skybristol
commented
2 months ago I'm part of the way through this, working from the 2024 Federal Register notice. I need to run back through once I have all Tribes identified with the following checks:
- Ensure I have at least one stated in reference to the appropriate WD item representing the FR notice where the tribe is listed
- Verify whether the primary English label or an alias contains the name string used in the FR and by the BIA
- Re-check the official website claims and make sure I have all of these that can be identified; set up a bot to check the viability of the web sites periodically and update retrieved qualifiers
We can focus somewhat on federally recognized Tribes using the federally recognized Tribes in the US classifier. There should be overall alignment with the BIA list, but I also need to track down the Federal Register notices that serve as an official reference point on this recognition. Beyond U.S. recognition, there is State-level recognition and a number of other Tribes that are still struggling through this process.
My overall focus here is on Tribal governments as they are operating today. There might be some debate on how best to organize the data for Tribes, and there is some variability today with many items pointing to things like "ethnic group" as a classifier. However, we need to have some kind of persistent, resolvable identifier as a rallying point for all the other data we want to develop, some of which are already in existence but not linked to some central concept.