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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/lakota-elders-helped-a-white-man-preserve-their-language-then-he-tried-to-sell-it-back-to-them/ar-AAY27OC>
"STANDING ROCK INDIAN RESERVATION, S.D. — Ray Taken Alive had been fighting for
this moment for two years: At his urging, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribal
Council was about to take the rare and severe step of banishing a nonprofit
organization from the tribe’s land.
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.
On May 3, the tribal council voted nearly unanimously to banish the Lakota
Language Consortium — along with its co-founder Wilhelm Meya and its head
linguist, Jan Ullrich — from setting foot on the reservation. What the council
took into consideration wasn’t just the organization’s dealings with the
Standing Rock Sioux; it turned out at least three other tribes had also raised
concerns about Meya, saying he broke agreements over how to use recordings,
language materials and historical records, or used them without permission."
Via Diane A.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
