The Lakota Language Consortium had promised to preserve the tribe’s native language and had spent years gathering recordings of elders, including Taken Alive’s grandmother, to create a new, standardized Lakota dictionary and textbooks.
But when Taken Alive, 35, asked for copies, he was shocked to learn that the consortium, run by a white man, had copyrighted the language materials, which were based on generations of Lakota tradition. The traditional knowledge gathered from the tribe was now being sold back to it in the form of textbooks.
“No matter how it was collected, where it was collected, when it was collected, our language belongs to us. Our stories belong to us. Our songs belong to us,” Taken Alive, who teaches Lakota to elementary school students, told the tribal council in April.
The legal fundraising page for the man in the article is here
The language belongs to them, not the textbooks. Why would you have the rights to a book you didn’t write, that is about something you own? What were they expecting?
Yeah I expected the contrarian contingent of lemmy to come defend the wrong thing. Not just because lemmy be lemmy but also because tumblr told me so. To wit:
Those two men who’s race is irrelevant by the way, do all of the actual work of making a textbook. I think its ok that they expect that work to be treated as their own.
This is only a big deal because it reminds people of actual injustices natives suffered at the hands of white people
Maybe they should just write their own textbook.
Were the confederate generals’ race irrelevant? They’d have to be, wouldn’t they.
Irrelevant to what? Their race is relevant to some things and not others. The race of those two men is not relevant to this specific situation. If they did something wrong, it wouldn’t suddenly be right if they were a different race, and vice versa.
You seem extraordinarily sure that their race is irrelevant. Did the fact that their names are Wilhelm and Jan raise a dry smile then? No. Well, maybe it’s just me.
Yeah its just you. I like to judge people based on their actions instead of their race and name.
Agree, it’s like math you don’t own math or how to do math but math books are copyrighted. The guy did some serious work in speaking to the elders and documenting the language. Grated the tribe should have gotten some free copies for their participation. Nobody is stopping the tribe from taking those books and rewriting them using the translations from the book and then teaching the language to their descendants. They own the language.
In the article, it says they do give free copies for educational purposes. It doesn’t say whether that happened in practice or not.
So “he said” then.
They did. The LLC distributed over a million dollar’s worth of material for free and also the elders that worked with the LLC were directly paid for their time.
So why is this man suing then?
There’s no lawsuit. LLC believed he was using his position at a school district as part of a defamation campaign against them so they issued a complaint and he had to defend his teaching license. This happened a year ago and he never turned off the fundraiser.
Do you have a link with that info?
I was going on a lot of different things but NPR did a good piece on it https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1197956092
Also here’s a telling of Ray Taken Alive making a scene at a conference presentation and trying to intimidate a Lakota woman and interrupt her presentation which I can only assume was the breaking point for LLC since it happened 2 months before they sent their cease and desist. https://lastrealindians.com/news/2023/10/25/rl1qqmxm3cpcvoe8k9vsiv06gxibns
You should leave your assumptions out of this
I appreciate you taking the time to fund those links.
Thank you.