#Non-Resident Indians

[tradersuraj1]

Top Money Transfer Tips for NRIs Living Abroad

NRI (Non-Resident Indian) Money Transfer services play a crucial role in facilitating financial transactions for individuals living abroad. These services offer a convenient and secure way for NRIs to send money to their families, make investments, or handle other financial obligations in their home country. With features like competitive exchange rates, fast transfer times, and reliable customer support, NRI Money Transfer services cater to the unique needs of the global Indian diaspora. Whether it's sending remittances for daily expenses or larger investments, these services provide a lifeline for NRIs to manage their finances effectively across borders. For more details visit: https://www.myforexeye.com/nri-solutions

[easterneyenews]

US-based Indian activist applauds initiative allowing diaspora contributions to Ram Mandir

Social activist Prem Bhandari had earlier appealed to prime minister Narendra Modi to allow members of the Indian diaspora across the world to contribute to the development of the Ram Temple in Uttar PradeshAsserting that there are over 3.5 crore Non-Resident Indians and Persons of Indian Origin around the world, he said that many of them would like to contribute to the development of the temple.

Read more- https://www.easterneye.biz/us-indian-activist-applauds-diaspora-contributions-to-ram-mandir/

[jasmelon]

How NRIs can Reactivate Inoperative PAN Cards - A Step-by-Step Guide

Introduction In the Indian financial landscape, PAN (Permanent Account Number) cards are vital for taxpayers, including Non-Resident Indians (NRIs). Recent regulatory updates have linked the status of PAN cards to Aadhaar, and the discontinuation of this linkage has led to some PAN holders' status changing from "Active" to "Inoperative." Nevertheless, NRIs can still use their inoperative PANs to file Income Tax Returns (ITR).

Click here to know more

[thegulfindians]

NRI, OCI candidates can now appear for CUET: UGC

The Common University Entrance Test (CUET) for undergraduate UG) courses is now open to international students as well as non-resident Indians (NRI) and Overseas Citizens of India (OCI) students seeking admission to central universities in the nation, according to the University Grants Commission (UGC) The UGC has however made it clear that admission to a certain university will depend on the…

[mylawyeradvise]

The professional team of Advocates & Lawyers of My Lawyers Advice are taking up an initiative solely to educate and enlighten the public at large with respect to the various aspects of different laws and/or legislations vis a vis their legal implications and importance while duly considering the legal procedures involved. The professional Advocates & Lawyers are sharing their experiences solely for the purpose of spreading legal education. The name of the actual entity and/or person is hidden and shall be hereinafter mentioned and referred to as “Querist”.

[iwan1979]

Last week, Singapore reported some weak economic numbers raising fears of a recession. Annual exports fell for the eighth consecutive month while total employment expanded at a slower rate, retrenchments rose, and job vacancies shrank for the fourth

[htylmg]

tesher is for the nri kids and the nri kids ONLY actually

[butchkaramazov]

The RG Kar Incident: DON'T CLOSE YOUR EYES TO RAPE

I’m unsure of how many non-Indians or even non-Bengalis know of this. Regardless of whether you do or do not, I would request you to reblog this post & share awareness about this. DON'T LET INJUSTICE GO UNPUNISHED.

On August 9, 2024, the body of 31-year-old post-graduate medical trainee, Dr. Moumita Debnath, was found partially naked in the seminar room of RG Kar, a hospital in Kolkata. She had just finished working a 36-hour night shift before this and, out of exhaustion, had fallen asleep while studying in the nearest seminar room on the fourth floor of the hospital.

Her family was informed beforehand that she had committed suicide, to which her mother emphasized on the fact that her daughter could never carry out such an act. On further investigation, it was found that Dr. Debnath had been raped and murdered in her sleep.

According to the Deccan Herald,

“There was bleeding from both her eyes and mouth, injuries over the face and nail. The victim was also bleeding from her private parts. She also has injuries in her belly, left leg… neck, in her right hand, ring finger and… lips. [...] “Her neck bone was also found broken. It seems that she was first strangulated and then smothered to death.”

According to Medical Dialogues,

“There were multiple hairs on the mattress and blood was soaked on the blue mattress [...]”

Later, it was found that Dr. Debnath’s glasses were shattered and her eyes were pierced with the shards of her glasses themselves.

Although one of the criminals (Sanjoy Roy) has been arrested, I am certain that there are others involved. In fact, it has been found that Sanjoy Roy, despite being an outsider, was granted access to PG Kar via personal relations with senior police officers.

The chief minister of West Bengal (despite being a woman herself) as well as members other political parties are trying, behind the scenes, to let this case fade away. Why? Oh right, it's really the privileged, upper class & upper caste sons and brothers of ministers who are behind this! No major crime can happen in a country without there being the hand of one or more influential persons, often politically involved.

Sisters and brothers, দিদিরা ও দাদারা, it would be a sin to remain silent in the face of such a crime. Our brave brothers & sisters pursuing medical practise have ceased working in their hospitals to protest against this grave crime against women, against humanity. We cannot let this injustice go unpunished! A crime against a single woman is a crime against all of us! We were born from a woman, raised by a woman—and now, when we see the honour, dignity and life of women at stake, won’t we join the andolan? Won’t we fight for what is right?

Requesting all Kolkata residents (who can) to join in at least any one of the protests mentioned below. There are provisions for elderly & disabled people. Men are invited to join us as well.

