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reasonsforhope · 4 months

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Interior Department Announces New Guidance to Honor and Elevate Hawaiian Language

"In commemoration of Mahina ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, or Hawaiian Language Month, and in recognition of its unique relationship with the Native Hawaiian Community, the Department of the Interior today announced new guidance on the use of the Hawaiian language.

A comprehensive new Departmental Manual chapter underscores the Department’s commitment to further integrating Indigenous Knowledge and cultural practices into conservation stewardship.

“Prioritizing the preservation of the Hawaiian language and culture and elevating Indigenous Knowledge is central to the Biden-Harris administration's work to meet the unique needs of the Native Hawaiian Community,” said Secretary Deb Haaland. “As we deploy historic resources to Hawaiʻi from President Biden’s Investing in America agenda, the Interior Department is committed to ensuring our internal policies and communications use accurate language and data."

Department bureaus and offices that engage in communication with the Native Hawaiian Community or produce documentation addressing places, resources, actions or interests in Hawaiʻi will use the new guidance on ‘ōlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian language) for various identifications and references, including flora and fauna, cultural sites, geographic place names, and government units within the state. The guidance recognizes the evolving nature of ‘ōlelo Hawaiʻi and acknowledges the absence of a single authoritative source. While the Hawaiian Dictionary (Pukui & Elbert 2003) is designated as the baseline standard for non-geographic words and place names, Department bureaus and offices are encouraged to consult other standard works, as well as the Board on Geographic Names database.

Developed collaboratively and informed by ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi practitioners, instructors and advocates, the new guidance emerged from virtual consultation sessions and public comment in 2023 with the Native Hawaiian Community.

The new guidance aligns with the Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to strengthening relationships with the Native Hawaiian Community through efforts such as the Kapapahuliau Climate Resilience Program and Hawaiian Forest Bird Keystone Initiative. During her trip to Hawaiʻi in June, Secretary Haaland emphasized recognizing and including Indigenous Knowledge, promoting co-stewardship, protecting sacred sites, and recommitting to meaningful and robust consultation with the Native Hawaiian Community."

-via US Department of the Interior press release, February 1, 2024

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Note: I'm an editor so I have no idea whether this comes off like as big a deal as it potentially is. But it is potentially going to establish and massively accelerate the adoption of correctly written Native Hawaiian language, as determined by Native Hawaiians.

Basically US government communications, documentations, and "style guides" (sets of rules to follow about how to write/format/publish something, etc.) can be incredibly influential, especially for topics where there isn't much other official guidance. This rule means that all government documents that mention Hawai'i, places in Hawai'i, Hawaiian plants and animals, etc. will have to be written the way Native Hawaiians say it should be written, and the correct way of writing Hawaiian conveys a lot more information about how the words are pronounced, too, which could spread correct pronunciations more widely.

It also means that, as far as the US government is concerned, this is The Correct Way to Write the Hawaiian Language. Which, as an editor who just read the guidance document, is super important. That's because you need the 'okina (' in words) and kahakō in order to tell apart sizeable sets of different words, because Hawaiian uses so many fewer consonants, they need more of other types of different sounds.

And the US government official policy on how to write Hawaiian is exactly what editors, publishers, newspapers, and magazines are going to look at, sooner or later, because it's what style guides are looking at. Style guides are the official various sets of rules that books/publications follow; they're also incredibly detailed - the one used for almost all book publishing, for example, the Chicago Manual of Style (CMoS), is over a thousand pages long.

One of the things that CMoS does is tell you the basic rules of and what specialist further sources they think you should use for writing different languages. They have a whole chapter dedicated to this. It's not that impressive on non-European languages yet, but we're due for a new edition (the 18th) of CMoS in the next oh two to four years, probably? Actually numbering wise they'd be due for one this year, except presumably they would've announced it by now if that was the case.

I'm expecting one of the biggest revisions to the 18th edition to add much more comprehensive guidance on non-Western languages. Considering how far we've come since 2017, when the last one was released, I'll be judging the shit out of them if they do otherwise. (And CMoS actually keep with the times decently enough.)

Which means, as long as there's at least a year or two for these new rules/spellings/orthographies to establish themselves before the next edition comes out, it's likely that just about every (legit) publisher will start using the new rules/spellings/orthographies.

