As Covid we couldn’t talk to elders anymore to work on our language so I deep dived into our texts, I spent many many hours transcribing, transliterating, translating but also running into firewalls, copyrights, asking for permission, I thought wtf is this. This is our language.

These are our resources. Then I realized that the Lakota Language Consortium had a bunch of our data but were editing and reorganizing our data in their orthography then copyrighting it and selling it back to us. But it’s “to save the language.” Now their push is

to record elders with their horrible waiver-basically taking all rights from the elders “while there’s still time.” We need to assert our Data Sovereignty, reclaim our data, push out the exploiters, and forge a new path controlled and led by us.

You can tell they have our data because of the example sentences in their dictionaries. I’d be working on vague texts and those exact sentences would be in there. It troubled and troubles me. They say everything is corpus based-ie= our data. They do not attribute

leaving huge problems with dialect, and not following our traditional protocols of obagi, wopila, permission, attribution. I’ve been called radical, miserable, negative, criticizing language revitalization but damn this is bs, theft, gate keeping, idk whatever you wanna call it.

What they do may be “legal” in the western sense but in the Lakota sense, it’s wrong and just another form of colonization.

Their waiver. #NeverSignThese