For those who want to join the Reclaim the Night protest at 11:55 p.m., please refer to this list of contact numbers (according to your region) provided by Miru Didi ( @arachneofthoughts )

Take hold of the night! We have always been told to stay wary of nighttime and the dangers, manifested in the form of cruel men, we may face. Not anymore—we must reclaim the night! How much fear is fear enough? If anyone wants to know further details and the phone numbers regarding this first event, please DM me.

Blowing the conch has always been a signal of strength. In traditional Bengali culture, it is almost always the women who blow the conch, be it in Durga Puja or the everyday pujas carried out at home. It was, and always will remain a sign of victory over evil. At 11:55 p.m., all those who cannot join the midnight assembly (the aforementioned event) can, instead, blow the conch from their own houses! Let them know you're not afraid. Let them know you've had enough. Let them know that once a revolution starts, especially one spearheaded by women, takes a long, long time to end.

[Please Note: These protests are not personally organised by me. I simply am in touch and will be attending the protest tonight.]

If you can, please do take the time to sign this petition below (courtesy of Miru Didi @arachneofthoughts) to aid our efforts:

If nothing, please do take the time to share and reblog this post wherever you can! DON'T LET RAPE GO UNPUNISHED!

[akgvgassociates]

Form 15CB: Meaning & necessity

Form 15CB is a critical document required under the Indian Income Tax Act and its regulations, used to calculate the tax liability on income earned from outside India. As a business owner, it’s vital to clearly understand Form 15CB and the role a tax consultant can play in helping you comply with this form. Read More:  Form 15CB: Meaning & necessity

[afloweroutofstone]

There's a lot to be said about how many Native tribes, often lacking in the economic opportunities available in many non-tribal areas, have turned their economic development models towards providing services that are forbidden to provide outside of tribal land. The 1987 California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians ruling acknowledged the right of tribes to operate gambling facilities regardless of state regulations, and the Obama-era loosening of weed regulations made it easier for them to sell marijuana with less concern for non-tribal laws.

Although these policy developments were not something that most tribes actively sought out, they eventually realized that these policies gave tribal lands a monopoly on certain goods and services that people were unable to acquire elsewhere. Perhaps for the first time ever, government decisions had given tribal economies an advantage over the non-tribal economies surrounding them. This led many tribes to lean hard into their newfound policy-based comparative advantage, building up their local economies around non-Native tourism in a way that sits awkwardly with many Native activists' desire for economic sovereignty.

Tribes with well-managed tribal governments have been able to use this arrangement to great advantage. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (who this post is really about, simply because I know a lot about them) not only uses the money generated by their casino resort to fund social services, they also distribute some of the casino's earnings as cash dividends to Cherokee residents, effectively funding a basic income for the tribe with the money lost by gamblers (who are, disproportionately, white outsiders). After centuries of being robbed by surrounding white communities, there's something of a perversely poetic justice to this (even if those losing the most money at the casino are not necessarily the same segments of the white population who gained the most from Cherokee dispossession).

But it's not all good news. This arrangement also has some concerning side effects on the political economy of Native tribes. The EBCI Cherokee tribe have long opposed federal recognition of the Lumbee, another group in North Carolina who are the largest Native tribe in the US that is unrecognized by the federal government. One of the reasons that the Cherokee have turned their backs on the Lumbee's quest for recognition is because it would threaten their monopoly on gambling in North Carolina. If the Lumbee were treated as a proper tribe, they could open up their own casino, threatening the monopoly profits of the Cherokee casino. Thus, another use of the Cherokee's casino funds has been to actively lobby against another Native tribe.

The EBCI Cherokee's economic reliance on their casino has damaged any prospect of inter-tribal Native solidarity in North Carolina. From the Cherokee's perspective, they have been placed in a situation where the desires of other tribes come at the direct expense of their own tribes' desires. The tension between these two is not a natural phenomenon, but rather the product of a policy framework which leaves little choice for tribal economic development outside of cutthroat monopoly preservation. If solidarity is to live, the casino-first model must die. The question is: what replaces it?

[jsbmarketresearch01]

NPCI to Permit NRIs with International Numbers from 10 Countries to Use UPI Payments

NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India) will allow Non-resident Indians (NRIs) from 10 countries to transfer funds easily through UPI (Unified Payments Interface) from an international mobile number. The countries that fall into consideration are the United Kingdom, United States, Australia, Canada, UAE, Singapore, Qatar, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, and Oman. But to use this facility, people have to use Non-Resident Ordinary (NRO) or Non-Resident (External) Rupee (NRE) account. However, without an Indian mobile number, they can enjoy making digital payments.

An NRO account allows NRIs to manage the earned income in India while an NRE account permits the NRIs to transfer to India their foreign earnings. The Payments Corporation has announced 30 April as the deadline for the partner banks to comply with the instructions. The UPI move will not just assist local businesses abroad, but even the family, individuals, and international students.

Earlier the NRIs were unable to operate the UPI network because the same is dependable on SIM. The feature was to date accessible to only Indian SIM card phones. However, non-resident Indians can now utilize international SIM linked to their NRO or NRE accounts and make transactions online from their mobile UPI interface. Also, no charges will apply for such transactions. In December 2022 alone, UPI transactions saw a record high of Rs. 12.82 lakh crore. With the current step, the transactional amount will soar higher.

