Andi

NARF (native american rights fund)

AISES (advancing indigenous people in stem)

NIWRC (national indigenous women’s resource center)

PWNA (partnership with native americans)

COPE (community outreach and patient empowerment)

the association on american indian affairs

first nations development institute

american indian college fund

CARE (diné citizens against ruining our environment)

hopa mountain

indigenous values initiative

native american disability law center

people’s partner for community development 

@mrchicsaraleo @britomartis @el-shab-hussein @paintedwiththecolorsofthewind @stephanemiroux

this is vile

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. 

This isn’t about books. This is about an organization founded and led by two white men using the work of indigenous peoples to create resources for their endangered languages and then not giving those people access to those resources. It’s about them literally copywriting the words of Elders and other indigenous people and refusing to let their tribes use them.

People are fighting to have access to the recordings that deceased loved ones gave to this organization and being denied because those recordings are copywrited. These men are literally taking aspects of these communities and saying, “these are ours now, no one else can use them, not even the people who shared them with us.”

And it’s not just one or two people who have issues with this. It’s not just one tribe. It’s multiple accounts of this organization and its founders violating the boundaries of both individuals and tribes and taking what wasn’t theirs to take.

I have to assume that in the fullness of time, at least once, a mouse has used a mushroom as an umbrella.

Also! Bonus frog!