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
What they actually own the copyright to is the fake entries they added to the dictionary because mere collections of facts aren’t copyrightable.
Not really no. A lot of work goes into observing how words are used and writing definitions that describe those uses. Someone has to actually write the definitions and their writings are copyrightable.
They don’t own the rights to describing a word, they do own how they described a word.