editing within a Wiki universe that has its own rules, language, police and courts but no traditional hierarchy.
Wikipedia’s structure allows likeminded editors to work together, but it also permits editors with a bias to advance their agenda. The site has drawn criticism from media and academics for slanted articles on Blacks and Jews. Wikipedia documents its own systemic bias in an article by that name and attributes the problem to too few minority editors. The typical editor, it says, is a white male.
By Wikipedia's definition, the only real tribes are federally recognized; editors of Native American material denigrate state-recognized and unrecognized tribes and seem preoccupied with revealing fake Indians.
The fakes are out there, and they’re a problem. But there’s a big difference between people who invented a Native ancestry and people who have a long, documented heritage.
For this story, aggrieved tribal members didn’t identify themselves because they fear the site’s size and power – it reaches 1.8 billion devices a month – and some editors’ vindictiveness.
Behind the curtain
Wikipedia is transparent about its process. Click on “talk” at the top of each article and you find the (sometimes endless) debates among editors about an article and see the site’s rules in action.
Editors are anonymous because the Wikipedia Foundation has a strong commitment to privacy, says a spokesperson. However, readers don’t know what expertise editors have or whether they’re Native American.
Editors select their subject matter. With experience they can rise in the pecking order until they gain authority to reverse or eliminate the edits of others. They quote the site’s often arcane rules in Wiki-Speak to anyone who disagrees. While Wikipedia espouses objectivity, neutrality and civility, discussions can take the low road.
On Lily Gladstone’s talk page, a newish editor, user name Tsideh (Apache for bird), asked, “What are your sources supporting the idea that Native Americans are only those who are enrolled in a US recognized tribe?”
A Wiki editor, user name ARoseWolf, answered: “A notable subject can make a claim… but you must have that respective tribal nation’s acceptance as verification through enrollment."
Gladstone’s uncle wrote: “I’m a primary source for Ms. Gladstone’s tribal heritage. Her father is my brother. Through our father, we are both enrolled in the Blackfeet Tribe in the USA,” he wrote. “Our mother is enrolled Nez Perce. So Ms. Gladstone is a direct descendant of both Blackfeet and Nez Perce.”
ARoseWolf shot him down. “We can not use primary sources to verify such information and, you, as a claimed family member have a WP:COI which means we need an independent source.”
WP:COI is the Wikipedia rule on confl ict of interest. Wikipedia forbids primary sources, and yet they’re the gold standard for journalists and academics.
Tsideh challenged the position that only enrollment in a recognized tribe “entitles somebody to claim to be a Native American” as an unfounded, minority point of view that Wiki editors didn’t support with a citation or explanation.
ARoseWolf and others chastised Tsideh for violating Wiki rules on bullying, false accusations and arguing Wiki policy. Tsideh countered that Leonardo DiCaprio didn’t have to prove he was an Italian American, but Lily Gladstone had to prove she was a Native American.
As the back and forth continued, ARoseWolf slammed a new editor who "just happened to find this discussion,” a dig that implies one party enlisted another to join the debate. That too is a Wiki violation.
Bohemian Baltimore, another regular, insisted, “If she’s not enrolled, she may be a descendant, but she’s not a Native American.”
Who is Native American?
Terry Campbell, a Navajo born in Tuba City, Arizona, who lives out of state, has been studying Wikipedia for five months, after friends complained about poor treatment in trying to edit Wiki pages.
One friend wanted to add some facts to an article about a tribe. “These changes were rejected by a handful of editors who cited other Wikipedia pages as sources,” he said, “and I thought that was very, very odd.”
A friend citing sources that prove her tribe survived the Indian wars and received state recognition ran up against Wikipedia guidelines on determining Native American identities that were largely crafted by two editors, user names CorbieVreccan and Yuchitown. Wiki editors used the guidelines to reclassify dozens of state-recognized tribes as “heritage organizations” and removed “Native American” from biographies of prominent tribal members or, worse, called them a "self-identified Native American.”
The implication, Campbell explained, is that the tribe no longer exists and that its members are suspect or even “Pretendians.” Wikipedia has a page for that too.
