[Ads-l] Lakota elders helped a white man preserve their language. Then he tried to sell it back to them.

[Mark Mandel]

*Lakota elders helped a white man preserve their language.
<https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/native-american-language-preservation-rcna31396>*
*Then he tried to sell it back to them.
<https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/native-american-language-preservation-rcna31396>*
NBC News
*June 3, 2022, 7:00 AM EDT / Updated June 3, 2022, 4:08 PM EDT*
By Graham Lee Brewer
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.

*click headline for story*

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