And of course, it would expand much further from there.

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fatehbaz · 1 month

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Because tuatara are very long lived - between 100 and 200 years by most estimates […] - the founding of Aotearoa/New Zealand as a modern nation and the unfolding of settler-wrought changes to its environment have transpired over the course of the lives of perhaps just two tuatara [...].

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[T]he tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) [...] [is] the sole surviving representative of an order of reptiles that pre-dates the dinosaurs. [...] [T]he tuatara is of immense global and local significance and its story is pre-eminently one of deep timescales, of life-in-place [...]. Epithets abound for the unique and ancient biodiversity found in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Prized as “Ghosts of Gondwana” (Gibbs 2008), or as denizens of “Moa’s Ark” (Bellamy et al. 1990) or “The Southern Ark” (Andrews 1986), the country’s faunal species invoke fascination and inspire strong language [...]. In rounded terms, it [has been] [...] just 250 years since James Cook made landfall; just 200 years since the founding of the handful of [...] settlements that instigated agricultural transformation of the land [...]. European newcomers [...] were disconcerted by the biota [...]: the country was seen to “lack” terrestrial mammals; many of its birds were flightless and/or songless; its bats crawled through leaf-litter; its penguins inhabited forests; its parrots were mountain-dwellers; its frogs laid eggs that hatched miniature frogs rather than tadpoles [...].

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Despite having met a reassuringly temperate climate [mild, oceanic, comparable to western Europe], too, the newcomers nevertheless sought to make adjustments to that climate, and it was clear to them that profits beckoned. Surveying the towering lowland forests from the deck of HMS Endeavour in 1769, and perceiving scope for expansion of the fenland drainage schemes being undertaken at that time in England and across swathes of Europe, Joseph Banks [botanist on Cook's voyage] reported on “swamps which might doubtless Easily be drained” [...]. Almost a century later, in New Zealand or Zealandia, the Britain of the South, [...] Hursthouse offered a fuller explication of this ethos: The cultivation of a new country materially improves its climate. Damp and dripping forests, exhaling pestilent vapours from rank and rotten vegetation, fall before the axe [...]. Fen and march and swamp, the bittern’s dank domain, fertile only in miasma, are drained; and the plough converts them into wholesome plains of fruit, and grain, and grass. [...]

[The British administrators] duly set about felling the ancient forests of Aotearoa/New Zealand, draining the country’s swamps [...]. They also began importing and acclimatising a vast array of exotic (predominantly northern-world) species [sheep, cattle, rodents, weasels, cats, crops, English pasture grasses, etc.] [...]. [T]hey constructed the seemingly ordinary agronomic patchwork of Aotearoa/New Zealand's productive, workaday landscapes [...]. This is effected through and/or accompanied by drastic deforestation, alteration of the water table and the flow of waterways, displacement and decline of endemic species, re-organisation of predation chains and pollination sequences and so on [...]. Aotearoa/New Zealand was founded in and through climate crisis [...]. Climate crisis is not a disastrous event waiting to happen in the future in this part of the world; rather, it has been with us for two centuries already [...].

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[T]he crest formed by the twinned themes of absence and exceptionalism [...] has shaped this creature's niche in the western imagination. As one of the very oldest species on earth, tuatara have come to be recognised [in Euro-American scientific schemas] [...] as an evolutionary and biodiversity treasure [...]. In 1867, [...] Gunther [...] pronounced that it was not a lizard at all [...] [and] placed the tuatara [...] in a new order, Rhynchocephalia, [...] igniting a frenzy of scientific interest worldwide. Specifically, the tuatara was seen to afford opportunities for "astonished witnessing" [...], for "the excitement of having the chance to see, to study, to observe a true saurian of Mesozoic times in the flesh, still living, but only on this tiny speck of the earth [...], while all its ancestors [...] died about one hundred and thirty-five million years ago" [...]. Tuatara have, however, long held special status as a taonga or treasured species in Māori epistemologies, featuring in a range of [...] stories where [...] [they] are described by different climates and archaeologies of knowledge [...] (see Waitangi Tribunal 2011, p. 134). [...]