So, the NPCI will enable UPI transactions from mobile numbers bearing the country codes of the mentioned 10 nations along with the existing domestic country code. In the future, the facility can extend to other countries as well. UPI helps to instantly transfer money through mobile phones in easy steps. The partner banks have to make sure that the NRE and NRO accounts comply with the guidelines of the RBI (Reserve Bank of India) and FEMA (Foreign Exchange Management Act).

The beneficiary and remitter banks will keep in check all the transactions to combat money laundering and any act of terrorism so that the UPI system remains transparent and risk-free. NPCI has been receiving several requests from NRIs and customers to include a  facility for some time now, and finally, international numbers from the 10 countries will be able to benefit from the instant and seamless payment on UPI.

Visit: - https://www.jsbmarketresearch.com/news/news-npci-nri-upi-payment

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[gkcurrentaffairs]

Interesting Facts About NRI (Non Resident Indian) Day

Interesting Facts About NRI (Non Resident Indian) Day

Every year on January 9, India celebrates Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (PBD) or Non-Resident Indian Day (NRI). The celebration day was initiated by the Republic of India in 2003 to mark the contribution of the overseas Indian community to the development of India. The day is celebrated to commemorate the return of Mahatma Gandhi to Mumbai from South Africa on 9 January 1915. It was established in…

[songoftrillium]

Werewolf: the Apocalypse 5th Edition and the Anti-Indigeneity in the Gaming Industry

reosted with permission from J.F. Sambrano

Dagot’ee!

Shii J.F. Sambrano gonsēē. My nations are Chiricahua Apache (Ndeh) through my maternal grandmother and Cora Indian (Náayarite) through my maternal grandfather.  I am a mixed race Indigenous person, and through my father my heritage is English and Scottish. I am currently residing and doing work in my community on the lands of Lummi Nation. I use both gender non-binary and masculine pronouns, but prefer the former. I have several published works in the TTRPG industry, and am probably most known for my contributions to Mage: the Ascension 20th Edition, Werewolf: the Apocalypse 20th Edition, and the Transformers Roleplaying Game, as well as being part of the Essence 20 development team. Further, I also work in higher education at an Indian college, both advising and teaching Indigenous students across the United States. My passion is education, and I believe that we all learn through play, and that TTRPGs are a valuable source of learning, especially on personal, cultural, and social levels. This has always been what has drawn me to TTRPGs since I started playing M.E.R.P. with my brother in 1996 (and before that HeroQuest), through to my “graduation” into more story-driven games such as those presented in the Storyteller System, until now, where I author and produce my own roleplaying games.

I was also part of the First Team (in-joke intentional) hired by White Wolf Studios/Paradox Interactive via Hunters Entertainment to develop and author Werewolf: the Apocalypse 5th Edition. After several months of work, Paradox Interactive chose to go in another direction in early 2021 (I believe it was either March or April) and in fall of that year, it was announced that Werewolf would instead be taken in house, with Justin Achilli as the Brand Creative Lead and primary author of the book. Going forward I will be describing my experience while I worked with Paradox Interactive, primarily through Karim Muammar, White Wolf’s Brand Editor, as well as the developmental editor for Werewolf. Although I worked in a team, both with hired authors and in-house representatives at Hunters Entertainment, I will not be speaking for the experience of others, except when specifically noting unanimous consensuses, and specific interactions (which will go unnamed) that are particularly relevant. My hope is that by highlighting some of the anti-Indigenous attitudes that are central to the foundational members and leaders of the White Wolf brand, that I can provide opportunities for growth and healing within the World of Darkness TTRPG community, but also in the broader gaming community, where these behaviors and attitudes are rampant. I also want the community to have a better understanding of what this experience is like internally, and the challenges that Indigenous creators, as well as other marginalized creators, are met with when they try to make positive change within nerd and geek communities clinging to inherited white supremacist values, even if they don’t realize they are doing so.

What I do not want to be doing in this article is creating fuel for edition wars.  I believe that both legacy and Werewolf 5th are rife with anti-Indigenous attitudes, and appalling amounts of appropriation. Both versions deserve criticism, I am not defending one over the other, I am only sharing what my experience was like working on the 5th edition of the book. Further, please understand that I was originally going to wait until I had read the final copy of the book, because I wanted to know how much of my work was used (based on previews I already know some was, just not the extent) and whether or not they decided to credit me for that work, and how I was going to be credited.  My belief is that I likely will not be, but I am genuinely uncertain.  Knowing how they handled that would have reframed how I addressed this. But more importantly, I want it to be very clear that even before Paradox ultimately pulled the plug on the Hunters team, I was preparing to exit working on the project based on the experience I will describe below. Not only did I find it frustrating, and personally disparaging, but I ultimately decided I was uncomfortable with my name being attached to the product based on the direction they wanted to go. So while I wanted to know whether or not I would be credited, because it would teach me something about their internal practices, I do not want or need the credit.

Finally, the reason that I decided to speak about this now instead of after having a chance to inspect the final product, was because my personal experience dealing with anti-Indigeneity coming from Paradox was just that: personal.  But since then I have witnessed a throughline of hateful and xenophobic attitudes wielded against Indigenous people across the globe, and we do not deserve this treatment.  I was outraged over the events that led to the segregation of the Latin American fanbase, which culminated from bottom-up criticism about how poorly their people and countries were being defined through World of Darkness products, and ended up with the firing of their Latin American Brand Ambassador, Alessa Torres, because she chose to stand with her community in those criticisms.  I was further appalled when the likeness of Tāme Wairere Iti was shoehorned into the Werewolf book, a blatant example of cultural theft: not only in stealing the literal physical identity of an Indigenous person, but also his sacred tā moko.  When Paradox Interactive issued an apology for this, it felt incredibly hollow to me in the wake of these events, the hateful attitudes I had personally witnessed coming from the top.

