Lakota Language Consortium has asked the Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Court to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe over Lakota language recordings. The nonprofit is represented by attorney Jeffrey C. Nelson of mctlaw and Leroy V. LaPlante, Jr. of LaPlante Law Office.
The lawsuit claims Lakota Language Consortium breached consultant agreements and violated the Tribe’s 2015 Cultural Resource Code.
Lakota Language Consortium, however, makes three main points.
First, Lakota Language Consortium says the breach of contract claims are too old. The motion argues that the Tribe’s own law sets a six-year deadline for civil cases, and the contract claims fall outside that limit.
Second, the motion says the Tribe cannot use the 2015 Cultural Resource Code to sue over things that allegedly happened before the Code existed. The defendant argues the law was not written to apply backward in time.
Third, Lakota Language Consortium says the Tribe’s reading of the Cultural Resource Code goes too far. The Tribe argues that under the Code, the Tribe automatically owns every cultural story, recording, song, book, interview, or language project created by individual tribal members on the Reservation.
Lakota Language Consortium, however, says that individual tribal members should have the right to determine how their intellectual property is used. In this case, the speakers involved in the recordings voluntarily agreed to participate. The nonprofit says the speakers were paid, or offered payment, and gave permission for the recordings to be used in educational work.
Attorney Jeffrey Nelson says that dismissal would protect tribally owned cultural resources while also respecting the rights of individual tribal members to create, share, license, and sell their own work.
“The Tribe’s Cultural Resource Code can be interpreted to apply only to intellectual property that the Tribe already owns,” Nelson said in a press release from Lakota Language Consortium. “That way, it would not make every cultural item produced by tribal members subject to its restrictions, but at the same time, it would be very protective of tribal cultural resources.”
