The taking never ended. It changed shape.
It used to be soldiers and schoolrooms. Now it’s a terms-of-service checkbox. An elder tells a story to a tablet, and the story rides up to a server she will never see, and it comes back down as somebody else’s product. Nobody calls that taking. They call it the cloud.
So the deal on the table looks like this: digitize your culture and surrender it, or keep it off the machines and watch it thin out, one funeral at a time. Two options. Both endings written by someone else.
First, the record.
It was policy. And it was recent.
408
federal Indian boarding schools, across more than 37 states, from 1819 to 1969. Not ancient history. 1969.
U.S. Department of the Interior, Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, 2022.
at least973
Native children died in that system. That is the government’s own count, and the government calls it a floor, not a total. The counting is not finished.
U.S. Department of the Interior, Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report, Vol. II, 2024 (doi.gov).
“Kill the Indian, Save the Man.”
That was the plan, in the planner’s own words. Inside those schools, children “were not allowed to speak their own languages, even between each other.”
R. H. Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1892; U.S. Department of the Interior findings (background).
50–90%
of the world’s roughly 7,000 languages are projected to be severely endangered or gone by 2100. Nobody knows where in that range we’ll land. Most Indigenous languages of the Americas are already classified as critically endangered.
Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages, 2011; UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger.
And the fix on offer is always the same: put it online, trust the cloud. As if the wire even reaches you.
U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey.
And when the wire does reach you, it takes. In the 1990s, members of the Havasupai Tribe gave blood for a diabetes study. The samples were later used for unrelated genetic research no one had consented to.
Indigenous people already wrote the rules for this. The CARE Principles. OCAP. The TK Labels. They exist because “open data” ignores power and history, and they all say one plain thing: the community alone decides how its knowledge is stored, used, and shared.
Most software was never built to follow those rules.
First Nations Information Governance Centre (fnigc.ca); Global Indigenous Data Alliance (gida-global.org); Local Contexts (localcontexts.org).
There is a third way. We built it.
keeps your technology fully sovereign. So all of your People can rediscover what 
means in your language, while hearing a 
and reconnecting with 
, all in one place. Anytime, anywhere.
Every other app sends your culture up to a company’s cloud. POCA keeps it home.
The whole thing fits on one card. Stories, language, calendar, land, ceremony, on a microSD card your community owns and holds. We call it the PAC. Ordinary tablets read it.
The core apps have no internet permission. That is not a promise buried in a privacy policy; the permission does not exist. Nothing is uploaded, because there is nowhere to upload it.
You own everything on the card. POCA owns the code, and the code is free. Open source, Apache 2.0. Read it. Audit it. Fork it and re-center it on your own community.
Your community’s own key cryptographically signs what goes on the card, so you know it came from your people and no one else. The design puts CARE, OCAP, and the TK Labels to work. Sacred and ceremonial material carries the access rules your community sets.
It runs on cheap tablets, including ones other people threw away. We took one discarded tablet and brought it back to life running POCA. One tablet so far. A proof, not a product line. But it proves the machine your culture lives on doesn’t have to be new, and doesn’t have to be theirs.
Nine apps, named in the old languages.
Amoxtli “book”
the stories
A living archive of cultural memory.
Tlato “word, speech”
the language
A word a day, back in daily mouths.
Metztli “moon”
the calendar
The year as your people counted it. Ceremony lands on the day it belongs to.
Tlalli “earth”
the land
The places and their first names. A treaty, a river, a trailhead an hour from home.
Ollin “movement”
ceremony and community
Past, present and future cultural consciousness lives here.
Cualli “good, well-being”
well-being
Mindfulness, medicine, and a hand to reach for in an emergency.
Cuilo “to paint, to write”
making
Paint, music, writing. Culture is not only kept. It gets made.
Teo “sacred”
the sacred
Enter with honesty. Leave with what you can carry.
Xochi “flower”
the one you talk to
Ask, and it answers from your card. The question never leaves the device.
Built with communities, not for them.
Peoples Open Codex Alliance is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The software is free, and it stays free. Nothing on the card is ours to see, sell, or study.
If you want POCA for your People, or you want to help keep it independent, write to us.
info@projectpoca.org github.com/projectpoca @projectpoca
Peoples Open Codex Alliance · EIN (Charity ID) 41-5358938 · 1111 6th Ave, Ste 550 #257606, San Diego, CA 92101