Whether from North America, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, or Peru, or across the globe in New Zealand, not only do Indigenous people deserve better treatment from such a major company, but their Indigenous and Latino fanbases, who have twisted and worked themselves through difficult representation for decades at this point, deserve better.  Apologies are not enough, especially when they come with next to no real change.

Werewolf: the Apocalypse in Context

At the time that White Wolf Publishing began to produce its World of Darkness line, the TTRPG industry was dominated by white men, both as producers, developers, and authors, as well as the main characters in their settings. White Wolf's World of Darkness made an impact at the time, by defying these Eurocentric, patriarchal presentations, first by defaulting to feminine pronouns throughout Vampire: the Masquerade, and then by focusing on Indigenous representation and values in Werewolf: the Apocalypse, and as a young Indigenous nerd, it had a positive impact on me, as I know it has on some other Indigenous people who became fans of the World of Darkness at the time. This was because before opening the pages of Werewolf: the Apocalypse, I had never seen heroes that I could play who looked like me and my culture. It was off, and often offensive, but it was my first experience in which I could directly play a hero who shared my heritage--and I also had more than one option through two different Tribes to do so. This might sound a little like I was cheering for table scraps, but again, at the time, table scraps was more than I had ever seen before.

Werewolf: the Apocalypse 1st Edition was originally published in 1992 via then White Wolf Publishing (not to be confused with Paradox Interactive's White Wolf). From its inception, the premise was interwoven with what its then-authors believed to be Indigenous praxis and representation.  Like many pop-culture presentations of Indigeneity from this time period (see Fern Gully, Dances With Wolves, Disney’s Pocahontas, or in TTRPGs, the NAN from Shadowrun) it was rife with problematic and even offensive stereotyping. The most obvious examples thereof are within the two "Pure Tribes" Uktena, and W****** who I will henceforth refer to as Older and Younger Brother. However, Indigenous inspiration was at the core of the game's spiritual premise as well, where animism and "Totems" are central to the setting and gameplay. The way these concepts are presented is trivializing and dehumanizing, but it is important to acknowledge that the appropriation present in Werewolf: the Apocalypse goes a lot deeper than the two Brother Tribes (even the term "Tribe" was meant to invoke a vision of Indigeneity compared to the previous setting in the line's use of "Clan"). Additionally, there is art throughout every generation of these gaming books that represents humans, wolves, and human-wolf hybrid forms wearing Indigenous regalia, including sacred items such as headdresses, or engaged in sacred rituals such as the Sun Dance. The list of problematic representations goes deep, and my examples only scratch the surface, but it is also important for me to note the positive impact that this had, particularly in the 90's.

Even though the primary contributors to these narratives were non-Indigenous authors, or in one case, a Pretendian, and another, a culturally disconnected author, by the time the Revised (or Third Edition) era of the books came around, White Wolf Publishing was actively engaged in cultural consultation.  While I do not believe cultural consultation makes a big difference on its own, it matters that the attempt was made, to a degree: while these efforts fall short of what needs to be seen in cultural representation, this was still ahead of most other gaming companies at this time.

Hired by Hunters Entertainment

In February of 2020 I was approached by one of the co-owners of Hunters Entertainment to be one of the primary authors for Werewolf: 5th Edition due to my work on other World of Darkness projects, and let's be honest, because I was capable of bringing a much needed Indigenous perspective to a gameline that was rooted in Indigeneity and rotting with appropriation and racist stereotypes. I was overall receptive to the invitation, largely because I was very passionate about the World of Darkness setting overall, and Werewolf in particular, due to the impact that 90's representation had on me when I was a younger gamer. I also felt hopeful that with a really hard rewrite of Indigenous aspects of the game that I could shift a lot of really painful aspects of the game into something that was a net positive for Indigenous representation. I will tell you now, more than anything, I was excited to rewrite the Younger Brother Tribe, because when separated from racist authors, their message is very empowering and real to my lived experience.

That said, I did not agree to join the project without first asking for reassurances. I said that I was not willing to write negative Native stereotypes. I would not use appropriative language, or generally engage in appropriative writing (which meant at minimum that the names of the Pure Tribes would need to change), and most importantly, that I would not not engage in writing that contributed to erasure. While the person who recruited me to work on the project was eager to work with me, he acknowledged that he was not sure he could get everything I wanted to see approved, but also promised to fight for everything I suggested as hard as he could. Additionally, he shared with me that the original setting pitch for W5 involved all of Younger Brother being slaughtered en masse in a massacre. I made it clear that this was exactly the kind of thing that I would not write.  I cannot remember if this was something he suggested to be changed before or after I was invited onto the project, but with some pushback it was changed.  However, I point this out because I want you, the reader, to understand how eager Paradox Interactive was to start with mass genocide and erasure as a foundation to the setting.  All that said, I cannot stress enough that I have had nothing but positive experiences with Hunters Entertainment, and none of the following concerns fall upon them.

