 Also, we're a descendant of the Indigenous people of the Caribbean, who in the place where my family is from in Jamaica were completely exterminated by the colonialism European colonialism in that region. I'm now based in London and the core part of my work is working with black led archives in London. My name is Stan Rodriguez. I'm from the San Isabel Reservation in San Diego, California. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Stan Rodriguez. I'm from San Isabel Reservation in San Diego, California. Our tribe is on both sides of the border, half in the United States and half in Mexico. And it's an honor for me to be here and I would like to also thank the native people from this land for allowing us to come into your land, into your territory. I would like to also thank the native people from this land for allowing us to come into your land, into your territory. As we say in my language, it makes my heart feel very good and we praise you. My name is Percy Lewis. I'm from the Yamba Band of Shoshone Indians, so I hold a dual citizenship in my tribal nation, which is in the traditional territory of what we know as the state of Nevada in the United States, as well as, of course, a United States citizen. I also would like to just thank the Indigenous people for having me as a guest on their traditional territory. And I currently work at the University of San Diego. I'm a tribal liaison, so I work with the 18 tribes, which include the tribe that Stan is from in our county. And then I also am a professor of practice in the Ethnic Studies Department. Thank you. My name is Tumisa Nindubani. I am South African. I speak Shitzonga. It is the second smallest language spoken in South Africa, and has been my passion for the past 10 years in terms of getting it online. Jeebeem, and good afternoon, everybody. My name is Tenmuri Saundarajan, and I'm here from the Organization Equality Labs, and we work with marginalized communities throughout South Asia. In particular, we work with those who are fighting against one of the oldest systems of oppression that have cast apart thine. And for me to say this is not something casual. As a Dalit woman, I'm here to represent the over 300 million Dalit people who survived this vicious system, such that every hour three of our people are murdered, two are raped, and three houses are burnt. And even though I'm here as an individual, I think for all of our panelists, I'm only here because of my passport, because I have an American passport. And there's many, many people who do this work with me that it doesn't feel fair that I'm the only one that can speak to this at this time. So even though I'm here, know that my people are here. And as we honor you and all your peoples, I think it's really important for everyone here to understand why it is so important for you and your peoples to be represented, to have your knowledge online. Percy, could you share a little bit of why you feel that it is important to have the Kumeyaay Shoshone Native Americans' knowledges online? Sure. Thank you. So for me, it's really important because I live in the United States, which is the settler colonial society. And honestly, I wasn't really engaged in online spaces. I mean, I used it, of course, but a couple of years ago, I really began to realize just how absent we were from that space. And I really saw it as a parallel, and we were in workshops a couple of days ago and somebody made the, you know, how there's these analogies of land and the internet. And so I really saw settler colonialism continuing within these online spaces, online spaces that have become so important to students and to, of course, the youth in our communities. Our reservations are very isolated, didn't have good internet access for a long time, but like the rest of the world now because of mobile technology, a lot of our youth now have access. And I want them to be able to Google Native American and not see statistics of alcoholism and suicide rates. I want them to be able to Google images and not see typical Native Americans in headdresses or things like that. And so I really have felt like it's my duty to engage in online spaces, and I'm fortunate because I'm able to do that through my position at the university. I have lots of workers, my students that are very happy to feel like the work that they're doing is contributing in some way, right? Instead of just writing a paper, they're able to actually engage in something that is going to go into an online space. So I've been very fortunate to be able to do that. I'm also in San Diego, which is the traditional territory, as I said, of Stan's tribe. So I am also a guest in that homeland. So I definitely privilege Kumeyi epistemologies, knowledges and perspectives in the work that I do with my students when it's appropriate, right? Because there's times as a Shoshone woman that it's not appropriate for me to engage in their knowledges. So I work closely with the local community to be able to do that. But I think as the internet continues to dominate and grow even more, our presentation this morning, those students are begging for Wikipedia, right? We have to be very cognizant of how we're not marginalizing folks, and then how, as marginalized people, we don't marginalize others. And so that has really come to the forefront for me. Thank you, Percy. Doomi, thank you for having us here and for helping make it happen. And as a fellow adventurer in the land of Wikipedia, you have a very particular and important way of thinking about these issues. Yes, so around 1900s, the people who speak the language that I speak, it was decided or not decided, it was thought that would have disappeared within 50 years. So a Christian missionary from Belgium decided to write about the Shitzonga language, the Shitzonga people, the tradition, the tribes and the day-to-day