“No matter how it was collected, where it was collected, when it was collected, our language belongs to us," said Ray Taken Alive, a Lakota teacher.

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

  • tomalley8342@lemmy.world
    0·
    16 days ago

    while also being unwilling to match that effort to create the textbook yourself.

    But the textbook was developed jointly, precisely through the cooperative labor between the two groups, no? It would not have been possible without the native speakers willing to share this information in the first place, no?