The same group has shaped many articles on Native subjects. Campbell said he combed through references and found they were misrepresented, taken out of context, sourced from far-right academics, or unreliable.
“The scope of this issue is huge,” Campbell said. “It permeates all the Native articles I checked.”
Campbell recognized talking points from what he called a far-right movement in Indian Country intent on erasing state-recognized and unrecognized tribes. (New Mexico has no state-recognized tribes and six unrecognized groups or tribes.)
Some Native Americans and Anglos, he said, believe that Indigenous people outside the circle of federal recognition should be considered non-Native. They also want to prevent members of the disenfranchised groups from selling their art, receiving ancestral remains, accessing disaster relief or re-establishing their homeland.
Outside Indian Country, it’s not generally known that U.S. Indigenous groups live within a caste system based on government recognition, with 574 federally recognized tribes on top, dozens of state-recognized tribes second, and several hundred unrecognized tribes last.
In 2021, Yuchitown wrote, “The overwhelming majority of ‘List of unrecognized tribes in the United States’ are completely illegitimate.”
There are many reasons why groups aren’t recognized. Some avoided the reservation. Some lost their recognition during the termination era. Some were broken up and scattered during the Indian Wars. Some went underground, practicing their culture secretly while passing as Hispanic. Many simply stayed put.
When Wikipedia editors claim that “Native American” is a political status conferred by the U.S. government, that an individual can only be called a “descendent” until their tribe is recognized, they push this narrative, Campbell said. It’s a contradiction of federal Indian law and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, “As a general principle, an Indian is a person who is of some degree Indian blood and is recognized as an Indian by a Tribe and/or the United States. No single federal or tribal criterion establishes a person’s identity as an Indian. Government agencies use differing criteria to determine eligibility for programs and services. Tribes also have varying eligibility criteria for membership.”
Extreme points of view
Campbell has contributed to a lengthy report, as yet unpublished, that identifies biased editors. They include Yuchitown, CorbieVreccan, ARoseWolf, Indigenous girl and Bohemian Baltimore.
“It was like a tree with many interconnecting branches that had been created over time by the same small group of people pushing extreme points of view,” Campbell said.
Initially the group made changes slowly, he said, “but they started pursuing their agenda aggressively after November, when state-recognized tribes retained their voting rights in the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI). Essentially, after the movement to delegitimize state-recognized tribes failed officially, the key players doubled down on altering and controlling the flow of information about Native Americans through Wikipedia.”
Campbell observed widespread violations of Wikipedia standards: “I found evidence that they blatantly misquoted and misrepresented sources to push extremist political beliefs; teamed up to manipulate the consensus system by voting in blocks; exploited Wikipedia rules, such as conflict of interest, to block outside editors from making changes to Native-related pages; excessively cited opinion pieces from fringe political figures, including those accused of racism and anti-semitism; blocked the use of legitimate primary and secondary sources that contradict their extremists beliefs, which violates Wikipedia’s rule against information suppression; posted originally researched, politically motivated essays instead of well-sourced articles; and harassed and defamed Native American tribes and living Native American people.”
Reacting in February to an early draft of the report posted on Google, the editors were incensed that anybody would voice complaints “off-Wiki.” ARoseWolf wrote that “we have been attacked, threatened with legal action and had misinformation/ false claims spread against us.” She and Yuchitown denied being part of a conspiracy against tribes or organizations and said they were just following Wiki rules. Yuchitown accused critics of being “meat puppets” of a person who objected to some Native content and enlisted others to back them up. In WikiSpeak this is meat puppetry.
“Volunteers on Wikipedia vigilantly defend against information that does not meet the site’s requirements,” the Wikipedia spokeswoman wrote. “These volunteers regularly review a feed of real-time edits to quickly address problematic changes; bots spot and revert many common forms of negative behavior on the site; and volunteer administrators (trusted Wikipedia volunteers with advanced permissions to protect Wikipedia) further investigate and address negative behavior. When a user repeatedly violates Wikipedia policies, Wikipedia administrators can take disciplinary action and block them from further editing.”
Inaccurate and insulting
In 2006, Wikipedia established the WikiProject Indigenous Peoples of North America to improve its Native-related content of 14,000 articles and more than 37,000 pages.