life. Unfortunately, what he wrote then in 1908 or 2005, it's still the most definitive resource available online and for academia about me. Yeah, so that's still the most definitive academic resource available about me, my language, and everything that defines me as in my culture. Unfortunately, 100 years later, it still is the case. So the only way I can combat that is to provide alternative research, resource, and make it available in my language so that my child one day will know that it's not only Henry G. Nutt's version of what Shitzonga is, but there's other versions of what he is through me. Thank you, Dumi, and most particularly, my sister. I would love to hear you tell us why it's so important for Dalit history and knowledge to be online. So I think that what's really profound when you think about wanting to tell the story of Dalit peoples, you really have to understand the profoundness of how knowledge has really been held in the power of those that have been uppercast. And within the caste system, you have several castes. Those at the top are the Brahmins, and those at the bottom are my people. We are the untouchables, and we're seen untouchable because we're spiritually defiling to other people. So from the beginning, knowledge was always a political construct in the subcontinent, such that if someone like me who was a Dalit was to listen to language, our tongues would be cut, and we would have lead poured in our ears. So to actually begin to take the grasp of knowledge back, it's really our way of basically going for epistemological justice. And I think that this is what was so profound about what you're saying, is that it's untenable to Dalit peoples to have to contend and make consensus with our oppressors for us to see an unmitigated experience of our world view and our world reality. And for me, what's amazing about doing this work as a Dalit woman is that Dalit women represent 0.1% of all journalists, intellectuals, and media owners within the Indian context. So for me to say, I not only want to be able to create knowledge for my people, and I want it to be unmitigated in the way that it's presented, is one of the most radical things that I can do to be free. Because ultimately, we all have heard that phrase that knowledge is power, but I think for us as many of the marginalized peoples here, we know that if we don't have unfettered access to our history, we can't fight for a future. And that's why I'm here. Thank you so much, Tanmarian, all three of you for your answers. And now that you've given us a little bit of grounding of why it's so important to do the powerful work that you do, I'd like to ask all of our panelists to respond to the next question, which is really, can you talk a little bit about what you've been doing so far to bring your knowledge online, including onto Wikimedia or other Wikimedia projects, but you don't have to limit yourself there, right? Feel free to speak in general about your work on the internet. And let's start with Kelly and work our way down, shall we? So thank you. It's been profound being here over the past few days in Azana in Cape Town, and I'm from London, which is still an imperial capital. And sometimes being in the context means that I often take for granted the bricks, the signs, the branding of colonialism that is all around me in London. So we're in a suite in the hotel until they were renamed by Wikimedia, we're called the VOC Centre. VOC is the Dutch East India Company, which was the major colonialiser in this part of the world, as well as the enslavers in this part of the world as well. One of the things that I do most often or I'm trying to improve is to look at how slave rebellions in the Americas are represented, both on Wikimedia and on Wikidata. So that pays tribute to not only the revolutionaries who led the fight to freedom and have been leading the fight for freedom, for human dignity, for hundreds of years in the Americas, Africans and African descended people. So making sure that there are records of those rebellions, records which so long has been suppressed. But also making more visible how the profits of the transatlantic slave trade fueled the expansion of European Empire, because oftentimes that is invisible. So most recently there's been a project run by University College London called Legacies of British Slave Ownership, when slavery was abolished eventually in the British Empire in 1838. They compensated, they be in the British government, compensated slave owners to the tune of £20 million, which in 1838 was 40% of the GDP of the United Kingdom. So that's hundreds of billions of pounds today. And those billions of pounds of compensation went into building the institutions of the United Kingdom, building the railroads, furthering colonialism in the East actually. So Trace and most of that money went to the most elite sections of British society who are still those elite families that are ruling today. So making those legacies visible is one of the things that I do both on Wikipedia and on Wikidata. First of all, thank you all for sharing, and it touched me in a lot of levels. I could relate to much of what you were talking about. My people, the Kumeya people, we're on both sides of the international border. We have been in contact with, well, we've had encroachment start since 1542 in San Diego. And it started with the Spaniards, and it continued on. And to give you the numbers of our people, approximate data about the population of the Kumeya at the time were about 80,000 to 90,000 in Southern California, northern Mexico. In 1900, there was less than 1,000. Today, there's 4,227 people who are identified as Kumeya on both sides of the border. And of that, there are 47 people who still speak our language. We say our culture is like a Askaya pot that has been shattered into many pieces, and these