Standing Rock to sue to gain Lakota language materials

Eugene “Ray” Taken Alive has spent the better part of four years in an ongoing backand forth legal battle against the Lakota Language Consortium, a language conservation program that his late grandmother Delores Taken Alive supported.

Taken Alive, a citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, isn’t alone in his battle – the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe is now preparing to launch its own lawsuit against the consortium, which it banned from its lands in 2022.

On Oct. 10, the tribal council approved a resolution to sue the company in order to gain any recordings or derivative works of tribal citizens obtained by the Lakota Language Consortium.

Janet Alkire, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe chairwoman, declined to comment on the matter.

The Lakota Language Consortium was founded by two non-Native people, Jan Ullrich and Wilhelm Meya. The company originally focused on the Lakota language, Lak.ótiyapi, but has now expanded to include Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe language), Apsáalooke (Crow Language), the Northern Cheyenne dialect/ language, the Apache language, Dinju Zhuh K’yuu (Gwich’in language) and Quechua.

The consortium produces a variety of language learning materials, including a dictionary app, a Lakota keyboard for smartphones, a physical dictionary, flashcards, picture books and children’s books. All of these materials are designed to be taught in classrooms, and the company even supplies a teaching guide of its own.

While it was founded by non-Native people, the consortium’s board of directors includes several Oceti Sakowin people, and until recently was led by Executive Director Alex Fire Thunder, Oglala Lakota, who produces a Lakota language podcast.

The consortium did not respond to requests for comment.

Founder and linguistic director Jan Ullrich worked with Taken Alive’s grandmother, Delores, and other Hunkpapa Lakota elders to develop the initial Lakota Language Dictionary. Ullrich began working with Delores in 2005.

Initially, the tribe viewed the consortium’s work as a means of revitalizing the Lakota language, Taken Alive said. But in time, the partnership deteriorated.

The tribe voted to ban the company, as well as Meya and Ullrich, from its lands in North Dakota and South Dakota in May 2022. The decision to ban the consortium was, in part, triggered by its treatment of Taken Alive.

A majority of the company’s Lakota language materials came from the tribe and were recorded on tribal land, Taken Alive said, particularly from his grandmother Delores Taken Alive.

Taken Alive said the consortium has exploited the tribe and its elders.

In the past three years, Taken Alive said, the consortium has threatened him with a million-dollar lawsuit and cease and desist letters and published press releases about him, as well as attempted to strip him and his wife of their South Dakota teaching licenses.

A brewing conflict

Delores Taken Alive, born in 1933, was a fluent Lakota speaker and Standing Rock elder who was passionate about preserving the Lakota language. She provided a wealth of information on the Lakota language to her people.

Ray Taken Alive and his grandmother spent countless hours discussing the Lakota language, looking at language books, attending conferences and more.

In August 2020, after Delores died, Taken Alive sought out recordings of his grandmother speaking the Lakota language.

“I wanted to hear all of the recordings I could,” he said. “Maybe I’d missed something, or maybe she gave me a message and I missed it.”

He received recordings from the local tribal radio station, but hit a roadblock when attempting to work with the consortium.

Taken Alive reached out to Ullrich, who told Taken Alive he couldn’t share the recordings without a grant.

“That was a huge red flag for me,” Taken Alive said. “I’m sitting here grieving my grandmother and he’s telling me he’s keeping a piece of her from me. Why would you need (money) to give someone recordings of their grandmother speaking?”

After this incident, Taken Alive began to question who the consortium was serving, and he suspected it wasn’t the Lakota people.

A majority of the materials gathered by the consortium came from Standing Rock elders on the Standing Rock Reservation.

So he began making his own materials using elders in the community, not relying on anything produced by the consortium, he said. He’d post daily language lessons to his Facebook page sharing lessons his grandmother had taught him.

Not long after, he was hit with a copyright infringement notice.

A language itself cannot be copyrighted; however, the materials produced about a language can be copyrighted. The consortium is the sole owner of its language education materials, despite the involvement of Standing Rock tribal citizens’ involvement in producing those materials.

“I knew then that something really weird was going on here,” Taken Alive said. “To tell a Lakota person they can’t speak their language? That was traumatic. Why do I have to ask this corporation four or five states away in Indiana if I can use my ancestral Lakota language?”

In 2021, at the National Indian Education Association conference in Omaha, Taken Alive and Meya engaged in a verbal altercation, which was caught on video, and served as part of the consortium’s complaint against him to the South Dakota Board of Education.

The consortium fires back

In March 2023, the consortium filed a complaint against Taken Alive and his wife Lisa Bordeaux Taken Alive, Sicangu Lakota, with the South Dakota Board of Education’s ethics board.

Taken Alive is a Lakota language teacher at McLaughlin High School in South Dakota and his wife is the principal of McLaughlin High School.

McLaughlin is a town on the South Dakota side of the Standing Rock Reservation, which straddles the North Dakota-South Dakota border.

Alex Fire Thunder (Oglala Lakota and the consortium’s former executive director), Wilhelm Meya and Jan Ullrich filed the complaint against the Taken Alive family on the basis that the two had “embarked on an unrelenting and malicious campaign to defame the Lakota Language Consortium, Alex Fire Thunder, Wilhelm Meya and Jan Ullrich.”

The consortium claimed it and its members are part of the McLaughlin School District community where the Taken Alives are employed.

The Taken Alives received letters of support from nine tribes – eight of the nine tribes in South Dakota and one tribe in North Dakota, including the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, Rosebud Sioux Tribe, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe, Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, Yankton Sioux Tribe and Spirit Lake Oyate in North Dakota.

“Mr and Mrs. Taken Alive cannot be silenced by those who wish to monopolize and monetize the Lakota language,” the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe said in its letter of support. The Oglala Sioux Tribe did not offer a letter in support of the two and has previously supported the consortium, which works with three schools on the Pine Ridge Reservation. On June 28, 2023, the Taken Alives spoke in their own defense before the South Dakota Board of Education, which ruled in their favor and allowed them to keep their teaching licenses. A shared vision Taken Alive, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the Lakota Language Consortium all agree preserving the Lakota language is of the utmost importance. The issue is the tribe doesn’t agree with the approach the consortium has taken.

According to the consortium website, the organization “envisions a day when the Lakota language is once again spoken in every Lakota household – where every Lakota parent has the resources and opportunity to speak Lakota daily – where Lakota people are developing and moving forward with Lak.ótiyapi and growing the language in new and profound ways.” The website also notes that the consortium is working to transfer ownership of language data to community archives in Standing Rock and Pine Ridge and plans to work with both tribes to create the tools and software to store, catalog and search the collection. “All data shall be permanently stored and owned by the Tribes,” the website says.

A majority of the consortium’s board of directors is made up of Native members, including Lakota members. Ullrich is the only member who is non-Native. In both the May 2022 resolution to ban the consortium and the recent resolution to pursue legal action, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe cites a desire to reclaim resources produced on its land with the assistance of its elders. The tribe also notes in the 2022 banishment resolution that all future external language efforts must fairly compensate those who supply language services. Taken Alive said he isn’t sure if his grandmother Delores was compensated for her work or how much. Sitting Bull College, a tribal college on the reservation, is working to create its own language materials and a new generation of fluent Lakota and Dakota speakers. The tribe wants Lakota/Dakota to be the first language of tribal citizens by 2045. Both Lakota and Dakota are the ancestral languages of citizens of the Standing Rock Reservation.

This story is co-published by the Rapid City Journal and ICT, a news partnership that covers In-

The post Standing Rock to sue to gain Lakota language materials first appeared on Native Sun News Today.

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