The Sword of Heimdall

The first encounter the Hunters Entertainment team as a whole had with problematic guidelines for the W5 draft was the direction that Paradox Interactive wanted to go with the Sword of Heimdall. At the time, the suggestions from Paradox and Karim Muammar were that the Sword of Heimdall was going to represent the new major villain of the Werewolf setting, and that they were to also represent the far-right, fascist direction that Werewolf society so often turned toward. They were meant to be representative of how far the new concept of Hauglosk could take entire communities. However, the Sword of Heimdall was discussed interchangeably with the Get of Fenris as a whole, and more than once Muammar seemed to suggest that every member of this Tribe was guilty of the same attitudes espoused in previous editions from the Sword of Heimdall. Now let's not beat around the bush: the Sword of Heimdall are literal Nazis. They believe directly in white supremacy and don't shy from it. They wanted to cleanse impure elements from the Get of Fenris, including BIPOC people, other non-white ethnicities, women, neurodivergent Garou, and other disabled Garou.

The writing team found this approach problematic for several reasons. The first, and most obvious, was that the direction seemed to want to turn one of the most popular Tribes into a horrific stereotype of its most abhorrent faction. Whether or not Muammar’s goal was to turn them into villains, we could not imagine a world where fans of previous editions would get their hands on this book, and not look for a way to play one of their previous favorite groups, thus creating the issue of making a guide to playing Nazi. Even beyond that, it’s not as if historically there were not players who used the tools of the setting to play Black Spiral Dancers, why wouldn’t this draw people who actually wanted to role-play through these toxic, harmful politics? Further, and while this is less important, it left a bad taste in my mouth, the justification for this major shift in Werewolf lore seemed to change over each pass. At first, Muammar suggested that all Fenrir were Nazis/SoH.  Then, when he was provided with evidence that it was a small faction that was eliminated in the early 2000’s, he started to shift toward the idea that we should not follow the lore. Finally, when every single member of the writer’s team flatly refused to provide what would essentially be “a player’s guide to being a Nazi werewolf” the writing was on the wall about the end of our involvement with this product. More than once, he suggested that we were cowardly social justice warriors for being unwilling to work with this concept, even though there were several attempts to write a heroic version of the Fenrir that were focused on undoing these ills of the past.

Indigenous Erasure in Werewolf: 5th Edition

While the entire Hunters Entertainment writing team was handling the major, glaring issue of Paradox’s fervor to include a major Nazi element in Werewolf, I was personally dealing with the problematic approach to the Indigenous issues in the setting. The largest problem, for me, was in addressing Younger Brother’s issues, the history of non-Indigenous writers creating horrifically racist stereotypes, and what was valuable in the Tribal identity that should be saved and recentered. However, my attempts to do so were thwarted with every approach. I rewrote this Tribe four times, and offered three different versions of it to try to earn approval for a final write-up, but each time there was a lot of negativity directed towards my attempts and all them boiled down to this: Muammar felt that having two Tribes (both Younger and Older Brother) representing the “Indigenous population” was too many, and wanted them to only be focused on Older Brother, and that Younger Brother’s connection to a central, Indigenous identity, was undesirable because “other sources wrote them as having Siberian and European connections” and that future writing on this Tribe would require a lot of sensitivity…suggesting that one, Muammar wasn’t interested in doing the work to handle that level of sensitivity, and further, that he wasn’t interested in including me in future work, since I was involved with doing that at the time.

I want to take a moment to remind you that the work that was put into recovering Younger Brother started with “Let’s Kill Them Off” and at this point, through a combination of convincing and pleading, had been walked back to “They can live, but now they’re not connected to being Indigenous anymore” which is just representative genocide of a different variety. “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” It was also explicitly something I said I would not write about going into this project. Ultimately, my efforts did not get much further than this, with some specific exceptions I will cite below.

Karim Muammar’s Anti-Indigenous Positions

Muammar consistently and repeatedly communicated to the team in ways that were condescending and dismissive of our collective accomplishments and capabilities, but from my perspective, no one suffered as much significant derision as I did while discussing the changes I wanted to make to Younger and Older Brother in order to make their representation empowering and exciting.

In the pulled quote from the previous paragraph, I want to point out to you that Muammar, who had the title of Lead Editor on this project, refused to capitalize Native American. Further, he would often redline my work with edits to decapitalize my own uses of Native American, as well as the word Indigenous when referring to Indigenous peoples. While there are plenty of people who might want to argue about this, I will point out that both the AP style guide as well as the Chicago style guide (the one which I am most familiar with in my academic historical work) both call for Indigenous to be capitalized when referring to a people. Further, I challenge anyone to defend the consistent decapitalization of Native American. More importantly, the reason that these are standards in respected style guides, is because the English language has been used historically to oppress and erase ethnic identities, including Indigenous identities. By transforming adjectives into proper nouns, we are declaring that Indigenous and Native aren’t descriptors that can be applied to animals, plants, and soil, but real lived identities and culture groups.

When I was explaining to the Paradox team (which was mostly just Muammar) why it was important to change the names of these two Tribes from the appropriative (and offensive) ones used in the past, Muammar pushed back by defending the previously used Younger Brother name, even after reading my extensive research and explanation about how this would harm Indigenous communities and fans.

While doing so, he also decided that it was appropriate to refer to this entirely Native American tribe by the word “savages” a slur that has been specifically used to dehumanize Native Americans, and then mocked my rewrite that focused on presenting them as stewards of the land using Indigenous methodologies and praxes, instead of the “savage” racist stereotypes they were presented as in previous editions. Further, as in the above quote, even after it was communicated that the use of this term was problematic, he kept doubling-down to use it to refer to the Tribe.

