In this repo, I am working through how to develop a better representation of Native American Tribes in Wikipedia and Wikidata. In trying to query Wikidata for information on the 574 Federally recognized Tribes, I've noticed a great deal of disparity between items in terms of how they are characterized. It's impossible to query for any real commonalities or to know if all 574 Tribes are actually listed. I'm trying to establish a baseline within the global knowledge commons so that I can look at other information sources from the BIA, U.S. Census, and others to see what all is missing.
Fundamentally, it appears as though the representation of Tribes as they are in existence today in the "Wikiverse" is not very representative of the reality on the ground. Many of the records such as Wikipedia articles for the Tribes do not appear to be managed by Tribal governments or other representatives. Because of this, there are issues with how Tribes are being referenced within Wikipedia and other Mediawiki projects that introduce semantic problems, which may lead to social justice challenges in practice.
For instance, there are quite a number of cases where a Wikipedia page and/or a Wikidata item appear to be describing a sovereign Tribe (a people) but instead are labeled as though they describe the reservation land those people were at one time relegated or confined to, unjustly. As an example, there is one Wikipedia page for the "Coyote Valley Reservation." That page as redirects from all of the following names:
The last redirect in that list is the official name of the Tribe as listed by the BIA. It is also the name the Tribe uses to refer to themselves via their official web site. The Wikipedia article and a related Wikidata item with the same label do characterize the geographic entity of the reservation with statements that somewhat relate to the reservation but also characterize/describe the people themselves. Because of all the redirects, though, there is no representation in Wikipedia or Wikidata specifically for the Coyoty Valley Band of Pomo Indians as a sovereign Tribal Nation recognized as such by the U.S. Government.
How to deal with this and other issues is the focus of this project. It seems like somewhere in the global knowledge commons, we should have a reasonable representation of each Tribe as it exists today in a way that is as close as possible to how the Tribe represents itself to the world. It is complicated and not at all uniform across all Tribes, but we need to clear up some of the semantic dissonance that has developed as different people have tried to build out some type of representation in the "Wikiverse" for whatever individual purposes they have had.
I have an interest this from a research perspective for personal work I am doing in the environmental justice and tribal sovereignty fields, examining issues that impact Tribal reservation lands, trust lands, and resources granted through treaty rights. For this work, I need to establish a baseline of data in knowledge graph form from which I can develop analytical pathways into other online data assets such as the EPA ECHO platform. My personal connection is as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, where I will focus a good deal of attention as one specific case in need of work in the global knowledge commons.