Recently, a hot topic on the project’s talk page was a proposal to change a category name from “unrecognized tribes” to “organizations that self-identify.”
On April 15 Melissa Harding Ferretti, chairwoman of the Herring Pond Wampanoag Tribe in Massachusetts, wrote, “The proposed renaming of the category on Wikipedia is not only inaccurate… but also insulting.”
Ferretti is one of the few Natives to take on Wiki editors openly.
Herring Pond was originally listed with other Wampanoag tribes. In 2022 Yuchitown stripped “state-recognized” from the page, even though the state Commission of Indian Affairs regularly engages with them. Last year Yuchitown created a separate page for Herring Pond. Wiki editors resisted attempts to make changes or corrections.
After Wikipedia called Herring Pond a “cultural heritage group" and a nonprofi t that "claims" to descend from Wampanoags, Ferretti wrote in a Wiki discussion, “There is no claim, it’s a fact! Might I add, nonprofit status was imposed upon Tribal nations in the ‘90s because we didn’t have our federal recognition yet.”
Her tribe has a well-documented history. “We still have care and custody of our sacred places, burial grounds and our 1838 Meetinghouse, one of three built for the Tribe after the arrival of the colonizers. Our continuous presence and stewardship of these lands are recognized by historical records, deeds and treaties.”
Ferretti wrote that tribes without federal recognition already face significant hurdles to gain recognition, "and being labeled as 'self-identified' can add to these challenges by casting doubt on our legitimacy.” Mislabeling unrecognized tribes “can lead to the spread of hate, misinformation and further marginalization.”
Some Wiki editors agreed. One wrote that “there are strong negative connotations to saying someone who is Native 'self identifies,' because the inference is that they are Native in name only or falsely claiming to be Native. A change like this will impact countless articles…” Bohemian Baltimore, ARoseWolf and Yuchitown insisted there were no negative connotations. They opposed calling an unrecognized group a tribe because it legitimized groups with unverified claims. ARoseWolf said, “If they had proof of their connection to the original people they would have gotten federal recognition.”
This is a frequent refrain among the insiders, who apparently think the application process is a slam dunk instead of the long, difficult, expensive journey it is.
Yuchitown noted that “all of the editors who actively contribute to and improve Native American topics on Wikipedia have voted to support the renaming.” It’s a remarkable declaration that he and his allies act in concert.
The insiders took even stronger action against Lipan Apaches in Texas.
Late in 2022, Yuchitown changed the entry of the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas to say that NCAI recognizes the tribe as state-recognized but the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) does not. In fact, NCSL took down its web page listing federal and state-recognized tribes because it couldn’t verify the accuracy.
In boilerplate that appears on all the Texas unrecognized tribes’ websites, Yuchitown said Texas has no legal mechanism to recognize tribes, citing an online article that in turn cites the discredited NCSL web page.
In 2022, a tribal member and Yuchitown fought back and forth, reversing each other’s edits. In WikiSpeak, it was edit warring. The tribal member informed Yuchitown that the NCSL page he quoted no longer existed. CorbieVreccan told the member she was up against “two experienced editors,” and Yuchitown accused her of conflict of interest and edit warring. His fellow travelers demanded to know if she had an official position with the tribe. She didn’t.
ARoseWolf wrote, “As Wikipedia is not a state or government-controlled entity it can make up its own rules for what content is allowed on its platform.”
The Wikimedia spokeswoman says that in some extreme cases the foundation relies on a trust and safety team that will investigate and may also take action.
Campbell wrote in the report that many Native American communities and people “have been targeted by the small group of propagandists in this complaint… And the thousands of people who make these communities have been slandered and assaulted on Wikipedia through the actions of these propagandists.”
Link to the original article:
By Sherry RobinsonSpecial to The IndependentALBUQUERQUE — When Lily
What is happening in West Papua
Well, since my blog has been gaining a lot of traction lately from the biphobes, yt butchfemmes, and lesbian exclusionist, I might as well use this opportunity to bring awareness on what is currently happening in West Papua.
Do note that there are more of this history that you can search online and do your own research. Many of these sources are banned in Indonesia, and so I cannot access them.