While unconfirmed sightings in the Wellington district were reported in the nineteenth century, tuatara currently survive only in actively managed - that is, monitored and pest-controlled - areas on scattered offshore islands, as well as in mainland zoo and sanctuary populations. As this confinement suggests, tuatara are functionally “extinct” in almost all of their former wild ranges. [...] [Italicized text in the heading of this post originally situated here in Boswell's article.] [...] In the remaining areas of Aotearoa/New Zealand where this species does now live [...], tuatara may in some cases be the oldest living inhabitants. Yet [...] if the tuatara is a creature of long memory, this memory is at risk of elimination or erasure. [...] [T]uatara expose and complicate the [...] machineries of public memory [...] and attendant environmental ideologies and management paradigms [...].

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All text above by: Anna Boswell. "Climates of Change: A Tuatara's-Eye View". Humanities, 2020, Volume 9, Issue 2, 38. Published 1 May 2020. This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Humanities Approaches to Climate Change. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Text within brackets added by me for clarity. The first paragraph/heading in this post, with text in italics, are also the words of Boswell from this same article. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

#i posted commentary about this article in 2020 right after it was first published but i did a sloppy job presenting and discussing it #some might be familiar with boswells 2015 article on longfin eels or her article the stoat free state on weasels in aotearoa #basically she writes on british imperial environmental imaginaries #how settlement tries to reshape a colonys landscape in idealized english image of domesticated home replacing native species with introduce #ecology #abolition #imperial #colonial #landscape #paleo #aotearoa #indigenous #multispecies

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forewordreviewsmag · 2 years

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To promote and support Indigenous businesses, Libro.FM put together a directory of Indigenous-owned bookstores based in the USA and Canada. Check each listing for the store’s website, as well as how to follow them on social media.

#indigenous #indigenous peoples #indie books #indie #bookstore #indie author #indigenous owned #indie publishing

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bdapublishing · 3 months

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At BDA Publishing, we're on a mission to amplify diverse voices and break barriers in the publishing world. Submit your manuscript to our open call and be part of reshaping the narrative. We're seeking originality, strong character development, engaging narratives, unconventional themes, and experimental styles—all under 80k words. Your story matters—let's make it heard!

Click here to submit your manuscript. Please allow a 6-week reading period for our editing team to evaluate your entry. Contracts are awarded on a rolling basis and subject to our discretion.

#bookblr #book blog #books and literature #indie publishing #indie author #booklover #books #books and reading #bookworm #reading #bipoc authors #bipoc author #call for submissions #fringe authors #indigenous authors

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solarisposting · 6 months

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I just read a goodreads book review that made me angrier than any inconsequential thing has made me in a WHILE. I loved the book, and I'm not a good critic of novels (or anything); I'm decent at analysis to be fair, but I like a read or I don't (on a spectrum of course).

But good goddamn, this review reeked with pretension and was written like the most unbearable food or music critic's diatribes. Adult character is lost in life, makes stupid choices out of grief/running away from issues/thinking distance from community will help/doesn't act logically as a character in a horror plot? Childish and not very bright! A large bustling family coming together for a major cultural and spiritual threat and asking the same damn questions over and over again, repeating the same arguments, etc.? Tiresome and muddled! Bro is your family (bio or chosen) totally chill? Have you never at least seen (in media or in others' lives) annoying family members beating dead horses for days on end out of concern and love and lack of knowing how else to help???

Dude I dunno, it just felt like legitimate criticisms one might have if they dislike a book or parts of its structure, but then those criticisms were a molehill buried beneath a mountain of hating some super fuckin' flawed characters making wild and awful choices in a time of grief and isolation. Screaming!!!!

#this was a review about Bad Cree by Jessica Johns which i gave five stars btw #i am unreasonably pissed lmao #it was like...just. gripes for the sake of bitching and being unhappy woth a short read that didn't hit typical horror benchmarks. dumb.#it's about multiple generations of cree women in the same family and naturally had a LOT to do with the cumture #and experiences and practices and just. daily lives of cree women mixed with A Horror Plot #but i was still sooo reminded of the chaos and aggravation and love and power and hurt and again love #of when the women on my mom's side of the family congregate #and the connections and rifts and stories memories legends among us all that get passed around rather than #passed down because it all feels so circular. we all repeat ourselves endlessly lmao #like this made me yearn for my family because i saw and felt them in this cast of characters #i'm not indigenous or canadian but i still saw myself and my family in this book and it was such a unique experience #bc it was so goddamn familiar in the midst of learning about this horror plot and how it mixed with cree culture #im emotional and tired and not explaining myself well. but JESUS i cannot wait for Johns to publish her next work #ann with an ie

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ghostisventing · 11 months

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Indigenous women who are csa/child abuse survivors or have bpd:

What would you say to writers who are writing an indigenous character with bpd and trauma?

