Talk:Shawano, Wisconsin

3O - Treaty of the Cedars

@Eldr-fire and Magnolia677: Responding to the 3O post. This is really the better place to have a discussion concerning the content of this article, rather than usertalk pages. Putting that aside, I do see that some discussion has taken place. It sounds like the question is about this material. I've read the discussions on each of your user pages and think I understand.

There are two issues: WP:V/WP:RS and WP:WEIGHT.

First one: Eldr-fire, we need reliable sources that verify the material. Magnolia677 is correct that the source in the edit linked above does not verify the material. I see in one of the other discussions the juxtaposition of this and this source, but I do not see where either Shawano or Sāwanoh appear in the former. On Wikipedia, nothing else matters until something is verifiable. In general, it's best to avoid scenarios where you have to combine two sources to verify something, as you start getting into original research territory, which isn't allowed on Wikipedia. That's not to say it's never allowed, but that if a simple statement of fact cannot itself be found in any single source, it's probably not right for Wikipedia. This also applies to using a set of maps, when no source puts the connection into words. Even worse when one of the maps is published on a wordpress.com blog (that's not to say it's definitely not a reliable site -- I'm not familiar with it -- but that a case would have to be made about its reliability).

Second one: WEIGHT is secondary to verifiability. IMO this is material that, if we have reliable sources to verify it, should very likely be included in the article as basic historical information. Let's resolve the first one first, though. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 04:04, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

@Rhododendrite: Thank you very much for weighing in on this issue. I'm not sure if you saw this since the chain of messages was a bit confusing on our talk pages, but I recently found this source which shows much more clearly the area affected by the treaty in 1836: https://decolonialatlas.wordpress.com/2015/08/21/menominee-treaty-lands/

Before I was relying on rougher geographical bounds as defined in words by the treaty text. Now that I have found this map, I would be happy to go back to the Wisconsin town pages that I edited and add this map as a source for towns that fall within that treaty range, and remove reference to the treaty on towns which are not part of the treaty range (marked in light orange on the map). Would that be an acceptable compromise in your opinion? No treaty will ever mention most Wisconsin towns by name because it involved too much land, and the whole point is that they could not be "founded" by white American settlers until the land was sold to the United States by the Menominee tribe. The fact that Menominee names exist for most of the settlements (https://www4.uwsp.edu/museum/menomineeClans/places/chart.aspx shows the Menominee names, including Sāwanoh) does not in itself tell us whether they existed as Menominee settlements before this treaty, since some of the names were clearly coined after the treaty (e.g. the names of reservations in Wisconsin). --Eldr-fire (talk) 09:01, 7 March 2019 UTC)

ETA: Sorry, I just woke up and I see you already addressed the map which I missed on my first readthrough of your post. I am not sure why you object to the map because it was published on Decolonial Atlas when the map is given a clear source - Wisconsin’s Past and Present: A Historical Atlas (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002). Also, I fear that by insisting on having the Treaty of the Cedar's effect on every town in its treaty range mentioned explicitly in a secondary source in order for it to appear on Wikipedia, you are not taking into account the problem of systemic bias - specific treaties are rarely given credit for their direct impact on the creation of towns in Wisconsin, something which has been acknowledged by Wisconsin legislature as a problem needing addressing (see Wisconsin Education Act 31 which requires better education on Native American treaty rights in the state - you can read about it here https://wisconsinfirstnations.org/about-first-nations/). --Eldr-fire (talk) 09:08, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

@Eldr-fire: First of all, apologies for missing the true source of the map. That certainly makes a difference. Could you explain (this may be "explain again," please bear with me), how you are interpreting that map to verify that "The area which would become Shawano was ceded to the United States by the Menominee in the 1836 Treaty of the Cedars"? From what I can tell, looking at the map as well as the source itself, Shawano (the town, not the county) is squarely in the area ceded to the Oneida in 1832, thus wouldn't it not have been included in the 1836 Treaty?

I work a lot with matters of systemic bias, and it's worth noting a distinction. There are different aspects of systemic bias on Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia is primarily written by men, for example, specifically men from English-speaking countries in the Global North. The average contributor is computer savvy, has some free time (lots of students, lots of retirees), etc. That means Wikipedia's articles will best represent the interests and abilities of those people. So we run events focusing on women, both as contributors and as subjects, we run events to try to involve more people of color, and otherwise try to involve a better representation of people in general (and the articles they would like to write about). There's a massive amount of information that can be added to Wikipedia that falls well within its rules. On the other hand, there are elements of systemic bias on Wikipedia that, because of its fundamental policies, are reproductions of biases in the rest of the world. For a great many of these, it's simply not Wikipedia's role to fix it. For example, in the US we have a vast publishing industry/infrastructure such that every television show episode, restaurant, etc. has a bunch of sources about it. Meanwhile, countries who do not have such an infrastructure would have trouble documenting in "reliable sources" even some of the most important things to those cultures, nevermind the frivolous stuff. That's the sort of thing we can't fix. We can search really hard for those other sources, we can focus on improving articles from those cultures, we can try to work with people in those areas to help them to publish, but Wikipedia is ultimately dependent on reliable sources being written about something. Even our publishing has plenty of bias in it, of course (e.g. publications about women for most of our history).

Now, I don't know where this falls. This is a discussion worth having, though. As I said, if we can verify this in reliable sources, it should be included. Just having a map is thin -- worse still if it's not self-evident (as it does not seem to be for me, anyway). I did my own search of google and an academic library for "treaty of the cedars" and "shawano" and couldn't really find anything.