Even though I worked hard to redefine Younger Brother through Indigenous theory, such as place-based theory, relational theory, and communal theory, Muammar either refused to recognize this work, dismissing it as simple, or else simply could not understand the importance of these changes. Either way, the choice is that he didn’t want them to change, or couldn’t comprehend why the change was important because of how entrenched in white supremacist thinking he is. Further, after the massive effort that I put forward to attempt to educate him and the rest of the Paradox team on these issues, the insistence on using offensive terms and belittling my work felt intentional. So let’s talk about the work I did that was above and beyond my job description: free cultural consulting work.

“Sensitivity” and Consultation

I have seen several misunderstandings of my role working on this project going around, so I want to make something very clear. I was hired to work on this project as an author, and nothing else. I was not ever hired to be a cultural consultant. I do not do cultural consulting work. While I feel that there are many creators and companies who hire cultural consultants with the best intentions in mind, their responses often fall short of what is needed, as no one is ever obligated to actually follow the advice of cultural consultants. Further, I think there are also many companies who choose to hire cultural consultants only to say “we did this minimal step, and that is enough” in order to ward off naysayers.

However, anyone who hires me gets some level of cultural consulting for free, because it comes out in my writing–in both what I won’t write and what I choose to center my writing around. In the case of Werewolf 5th Edition, however, it was far more involved than this. I came with a plethora of “I will not write X” because I knew the setting was so problematic.  A short list of my demands besides not being willing to write Indigenous erasure, was that we needed to change the names of the Pure Tribes (and the term Pure Tribe itself), we needed to change the word Totem to Patron, and also the Patrons of the Pure Tribes. We needed to move away from the term Metis for obvious reasons, and we needed to move away from the term Skin Dancers. I also specifically noted that there was a lot of cultural theft happening from the beginning of Werewolf until now that I wanted to address. The only way these issues were going to be addressed was to convince Paradox they were actual issues on the level of PR concerns, because nothing else was likely going to be considered. So in order to achieve this, I put in weeks worth of research, writing, and meetings with top level administrators with Hunters Entertainment so that they could bring this information to Paradox.  I never documented my hours, but I would guess that I did approximately 80-100 hours of what I could only describe as cultural consultation work for free that was outside the contract work I was hired for. Let’s be clear: I did this willingly because I was passionate about the positive changes I wanted to see in this product, because I believed that Werewolf’s historic ills could be turned toward non-toxic representation.

Besides my actual words, such as naming the Ghost Council, and arguably the name Gale Stalkers came from a combination of names I pitched to Paradox after Winter’s Teeth was denied, and several sentences and paragraphs that I have seen so far that appear so close to what I originally wrote that you could imagine they were just edited versions, my largest contribution toward the final version of Werewolf: 5th Edition was this work. The only reason the offensive, appropriated names were changed were because of hours of my work to convince them it needed to happen. The reason that the Gale Stalkers aren’t just dead and gone: again, I pushed against this. The reason that Skin Dancers, Totem, and Metis will not appear as canonical titles? I pushed against their unwillingness to alter these things (see Karim’s defense of Wen**** Tribe name above).

Further, and this is the biggest reason I decided to write this article before seeing the final version of the book, I want to mention that I was also included in discussions with Hunters Entertainment to potentially be part of the art direction team, especially to oversee depictions of Indigenous characters, regalia, and art, to ensure that it would be represented either respectfully or not at all. I decided I needed to speak as soon as possible after the artistic portrayal of Tāme Iti appeared in the Glass Walkers preview without his permission. There are many arguments surrounding this issue and I am not going to address everything, but ultimately, I can tell you that had I remained as part of the art direction team, and saw that, I would have questioned it immediately. Even if I didn’t recognize Tāme Iti immediately, I would have asked what the source was on the depiction of moko in that piece, because I am aware that this is a sacred form of art–and I had already discussed wanting to make sure things like Crinos in headdresses didn’t appear in the book (as had often happened in previous editions, particularly on a certain white-skinned character whose name rhymes with Steals-the-Past).

As time working on this project went on, and I went through rounds and rounds of trying to convince Muammar and Paradox that it was important to not steal Indigenous identities, art, and stories, and that a greater effort needed to be put in powerful and empowering Indigenous representation, and I constantly ran into refusals and criticisms that were clearly hateful toward Indigenous identities and peoples, not to mention the push to represent Nazism as a major part of the game setting, I grew increasingly frustrated and restless with feeling like I was trying to work on a challenging project while also defending my right to exist as the person I am at every turn. Eventually I turned to another Indigenous TTRPG and game creator to ask for advice, and after a long and difficult discussion, I came to the conclusion that I was going to talk to the Hunters administration team and tell them that if Muammar kept using slurs and other anti-Indigenous language and attitudes, I was going to need to step off of this project, because it was harmful to me on a personal level. In furtherance of this point, I have been avoiding doing any contract work at all where I can tell that I am wanted for my specific cultural perspective ever since, because this situation was so harrowing for me.

Unfortunately, before I could have this conversation, after one final draft of Younger Brother and Bone Gnawers (which had its own issues, but that is not the point of this discussion), before we received any other specific feedback, the Hunters Entertainment administrators announced to the writing team that Paradox had decided to take the book in-house, and would no longer need our services.

