Last full-blooded Eyak, and fluent speaker of native Alaskan language, dies at 89

Source: AP

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) - Marie Smith Jones, the last full-blooded Eyak and fluent speaker of her native language, has died. She was 89. Jones died peacefully in her sleep Monday at her home in Anchorage. She was found by a friend, said daughter Bernice Galloway, who lives in Albuquerque, N.M.

"To the best of our knowledge she was the last full-blooded Eyak alive," Galloway said Tuesday.

Jones also was the last person alive who was fluent in Eyak, a branch of the Athabaskan Indian family of languages, said Michael Krauss, a linguist and professor emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who collaborated with Jones for years in an effort to preserve the Eyak language. "With her death, the Eyak language becomes extinct," Krauss said.

Jones was honorary chief of the Eyak Nation. The Eyak ancestral homeland runs along 300 miles of the Gulf of Alaska from Prince William Sound, near the fishing village of Cordova, eastward across the Copper River Delta to the town of Yakutat. By the 21st century, only about 50 Eyaks remained, according to the university's Alaska Native Language Center, which Krauss directs. Jones was a survivor from the start, her daughter said. Many of her siblings died young when smallpox and influenza tore through the Eyak Nation of south-central Alaska, "wiping out just about everyone but her family," Galloway said.



On the Net:

Alaska Native Language Center: http://www.uaf.edu/anlc/


Read more: http://www.komotv.com/news/local/14026677.html

She's not a fullblood native American but she's the only person left who can speak the language fluently. I think the article said she's in her late eighties or early nineties.

a man here, Peter Kalifornsky, worked real hard to preserve his language, writing stories and giving the words to the Smithsonian I believe it was. Or maybe the UA or the National Archives. Its preserved and people are trying to learn it. Languages up here are the hardest sounding things ever. I love to hear them.

RIP Marie Smith Jones.

with her a way of life, wisdom of a people is lost.
What can we collectively do as a society to honor and correct the wrongs to so many peoples?

Article 13
1. Indigenous peoples have the right to revitalize, use, develop and transmit to future generations their histories, languages, oral traditions, philosophies, writing systems and literatures, and to designate and retain their own names for communities, places and persons.
2. States shall take effective measures to ensure that this right is protected and also to ensure that indigenous peoples can understand and be understood in political, legal and administrative proceedings, where necessary through the provision of interpretation or by other appropriate means.

United Nations Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples

Adopted by General Assembly Resolution 61/295 on 13 September 2007

http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/en/drip.html

Thank you, Mrs. Marie Smith Jones...

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when we stop talking "pedigree" when referring to Native people.

I'm not Indian. So why would I care how they define themselves. And was this not imposed on them by white men to further define them?

They don't necessarily have to be 100% Eyak to carry it on.