NBC News
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. More
Scalp him!
If elizabeth warren had a brother.
I mean… who else would waste time and money on something no one cares about?
“Hey, Jimmy, you are a Lakota! How do you say moon?”
“You got any cigarettes?”
I do not believe in severe, degrading punishments; I believe this person should be allowed to explore and to capture and to cook his own food in a portion of Lakota tribal lands, 25 sq. miles of the SW corner of North Dakota for three months: 1 Dec to 28 Feb.
‘Ray Taken Alive’?
reminds me of …
Scenario #1
Indian Brave: “tell me, oh wise Chief, how do you come up w/ our names?”
Indian Chief: “I look at the signs in the land. when I see a horse crossing the Plain, I see ‘Horse Running’. when I see a hawk hunting down a dove, I see ‘Hawk Hunting’ … why do you ask, ‘Two Deers Fucking’?”
Scenario #2
Paleface addressing large, muscular, impressive Indian Brave: “so what is your name?”
Indian brave: “Delicate Sweet Flower”
Paleface: ” ‘Delicate Sweet Flower’? who in the world would give a big, burly guy like you a name like that?”
Indian Brave: “Chief Smashed Head”
Preserve your own language and don’t trust non profits that don’t give away their money.
Perhaps the Lakota need a good copyright lawyer to regain control over their own language. Maybe they could come to a sharing agreement with the profitable non-profit that could make their language available to more tribal members.
I don’t like the non-profit where the CEO takes a $200,000 salary for a government grant to preserve threatened language then turns around and sells the proceeds back to those who originated the language.
First off: Government grants? Preserve the Lakota language? Who givesash. Waste of taxpayer money. If the Lakotas wanted to do this, they should have done it themselves.
Beyond that: A person who does the work of putting something together — researching, compiling, organizing — even something that is merely a list (this is vastly more) gets to have the copyright on that work. No different from writing a book and then having someone claim that the “words used” belong to everyone who speaks that language.