pieces have gone in all different directions. Each community has a piece of our culture, who we are. The international border has made it even more difficult for us to share our indigenous knowledge. One of the things that we started was Kumeya Community College, which is the only operational Native American tertiary institution in California. And we are working with the various communities. And we've done work with Percy and what you've been doing over at University of San Diego in order to develop programs, develop a pedagogy that's going to support cultural language revitalization. Bringing it out to our people where we have many hurdles we need to go through. On the United States side of the border, it's English that's spoken. On the Mexican side, it's Spanish. That's why I can speak English and Spanish. I go back and forth. And the thing is, with the United States government and the Mexican government until the 1990s, traditional knowledge, traditional religion and language were not allowed. It wasn't until the Freedom of American Religion Act was passed in 1978 that we wanted to change these things. And this is where Wikipedia can help us. This is where putting our knowledge in there can help us for all of our people to learn. Thank you. So I've been in San Diego for 18 years. As I said, my traditional territory is outside of the area that I'm living in now. And as an Indigenous person, I felt it was important that I be a good guest. And to me, part of being a good guest in a homeland is not contributing to settler colonialism, right? Which Patrick Wolf defines as elimination of Indigenous people, our physical selves as well as our knowledges and everything, our epistemologies. So it was very important to me that I work with the Kumi'ai people. So in order to do that, I needed to make friends with Kumi'ai people, be respectful, learn protocol. I've been fortunate to be working in their communities now since 2001. I've been good friends with Stan for quite a while. And then when I got to University of San Diego and started teaching, as a Native American, very few of us obtained bachelor, about 7% of us obtained bachelor's degrees. And then it gets smaller as you get up. Very few of us end up in the academic institutions. I am the only Native American faculty member right now in my institution. So there really is an erasure of us in the United States, which is mirrored in the online erasure. We might even be more present online actually than we are within our own society. So once I was in the classroom, I really felt that I needed to employ a place-based critical indigenous theoretical teaching style. So I have been really fortunate to be able to work with our Native students that we have on campus. And then also with the local Kumi'ai people. So some of the projects that I've done, as I said, all of my assignments now enter some sort of online space. So if they write papers, they go into our digital USD space that they can be accessed. We have them do podcasts. I make them transcribe their podcasts. Fortunately, there's good software now that helps them to do that. But that all goes into the online space as well as videos. And within the past year, I started editing Wikipedia, which I never thought that I would do, but has really been a great opportunity to partner with the local communities. Because if you search Kumi'ai, very little comes up. And then if you get down to Kumi'ai people, who are really leaders, have received awards, have PhDs, they're not present anywhere. So if you're a Kumi'ai student, as Stan said, 4,000, both sides of the border. So if you're young, there's not a lot of in the mainstream society that you're seeing. So then even when you turn to the online space, they're not present there either. So how do you dream? How do you dream to be a professor when there's not a Kumi'ai person that you can look up to who is in that position? That is in an online space, right? So I started working with Stan and with other Kumi'ai people to create articles and to write articles. And then my students started working with them to also write articles and to edit articles as well. And I think for my students, they feel such a sense of purpose now. And they meet with the community member that they're working with, whether it's to write an article on an institution or that person. And they're able to just really engage in the work and to really see how the theoretical frameworks that they're learning in the classroom, how that applies, right? Because they go into Wikipedia and they're shocked. I have them look at articles that are really poorly written, that are by non-native people written about us. And they cannot believe because they're like, hey, we read this article. Why are they saying this in this article? Don't they know that's not true? Well, they don't know it's not true because they think that they do know, right? Sometimes within the Wikipedia space, people feel like they're experts in lots of different areas when probably that's not really the case. So that has been a really great platform for me. So for me, what I have been doing can only be explained by taking you back a bit into the past. Into the 1900s, the 1885s or 1800s even, when we had the Anglo-Boa War and again then the Land Act, which deprived a lot of my people of land and most of them were moved into reservations and it became policy not to invest in those reservations in terms of health, in terms of education, even worse in terms of language and that has been perpetrated up until today where the lingua franca is supposed to be the language I'm speaking now and Africans and not my language and what that does, it actually erases the languages that we have and with the erasure of the language and the fluency into the language goes again to the knowledge that language holds. So I felt the pain that technically