(For context, the character develops bpd from trauma. This is part of the backstory. Not the entire story).

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laikacore · 1 year

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First Peoples Shared Stories: orders open now!

Laika Wallace’s short story, Snow Blindness, has been published in First Peoples Shared Stories by Flame Tree Publishing!

Taken from the publisher’s website: Following the success of Black Sci-Fi Short Stories comes a powerful new addition to the Flame Tree short story collections: the first peoples in Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas, the first migration, the first exploration, the discovery of land and landscape without the footprint of humankind. Stories of injustice sit with memories of hope and wonder, dreamtime tales of creation and joy highlight the enduring spirit of humanity. These stories, selected from submissions by new writers and cast alongside ancient stories and oral traditions from around the world bring new perspectives to the legacy of First Nations, of First Peoples.

His addition to the anthology follows a Mi’kmaw trans lesbian and hir daughter searching for a planet for their family to call home after being adrift in space for many generations, and finding something they could never have predicted, for better or for worse…

Orders are open now at the link in the first reblog. Reblogs are very appreciated, as are requests for the book at bookstores and libraries. Thank you for supporting indigenous authors!

#indigenous authors #indigenous fiction #indigenous fantasy #indigenous scifi #support native authors #support indigenous authors #support small authors #flame tree publishing #first peoples shared stories #lesbian characters #trans characters #trans authors #support lgbt authors #two spirit #two spirit authors #mi'kmaw #mi'kmaq #outer space #snow blindness

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marvelousartcatastrophe · 1 year

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My book, Land of Armonia, has now been published and is available on Amazon Kindle! Go buy it here and share this around!

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k8leggedfr34k · 3 months

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anyways, my new response to arguments that Isr*el's genocidal actions are somehow justified because of some "homeland" claim, is to bring up the Canaanites.

#Palestinian people literally define the term indigenous #free palestine #edit in tags #Is*rael doesnt ban DNA testing but without medical need it has to be bought through independent companies #but they sure as hell dont publish the fact that Palestinian DNA is indigenous to the region much further back

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the-eldritch-it-gay · 2 years

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Of course he’s a linguist

#any white person being into or studying linguistics is a big red flag to me #sorry but as someone who studied linguistics and fucking had to deal with the overt racism that so much of academia is steeped in #i don’t trust any white person linguist #had to read too many published academic articles like ‘actually indigenous languages should die’#and ‘do Black people have languages? 4 white men decide scientifically’

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ebookporn · 1 year

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‘Their vision needs to be shared’: the tiny shop championing the literature of the Amazon

Banca do Largo contains the world’s largest collection of titles by Amazonian writers – and its owner believes their Indigenous knowledge and voices should be more widely heard

by Mélissa Godin

Melo began seeking out more Amazonian books and by the time he went to study at the Federal University of Amazonas in 1999, his collection had grown considerably: other students came to him when they couldn’t find books in the university’s library.

In 2006, Melo decided to buy a magazine stand next to the opera house, where, alongside magazines, he displayed books from his personal collection. “I got a lot of positive responses,” he says, noting that students, artists, academics and professors would visit. “So I kept bringing in more books.” By 2010, the shop stopped selling magazines and specialised exclusively in Amazonian literature.

Over the past 12 years, Melo’s bookshop has become a key feature of Manaus society. “This is the centre for Amazonian culture and literature,” says Eunuquis Aguiar Muniz, a comic book writer. “There’s no other place like it.”

After reading a book by a writer from the Amazon, I thought: ‘Where is all the Amazonian literature?’

When you walk into Banca do Largo, you can tell the shop is the result of years of careful reading and deep studying about the region’s past and present. The books on the shelves range from poetry collections celebrating the jungle’s forest and fauna to novels chronicling the experiences of Lebanese-Brazilian migrants.

“I don’t even know if there is just one Amazonian literature,” Melo says. “So I include everything, from the European explorers to the new texts by Indigenous writers.”