The main point I would like to leave you with, besides these few specific quotes (out of dozens and dozens) that Muammar made that were anti-Indigenous, is that there is often a big call to have more BIPOC voices in various entertainment industries, so that both our stories, perspectives, and unique views on how the universe and life works, can be included; so that an industry that is historically, harmfully Eurocentric, might turn toward new, healthier, and inclusive directions. And I agree with this call for change, but I implore you to consider the conditions that BIPOC creators often have to work under: doing cultural/identity work and consultation for free as part of being present, being subject to vicious refusals of our experiences and perspectives, and straight-up having slurs lodged against our work. I want to see these changes in the industries we love, including the gaming industry, but currently the people who are in charge, who have the most power, are severely hostile to our work and our perspectives. This is why, for example, works like Coyote & Crow were done with an almost entirely Indigenous group of creators, and led by Indigenous creators, because trying to work for and with this ugly, hateful, and xenophobic group of people is so often exhausting, both mentally and spiritually, and because no good changes end up being made.

I am glad the harmful, appropriative terms were removed from the setting. I am glad I was part of the fight to make that real. I am not so glad that I was treated with hostility and racism by Muammar for the effort and love I put into this work, and I am not so glad that I will certainly be reviled by one of the two communities I did this work for–the gaming community, and certainly the people in power in this industry–and I am also not so glad that I didn’t have the opportunity to properly acknowledge how much of Werewolf’s base themes and setting are twisted and tied-up in Indigenous appropriation without giving the proper acknowledgments.

More than anything, I hope that this story will help you, the fans, realize that there is a lot of darkness in these communities, and they won’t change unless you hold their feet to the fire.

Ánaagodzįįhł

J.F. Sambrano

[mylawyeradvise]

A Non Resident Indians (NRI) who have left India and/or are either staying abroad or have obtained the citizenship of a foreign country have their immovable properties and/or real estate in India and the same can be in the form of ancestral property which a person inherits. “Partition” is a process by which ownership of property among the family members is managed. When there is/are more than one owner of a property, it is known as “joint property”. Joint ownership in the property creates many problems to the owners of the property and for the Non Resident Indians (NRI) it is even more complicated when they want to sell or transfer the undivided property to someone.

[shehzadi]

so far, nearly 3 weeks on from the inauguration of ram mandir, indian authorities have demolished as many masjids and/or madrasas.

30.01.24 - akhoonji masjid & madrasa in delhi, also destroying a cemetery, shrine and all the students’ belongings in the process.

01.02.24 - a madrasa in maharashtra despite facing opposition from local muslims and one day before its scheduled court appeal.

08.02.24 - a masjid & madrasa in uttarakhand. this comes one day after uttarakhand became the first state to pass the uniform civil code (x, x) which aims to apply a ‘hindu code’ to all indians, infringing on the rights of dalits, adivasis, sikhs, christians, buddhists and muslims (i.e. anybody non-hindu) to practice their religion/lifestyle. muslim women protesting the demolition were lathi-charged (beaten with sticks) by police, a shoot-on-sight order was given resulting in 6 muslims killed and 300+ injured in the riots that followed, a curfew was put in place during which hindutva mobs burned down muslim homes and businesses while shouting abuse at muslims.

as always, no prior notice was given and bjp used it’s gold-standard excuse for each demolition, citing ‘illegal encroachment’.

in addition to these masjid demolitions, indian authorities bulldozed 2 neighbourhoods (ghettos, really) in the same timeframe and also without prior notice:

01.02.24 - jasola slum, which, having been around for at least 16 years, should not have been demolished without providing alternative housing, as the delhi slum policy states for slums which came up before 2015. obviously, housing hasn’t been provided.

06.02.24 - panchsheel nagar in mumbai which, having been around since 2011, entitled residents to paid rehabilitation, which has also not been given. this has left over 110 families homeless.

the demographic of both neighbourhoods, surprise surprise, is overwhelmingly muslim, buddhist and dalit.

bjp is enjoying the cover it is receiving from israel’s genocide in palestine to do whatever it wants and is getting bolder by the day. this ‘bulldozer justice’ has been happening for years, but not at such a rapid rate as it is now.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 2, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 03, 2024

Today is the one-hundredth anniversary of the Indian Citizenship Act, which declared that “all non-citizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States be, and they are hereby, declared to be citizens of the United States: Provided, That the granting of such citizenship shall not in any manner impair or otherwise affect the right of any Indian to tribal or other property.”

That declaration had been a long time coming. The Constitution, ratified in 1789, excluded “Indians not taxed” from the population on which officials would calculate representation in the House of Representatives. In the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, the Supreme Court reiterated that Indigenous tribes were independent nations. It called Indigenous peoples equivalent to “the subjects of any other foreign Government.” They could be naturalized, thereby becoming citizens of a state and of the United States. And at that point, they “would be entitled to all the rights and privileges which would belong to an emigrant from any other foreign people.”

The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, established that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” But it continued to exclude “Indians not taxed” from the population used to calculate representation in the House of Representatives.

In 1880, John Elk, a member of the Winnebago tribe, tried to register to vote, saying he had been living off the reservation and had renounced the tribal affiliation under which he was born. In 1884, in Elk v. Wilkins, the Supreme Court affirmed that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution did not cover Indigenous Americans who were living under the jurisdiction of a tribe when they were born. In 1887 the Dawes Act provided that any Indigenous American who accepted an individual land grant could become a citizen, but those who did not remained noncitizens. 

