Talk:Juana Maria

María

Personally I find distasteful to ommage the Spanish language by keeping its words unassimilated in English when it comes to naming languages and peoples disappeared by Spaniards — but since you’re doing it, maybe spell it correctly? Tuvalkin (talk) 17:37, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

Peor es Nada

The name of the ship is translated as "Better than Nothing" in the article, but to my (extremely rudimentary) understanding of Spanish this would translate to something more like “Worse than Nothing” or “Nothing is Worse”. Is this the case, or is it an idiomatic phrase? Marchantiophyta (talk) 15:57, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: ENGL 165NJ Native Justice

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 31 March 2025 and 13 June 2025. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): 3arthmoons (article contribs). Peer reviewers: ChippedWallPaint.

— Assignment last updated by ChippedWallPaint (talk) 05:20, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion:

• Statue of Juana Maria and child.jpg

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 15:37, 15 March 2026 (UTC)

Inconsistent info

Hi everyone! I was looking at both the Wikipedia pages for Juana Maria and The Island of the Blue Dolphins (book), the novel which is based on Juana Maria's life, and noticed some discrepancy between the pages when discussing Juana Maria's life. I will label the wiki page for Juana Maria as JM and the wiki page for The Island of the Blue Dolphins (book) as BD.

On JM's page, it says this about her after arriving in Santa Barbara: "Afterwards, Juana Maria was taken to the Santa Barbara Mission, but was only able to communicate with the three or four remaining members of her tribe."

On BD's page, however, it says this: "No one alive at that time spoke her language, so she struggled to communicate using a form of sign language."

Evidently, something went amiss here; that's a pretty big discrepancy! I did some digging to figure out which one is true and an editor's note on a JSTOR article says this (relevant part bolded): "She was not the last of the Nicoleños; her people did not seem to have fled the island at the behest of Catholic missionaries after the massacre by Russian hunters; she was able to communicate with other Native Californians; and, most intriguingly, she was not alone on San Nicolas at all" (https://daily.jstor.org/juana-maria-blue-dolphins/).

I'm a bit new to the world of editing Wikipedia articles (and making significant changes such as this one) so I'm unsure if there is protocol for this? But I do think the page needs to make a note of this update and I will do that without deleting what is already on the page, just in case.

I also cast a bit of doubt on the linked article (copy available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aNgaPxU2SA6T5nx4n-yLyarZP6pZdujn/view) as the entire claim re: her ability to communicate in Santa Barbara rests on some recently unearthed testimony, and I have been unable to find other info (as of now) to back up this claim, but I am also neither a historian nor a linguist so I don't know how the research protocol works in these fields. So for now, I will take the research article as fact until proven otherwise.

(I will put down the same comment/observation on the Island of the Blue Dolphins page.) Hilthebookworm (talk) 03:00, 25 March 2026 (UTC)