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

[Jonathan Lighter]

Surely the Consortium can donate as many copies as the Lakota schools need?

And give the tribe a cut of the profits (if any).

You can't preserve a language through books, if people can't afford
access to them.

JL

JL

On Fri, Jun 10, 2022 at 3:01 PM Mark Mandel <markamandel at gmail.com> wrote:

> *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*
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org