speaking it's the new South Africa from 1994 and my language has become official again after 100 years and technically speaking I should be able to walk into a bank and request to be served in my language and to do a transaction in my language but I can't. Technically speaking I should be able to go online and do searches in my language and receive results of whatever I'm searching for in my language but I can't. The only excuse that is there is that it's not online because it hasn't been translated and we don't have enough users and so on and so forth. So the only way I could change that was to make sure that it is online and the only place I could do that was on Wikipedia. So I started doing that 10 years ago and frustrated by small things things that look small to others but big to me that my language Wikipedia interface the whole interface was in English and it's called Shitzonga Wikipedia. So where's the interface so that I can translate that and that gave me a long rabbit hole of finding that the interface is not actually kept in Wikipedia but in something else called Translate Wiki go there get an account created start the translations get them adopted onto my language Wikipedia and come back and still find 12 articles after two years translating the interface and then having to start from scratch and try and work and get the knowledge up to the very first thing that I was looking for five years later and ten years later we're sitting at 600 articles it looks small because we had so much to do before we could actually start to work on the actual content which is putting my language Wikipedia's content online. So that's what we've been doing. So I think what's really incredible at thinking about how difficult it is to create knowledge in the face of a dominator culture whether we're talking about slavery and white supremacy or we're talking about caste apartheid and Brahminism is that it's like you're eternally being gaslit by your oppressor. So on top of the extortion of your land the extortion of your bodies the lack of like existential space that you have to be a free person you also don't get to have autonomy over the origination of your knowledge you have to constantly negotiate with your oppressor about facts. So I know one thing that we talked about is this like small battle which is actually a very big battle that instead of saying slave, saying enslaved there are so many similar contexts like that when it comes to Dalit knowledge online because we were not the first people online we were actually barred and are part of the next billion that are coming online. So when we come to infrastructure that's been created in Wikipedia primarily by those who are a part of upper caste we see so many inaccuracies so many sources that shouldn't be used they're partisan sources but also we just see violent iterations of history that diminish and distinguish our dignity and so to be people who want to live beyond atrocity we actually have to also start from scratch and that's not always possible especially in English Wikipedia because as we know we have to build knowledge through consensus but I think that for us like where we were last year we basically had just begun our process and what we did is we were very intentional in working with who's knowledge we mapped all of the areas of knowledge that we wanted to try to see if we could help create more evidence-based content around and then we also wanted to create a more diverse body of editors that actually came from marginalized communities that are struggling under caste apartheid but also have valid positions the same and I'm so proud to say that from the work that we've done our little small team of Dalit women editors have been able to host over 20 editathons across North America, Europe and India we've also edited more than 170 articles created 30 new articles 30 comments uploads as well as and most important created 100 new Wikipedia editors across many different Indian languages and I think that for me similarly it might feel small because you know I know it was in one session where people were talking about doing 20,000 edits in a month but when you think about the barriers of literacy structural oppression and in our case violence that we have to be able to tell our truth and tell our truth to the world in a way that our knowledge gets to be part of the commons that to us this is like an invaluable experience that we've been able to do this and there are times when we face fear we don't know if an edit that we do could lead to someone facing physical violence in the real world we don't know who's watching our edit lists and at what point we might be interacting with someone who might be reporting on us back to the government the act of telling our truth is an act of freedom but it's also one that we take with great risk and I think this is actually one of the biggest points that I wanted to make is that the question of tech equity is not really being discussed with real parity if one side is able to speak totally openly and the other side is speaking with the understanding that there could be a causality of violence that's not tech equity and I had to make a decision at this Wikipedia that I'm actually going to abandon my handle and create a handle that sounds like a white European male name because I'm more likely to be able to get my edits to stick and have my edits not be scrutinized because my position as a Dalek person is seen as partisan because I speak about caste apartheid that's not tech equity we should be able to be our full selves to be on the platform and be able to speak with the same relevance and the same representation as our oppressors but we're not at that place yet but I think this is why when we center the voices at the margins what we're doing is not just creating a diverse panel we're actually