BTW I would highly recommend this talk given at a Wikipedia-related event. It was a great talk at the time, but given it's about maps and systemic bias, you may find it particularly interesting. :)

As an aside, try to remember to indent by one when replying to something (so in reply to this comment, you would start each line with three colons). — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 15:53, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

@Rhododendrite: Thanks very much for your thoughtful reply, and for the helpful tip about the indenting. After finding the map several days ago, I realised that some of the towns to which I added a link to the Treaty of the Cedars were actually built on land sold to the United States by different treaties (such as Shawano, which as you point out is not within the Treaty of the Cedars area). I had previously been operating on the basis of a map (http://www.mpm.edu/content/wirp/ICW-162.html) of traditional Menominee territory, which covers a much wider area than the Treaty of the Cedars does. Because of my exposure to that more vague map, I had overestimated the geographical bounds of the Treaty of the Cedars as explained in the treaty text, and because of sources like this which frame the Treaty of the Cedars as the most significant land cession the Menominee made to the United States: http://www.mpm.edu/content/wirp/ICW-108.html. This is also why I have proposed as a possible compromise revisiting my edits of Wisconsin town articles and using the map to make sure that the Treaty of the Cedars is only mentioned for towns built on land sold in that treaty. There are a few examples of Wisconsin Wikipedia town articles where before my edits, the first thing mentioned in the history section were white settlers in the late 1830s, so it made sense to me to add the Treaty of the Cedars to explain why those people were able to purchase land for "founding" towns built on former Menominee territory.

I understand your point about how it can be difficult to correct systemic bias in Wikipedia when that bias leads to the exclusion of certain perspectives in what Wikipedia considers "reliable sources" (in this case, the erasure of Native American diplomatic history from most mainstream historical narratives in the United States). I grew up in Wisconsin and see reflected in these Wikipedia articles the same leap from "A long time ago tribes XYZ lived here" to "In 1837 Mr. John Whiteman founded this town" that was common in my education. These narratives leave out the treaties that make those land sales possible. I admit that since I am an academic it is a bit foreign to me to work on the basis that conclusions cannot be drawn from looking at two sources which are talking about the same thing in different ways (the Treaty of the Cedars talks about this land without calling it Shawano, local histories call this land Shawano without referencing the Treaty of the Cedars) and concluding that if A = B, and B = C, then A = C. That alone would not really constitute "original research" in my field. I had hoped that the link between the Treaty and the towns which were founded on the land it ceded would be apparent enough to justify linking them on Wikipedia, especially since Wikipedia's importance as a first port of call means that it would actually help Wisconsin educators satisfy Act 31 to show how treaties bridge this gap in the narrative of so many places in the state. I am not sure what the best resolution is since I see to some this looks like original research, even though to me it seems a basic, logical conclusion to draw. I appreciate the discussion though. --Eldr-fire (talk) 16:23, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

@Carwil: Curious about your take on this, if you have the time to look through it. You certainly have more experience than I do when it comes to this intersection of historical maps, systemic bias, and Wikipedia policies. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 16:44, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Briefly, I want to note that many US–Indian treaties, including those involving the Menominee, entail messy and chaotic disputes over coercion, legitimacy, and enduring validity, and that seems to be the case with the 1836 treaty, and even more so for the treaties of 1820, 1821, 1822. This is an arena in which authoritative sources are nearly essential to untangle claims and counterclaims about whether X land was actually "ceded" and whether "the Menominee" as a whole did the ceding. It looks like Siege and Survival: History of the Menominee Indians, 1634-1856 by David Beck is one such authoritative historical source (not only scholarly and recent, but the recipient of the Wisconsin Historical Society Book Award), although I can't tell via the Google Books version whether it clarifies which particular towns and places are part of which cession. Perhaps there is a clearer treaty-focused source to rely as well.--Carwil (talk) 23:15, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Thank you both of you for weighing in on this, @Carwil: and @Rhododendrites:. I agree now that in some cases (even cases where the land WAS ceded to the US by the Treaty of the Cedars, and not some other treaty which I missed in my previous edits) it would be worth using a more detailed source to look at the dynamic between the Treaty of the Cedars, other treaties, and white settlement in the area. I tried to address this on some pages which I edited about the treaty, such as this one where I briefly discussed that the treaty was a result of the pressures from Indian removal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiocton,_Wisconsin#History However, I am not sure if you would consider even this an adequate way to handle the problem. I am not currently at a university which holds that book in Scotland, but I will try to get a hold of it eventually (there are a few in Scotland which do hold it in their library) and look into this in more detail. That will probably not happen for several months though; in the meantime, what do you suggest is the best course of action? --Eldr-fire (talk) 08:34, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

I'm not sure whether this helps or not, but the following source has a very extensive run-down of the treaty, settlement, and (attempted) removal dynamics during the 1830s and 1840s. It seems to me that the representativeness of Oshkosh and other signers is not in dispute, but that the 1836 treaty was understood by them as ceding ownership but not usufruct rights over the land in question. There may have been later litigation on the matter. In any case this source is useful:

• Cleland, Charles; Greene, Bruce R. (2011-10-05). Faith in Paper: The Ethnohistory and Litigation of Upper Great Lakes Indian Treaties. University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0-472-02849-8.

Most of this material should inform the narrative at Treaty of the Cedars, which seems to have several points that are contradicted by the book, for example that Indians generally began voluntary removal the following year. I tend to think that a brief description of the place's prior inclusion in Menominee territory, followed by a description of the treaty cession is appropriate in place-centered articles like this one, but that step in the history should probably be followed by a description of the process of forced removal that came next.--Carwil (talk) 02:14, 14 March 2019 (UTC)