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
As pointed out in the first paragraph of the article, “Lakota Language Consortium” is a nonprofit organization. While NPOs operate in our capitalist system, you expect them to have goals besides pure profit.
It’s not actually a legitimate excuse for regular corporations, either!
The notion that corporations have an obligation to maximize shareholder profit, let alone to the sociopathic exclusion of everything else, is nothing less than a complete perversion of what the privilege of incorporation is supposed to be for.
Oh dude the list of things we’ve let corporations get away with over the centuries… They were originally supposed to be limited time, often purely for a single project, and kept under a watchful eye. Because we knew they were dangerous.
They’ve gone from that to permanent titans of industry with the rights of a person, held above any rights of individuals they come into contact with.