disrupting the entire logic of the space and that's actually what really begins the process of decolonization Thank you Thinmuri and Thinmuri has already begun to tell you a little bit about the challenges and the possibilities of the work they've been doing and I'd like to open that question up to others Kelly, would you tell us some of the challenges and hopefully some of the joys that you've had as you've been doing this work? Thank you In thinking about this question it immediately drew me to the words of a Trinidadian historian and writer called C.L.R. James and he said, those people who are in Western civilization who have grown up in it but are made to feel and themselves feeling like they're outside it have unique insights into their society I think very often, especially on the bigger European language Wikipedia, one of the things that is particularly touching me in this moment is hearing everybody speaking their mother tongue I have no mother tongue the African languages that came with the people to Jamaica were taken away from us so my mother tongue is lost to me and to a certain extent I still carry with me however a huge part of the Jamaican identity is identity and a commitment to rebellion and identity and commitment to disruption Jamaican music is known throughout the world the music of reggae is known throughout the world has been the music, the theme songs of liberation and of emancipation and still I remember the words of one of my elders in London who says our first job and these are also the words of Marcus Garvey and also the words of Bob Marley our first jobs are to emancipate ourselves and that is what we're, yes absolutely, yes applaud it our first jobs are to emancipate ourselves and that isn't necessarily an easy thing to do it's often times putting yourself in uncomfortable places so the strength of the margins is to disrupt the core and I see there being so much strength in working from the margins often times, especially when thinking about marginalised knowledge, marginalised communities, marginalised people the argument is to bring them into the mainstream how does the mainstream do or cater do the same work that people are doing from the margins and that isn't possible it isn't possible to necessarily for the core to necessarily take the causes of the margins forward but I think it is vital to be able to disrupt and subvert from the margins so Percy, your peoples in essence hold the land and trust that Silicon Valley is sitting on and much of technology, capitalism works from and yet you do this work with your students, with your peoples what are some of the challenges and joys you face? I'll be quick, I know we're running out of time joys, I'll start with joys my students love being editors they feel a real purpose in the work that they're doing they love the idea of others building on the work that they're doing they feel like they're correcting wrongs when they're editing poorly written content I have students that have continued to engage in editing which is so happy to me I teach in ethnic studies which is the study of race and migration in the United States so a lot of my students are what we call underrepresented students so they're able to also begin to see the gaps and knowledge in the online space from their own community perspective so that has been wonderful the downside is I think what other people have spoken to we get, our articles get flagged for deletion last semester I had a really upsetting experience where a student worked with a Kumeya woman who to us was very notable, had publications in her own name we had plenty of references I felt like it was a really strong article she had it in her sandbox and it actually got flagged so she had to go through the review process and in the review process her article was recommended to not be published because the person did not meet the academic standards of like an academic on Wikipedia even though she was the first in her tribe to attain a PhD from the University of Southern California Ford Fellowship a very notable person so I think that constant struggle of trying to claim that we belong in the space that we are notable that in some regards we are human and belong there as much as anybody else or have a right to be there has been the most discouraging part Thanks, Percy and we're short on time for all you brilliant folks so let's switch topics again and Stan we'll start with you this time because we'd love to hear from you again so you're all just coming out of two days of the Decolonizing the Internet Conference and we'd just love to hear if there's any insight or feelings that you've had coming out of that that you'd like to share with us all in this room For me what I got out of it was solidarity I got to meet some incredible people and sit down and talk and share and we had many things in common passions, the passions for the world to hear our story for the world to understand our knowledge and the help that was given with each other I found that really touched my heart and that's something that I will take with me wherever I go although my people are marginalized your people have been marginalized too your people, your people and from that we come together like I said one arrow can do many things but a bunch of arrows is unbreakable and if we come together we're strong and we continue to push our epistemology out so it does not die out that is true resistance and we have not been conquered and I just want to say that I am not conquered and I don't think anybody else in here is conquered either thank you Thank you Stan Doomi, do you want to speak to this one as well Doomi? Yeah, so a lot of things went through my mind while we were doing the Decolonizing the Internet Conference building up to it and actually being there with people from different backgrounds sharing the frustrations that