Draft:Delores Taken Alive

Hiŋháŋ Sná Wíŋ (September 29, 1933 - August 29, 2020), also known as Delores Taken Alive, was a Lakota educator, radio host, and language specialist.

Biography
Taken Alive was born on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, the descendant of survivors of the Wounded Knee Massacre. She began working at a Head Start program in Little Eagle, South Dakota where she worked for thirty years before she began teaching the Lakota language at McLaughlin High School.

Lakota language revitalization work
As the number of first-language Lakota speaker dwindled, Taken Alive began working with Czech linguist Jan Ullrich (linguist) in 2005. She recorded both words and stories for the Lakota Language Consortium's dictionary, as well as reviewing new entries, as part of a program between LLC and Lakota elders that paid speakers up to $50 per hour, in exchange for exclusive publication rights.

She also taught weekly classes at Sitting Bull College from 2017 to 2018; recordings of both her classes and the 48 episodes of her weekly radio show, It’s Good to Speak Lakota, have provided hundreds of hours of fluent Lakota speech. The recorded collection is the largest of its kind in the Lakota language resources corpus at Standing Rock Indian Reservation.

Delores Taken Alive died from COVID-19 in 2020 at age 86. She was one of at least three Lakota language revitalization instructors from Sitting Bull College, including Paulette High Elk and Richard Ramsey, to die of COVID-19 in 2020.

Legacy
In 2023, Taken Alive was awarded the Ken Hale Prize by the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA).

Copyright lawsuit
Taken Alive's grandson, Ray Taken Alive, who is also a Lakota language instructor, has been involved in litigation against LLC since the death of his grandmother. After requesting recordings of Delores Taken Alive, he learned that the organization retained "unrestricted permission to copyright" and publish, according to the agreement signed by Taken Alive in 2005. LLC filed a lawsuit against Ray Taken Alive for copyright infringement. In May 2023, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe voted to ban the consortium's representatives from the reservation.