“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.
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.
Native Americans have been mined for financial benefit and academic accolades for centuries. Information collected on Native Americans has rarely been taken with their consent or been used to serve their communities, whether through research done on Indigenous remains robbed from gravesites or on blood samples used without permission. Still, there are Lakota people who support what the consortium is doing: They say preserving the endangered language is paramount.
This work has been lucrative for Meya, who started the Lakota Language Consortium in Indiana in the early 2000s.
In tax filings for 2020, Meya reported an annual salary of about $210,000 from his two nonprofit groups, according to tax disclosure documents. That kind of money bothers some in the Native American communities he’s worked in; on the Standing Rock reservation, the median income is just over $40,000.
Meya’s organizations have received more than $3.5 million in federal grants over the past 15 years for language revitalization projects with tribes across the country, records show. The Department of Health and Human Services alone has paid the Lakota Language Consortium nearly $1 million to create some of the textbooks the organization sells for $40 to $50 apiece.
several Indigenous academics, legal experts and tribal leaders say the consortium is asserting control over more than the teaching materials it makes; it’s the community-specific information and tribal history that’s contained within the books. Some of the words and phrases in the consortium’s materials have never been recorded or transcribed before, and charging a marginalized community any fee for them is unethical, the experts said.
Makalika Naholowa’a, a Native Hawaiian attorney and the executive director at the Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation, said when organizations that trade in Indigenous data don’t freely share that information with the communities they gather it from, they are akin to miners or loggers, taking a valuable resource and selling it to whoever wants it.
“Data is the new oil,” she said.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/native-american-language-preservation-rcna31396