they have and sharing my frustration and realizing that I'm not alone in those frustrations but then again realizing that my language Wikipedia is just one and there's still more language Wikipedia that I still refer to as small language Wikipedia and even that reference as small but connotations with it so breaking out of that cycle of accepting these labels and taking back the spaces is some of the things that I'm taking from the conference Tee Well, I think that there's kind of two big pots of thinking that I had the first was that I think that we very quickly kind of came to the realization that Decolonize was not a word that was expansive enough to really talk about what we needed at this moment of history and really what we're looking at where we are right now as a species this is really a time of deep conscience where we have to really look at do we value our fellow humans enough to let go of the baggage that is actually going to sink our planet? You know, so whether we're talking about cis-heteropatriarchy or we're talking about capitalism or we're talking about Brahminism these things that are limiters that come from older dominator cultures are really not the kinds of ways of world views and thinking that we need to really be able to work collectively as a species to solve the problems that we have before us whether it's climate change or the return of white supremacy and fascism the fact that we see democracies all around the world in crisis at this moment really should be a call to each and every one of us saying I don't want business as usual in fact maybe I don't want business as all because capitalism is part of the problem so the fact that we were able to talk visionarily in this conversation was really an important piece because I think oftentimes we tend to because of the way that we have been colonized and we internalize colonizer narratives we stay within reactionary frames and I think the conference is really a call to be visionary because when we're visionary we can actually build hope and that to me was like one big takeaway I got out of the conference and the second is that in many ways where we are right now we are at a juncture also where we're all very unclear as to like what makes a fact you know typically like you know from a scientific perspective I think a fact is something that is defined by evidence but as we've seen you know with you know the United States and we have you know the president who's like the trolling chief a fact is not simply made by evidence it's actually cemented by power whether that's political power economic power or people power we are in a moment that we have to decide as a community and as a species are we going to stand with evidence or are we going to stand with bad iterations of power and I think this is where the community of Wikipedia really has to look at itself and say are structures really allowing for democratic engagements of all communities at parity with each other or are we creating situations where we're replicating colonial or other dominator cultural models and I think this is the deep question whether it's in Wikipedia or other social media platforms we're grappling with as a species because we finally created technology that allows us to interact as a species and a lot of times it's not with equity but now that we're at the table how are we going to disrupt the logic of the whole game Thanks Timmarine So remember when I said that we were going to throw it to the audience for you all to have a chance to ask questions I totally lied we're almost out of time and so just wondered if Kelly and Percy wanted to have the last word insights, thoughts, feelings coming out of decolonizing the internet So out of the past two days that I spent with these glorious people I left feeling hopeful sometimes it can get very overwhelming not only having to grapple with the weight of history and the enormous task ahead in trying to redress how it redress the enormous amount of denial that comes along with telling that history because that often times that's what I'm doing what I'm looking at but it's empowering and emboldening to know that we are not going it alone One of the things I spoke about quite often that fuels me is a realization that I'm continuing the work I'm continuing the work of my forbearers in seeking emancipation This isn't something that I've come into that has been discovered that I've discovered myself in This is a path that has been laid for me generations back I'm on a similar path and hopefully always striving towards liberation, always striving towards emancipation Thank you, Percy And I'm going to do a plug So I'll just say that the conference showed me how much I don't know So I am looking for folks who can help me to figure out how to use the rules of the game until they're dismantled by the end of this weekend, I'm not sure But I really need people to help get my articles published and I've been burdening SICO with that as our editor But if there's anybody in the audience who's interested in ensuring that North American Indigenous knowledge makes it into Wikipedia I would very much appreciate speaking to you after this presentation, so thank you And that's a good call to action The one thing I want to remind all of us here as Wikipedians, as people who deeply, intensely, passionately believe in working towards the sum of all human knowledge These peoples, these communities that we have been talking about are not the minority of the world They are the majority And if their knowledges are not on Wikipedia and our sister projects then Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects are not representing the world So once again we invite all of you to share with us in solidarity the power, the passion the gift economy of being Wikipedians and Wikimedians Thank you for being with us today Thank you