Before you read below, I do implore you to read this article.
THE ICWA HAS BEEN UPHELD 7-2
Indigenous Women Rising is hosting a webinar later today for everyone concerned about how to navigate the topic of "birthright citizenship" for our communities. Not affiliated but just trying to help get the word out to the right people.
It's not a full pardon, just indefinite house arrest.
Private and public lands are slowly being returned to the care of Native peoples across the country.
Tribes welcome return of ancestral lands
Tuesday, February 14, 2023 By Kevin Abourezk, Indianz.Com Kimberly Morales Johnson can’t help but imagine the land that today is Los Angeles as her ancestors would have seen it centuries ago. The Tongva people used the canyons of the San Gabriel Mountains as trading routes with the indigenous people of the Mojave desert. Last year, the Tongva reclaimed land in Los Angeles for the first time in almost 200 years after being forced to give up their lands and having their federal status terminated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1950.
Sharon Alexander, a non-Native woman, donated a one-acre property in Altadena, California, to the Tongva after learning about the #LandBack movement during the 2016 Democratic National Convention and discovering that the Tongva were the original inhabitants of Los Angeles.
Johnson, vice president of the Tongva Taraxat Paxaavxa Conservancy, a nonprofit set up by the community to receive the land, said the tribe has big plans for the property. “It needs a lot of work, but we’re all dedicated to it,” she said.
In 2022, thousands of acres of private and public land in America were returned to the care of Native peoples. Many of these lands were returned to their original inhabitants, including the one-acre property in Los Angeles.
A website called the Decolonial Atlas created a “Land Back” map charting the locations of land returns that occurred last year. Other land returns that occurred last year include 40 acres around the Wounded Knee National Historic Landmark, the site of the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre. The Oglala Sioux Tribe and the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe bought the land for $500,000.
“It’s a small step towards healing and really making sure that we as a tribe are protecting our critical areas and assets,” Oglala Sioux Tribe President Kevin Killer told The Associated Press.
Although not a land return, the Biden administration last year signed an agreement giving five tribes – the Hopi, Navajo, Ute Mountain Ute, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and Pueblo of Zuni – greater oversight of the 1.3-million acre Bears Ears National Monument in Utah.
Last year, the Rappahannock Tribe celebrated the return of more than 400 acres along the Rappahannock River that is home to a historic tribal village named Pissacoack and a four-mile stretch of white-colored cliffs.
“Your ancestors cherished these lands for many generations and despite centuries of land disputes and shifting policies, your connections to these cliffs and to this river remain unbroken,” Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland said at an event celebrating the land return. One of the largest land returns last year involved the purchase of more than 28,000 acres by the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa Tribe in Minnesota.
The Conservation Fund, an environmental nonprofit, sold the land to the tribe after purchasing the land from a lumber manufacturer in 2020. Emilee Nelson, Minnesota associate state director of The Conservation Fund, said her organization bought the land from the PotlatchDeltic Corporation after the company decided to divest of much of its Minnesota land holdings. The Conservation Fund bought 72,000 acres from the company, including 28,000 acres that were within the Bois Forte Reservation. The Boise Fort Band lost the land following passage of the Dawes Act of 1887, which led to the allotment of the land to private landowners. “Where this land was located made a lot of sense for the tribe to own it,” Nelson said.
However, he said, tribes don’t always want to purchase land or even accept a land donation, especially if they don’t think they’ll be able to put it into federal trust status. He offered advice to those considering donating their land to a tribe. “If you want to make a donation, sell the land and make a donation,” he said.
As for the one-acre land donation to the Tongva, Kimberly Morales Johnson said the tribe plans to use the land to create a community center where it will be able to host cultural workshops and where Tongva people will be able to gather plants sacred to their people, including the acorns from the oak trees on the property.
“This is about self-determination and sovereignty,” she said. The tribe is also allowing a tribal artist to live on the land and take care of it, she said. The Tongva have also begun working to return Native plants to the property and remove invasive species.
“This whole LandBack movement is rooted in healing, and instead of looking at land as a commodity, we’re looking at it as a way to have a relationship with the land and with each other and bringing back our traditions, our language, our food, our culture,” she said.
claim now