As Interior Secretary Deb Haaland pointed out today in an article in Native News Online, Elk v. Wilkins meant that when Olympians Louis Tewanima and Jim Thorpe represented the United States in the 1912 Olympic games in Stockholm, Sweden, they were not legally American citizens. A member of the Hopi Tribe, Tewanima won the silver medal for the 10,000 meter run. 

Thorpe was a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, and in 1912 he won two Olympic gold medals, in Classic pentathlon—sprint hurdles, long jump, high jump, shot put, and middle distance run—and in decathlon, which added five more track and field events to the Classic pentathlon. The Associated Press later voted Thorpe “The Greatest Athlete of the First Half of the Century” as he played both professional football and professional baseball, but it was his wins at the 1912 Olympics that made him a legend. Congratulating him on his win, Sweden’s King Gustav V allegedly said, “Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world.”  

Still, it was World War I that forced lawmakers to confront the contradiction of noncitizen Indigenous Americans. According to the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History, more than 11,000 American Indians served in World War I: nearly 5,000 enlisted and about 6,500 were drafted, making up a total of about 25% of Indigenous men despite the fact that most Indigenous men were not citizens. 

It was during World War I that members of the Choctaw and Cherokee Nations began to transmit messages for the American forces in a code based in their own languages, the inspiration for the Code Talkers of World War II. In 1919, in recognition of “the American Indian as a soldier of our army, fighting on foreign fields for liberty and justice,” as General John Pershing put it, Congress passed a law to grant citizenship to Indigenous American veterans of World War I. 

That citizenship law raised the question of citizenship for those Indigenous Americans who had neither assimilated nor served in the military. The non-Native community was divided on the question; so was the Native community. Some thought citizenship would protect their rights, while others worried that it would strip them of the rights they held under treaties negotiated with them as separate and sovereign nations and was a way to force them to assimilate. 

On June 2, 1924, Congress passed the measure, its supporters largely hoping that Indigenous citizenship would help to clean up the corruption in the Department of Indian Affairs. The new law applied to about 125,000 people out of an Indigenous population of about 300,000.

But in that era, citizenship did not confer civil rights. In 1941, shortly after Elizabeth Peratrovich and her husband, Roy, both members of the Tlingit Nation, moved from Klawok, Alaska, to the city of Juneau, they found a sign on a nearby inn saying, “No Natives Allowed.” This, they felt, contrasted dramatically with the American uniforms Indigenous Americans were wearing overseas, and they said as much in a letter to Alaska’s governor, Ernest H. Gruening. The sign was “an outrage,” they wrote. “The proprietor of Douglas Inn does not seem to realize that our Native boys are just as willing as the white boys to lay down their lives to protect the freedom that he enjoys." 

With the support of the governor, Elizabeth started a campaign to get an antidiscrimination bill through the legislature. It failed in 1943, but passed the House in 1945 as a packed gallery looked on. The measure had the votes to pass in the Senate, but one opponent demanded: "Who are these people, barely out of savagery, who want to associate with us whites with 5,000 years of recorded civilization behind us?"

Elizabeth Peratrovich had been quietly knitting in the gallery, but during the public comment period, she said she would like to be heard. She crossed the chamber to stand by the Senate president. “I would not have expected,” she said, “that I, who am barely out of savagery, would have to remind gentlemen with five thousand years of recorded civilization behind them of our Bill of Rights.” She detailed the ways in which discrimination daily hampered the lives of herself, her husband, and her children. She finished to wild applause, and the Senate passed the nation’s first antidiscrimination act by a vote of 11 to 5. 

Indigenous veterans came home from World War II to discover they still could not vote. In Arizona, Maricopa county recorder Roger G. Laveen refused to register returning veterans of the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation, including Frank Harrison, to vote. He cited an earlier court decision saying Indigenous Americans were “persons under guardianship.” They sued, and the Arizona Supreme Court agreed that the phrase only applied to judicial guardianship.  

In New Mexico, Miguel Trujillo, a schoolteacher from Isleta Pueblo who had served as a Marine in World War II, sued the county registrar who refused to enroll him as a voter. In 1948, in Trujillo v. Garley, a state court agreed that the clause in the New Mexico constitution prohibiting “Indians not taxed” from voting violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments by placing a unique requirement on Indigenous Americans. It was not until 1957 that Utah removed its restrictions on Indigenous voting, the last of the states to do so.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act protected Native American voting rights along with the voting rights of all Americans, and they, like all Americans, are affected by the Supreme Court’s hollowing out of the law and the wave of voter suppression laws state legislators who have bought into Trump’s Big Lie have passed since 2021. Voter ID laws that require street addresses cut out many people who live on reservations, and lack of access to polling places cuts out others. 

Katie Friel and Emil Mella Pablo of the Brennan Center noted in 2022 that, for example, people who live on Nevada’s Duckwater reservation have to travel 140 miles each way to get to the closest elections office. “As the first and original peoples of this land, we have had only a century of recognized citizenship, and we continue to face systematic barriers when exercising the fundamental and hard-fought-for right to vote,” Democratic National Committee Native Caucus chair Clara Pratte said in a press release from the Democratic Party.

As part of the commemoration of the Indian Citizenship Act, the Democratic National Committee is distributing voter engagement and protection information in Apache, Ho-Chunk, Hopi, Navajo, Paiute, Shoshone, and Zuni.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON