Borderland

A small item in the paper earlier this week quietly announced the death of Chief Marie Smith Jones, the last native speaker of the Eyak language. Eyak is one of nearly 20 Alaskan Native languages, and the first to become extinct.

Jones was chief of the Eyak Nation, a people whose ancestral homeland runs along 300 miles of the Gulf of Alaska from Prince William Sound, near the fishing village of Cordova, and stretches east across the Copper River Delta to the town of Yakutat. Presently, according to the Alaska Native Language Center, only about 50 Eyaks remain.

After her older sister died several years ago, Jones became the last remaining speaker of her language. None of Marie Jones’ children learned Eyak because, as her daughter explained, “they grew up at a time when it was considered wrong to speak anything but English.”

Jones became an activist, and spoke at the United Nations on the importance of indigenous languages. She also became an environmentalist, lobbying against the timber harvesting practices of her own village corporation. Michael Krauss, director of the Alaska Native Language Center, worked with Jones. He said that Jones, being the last native speaker of her language, bore her tragic mantle with great dignity, grace and spirit. Krauss and Jones worked to compile an Eyak dictionary.

It should probably not be surprising that the subject of endangered languages is controversial. One view holds that the extinction of languages is a tragic loss because languages are a window into unique ways of knowing, and from them we can learn more about the values, histories, and local knowledge of peoples who may not have left a written account of their experience. The opposing view is that we should, in fact, encourage language extinction to promote clearer communication around the world. The question of whether either view is right becomes problematic when we consider that pressure to abandon indigenous languages comes from within, as well as from outside native language-speaking communities.

Languages are lost when they are no longer spoken in the home or taught to the children. And the reasons why that happens are a part of the cultural matrix of economic forces and traditional values that exists in communities where cultures meet, and one language is dominant. Language loss isn’t always the result of official policy or compulsion. Minority language speakers may, for instance, feel that their children would gain an advantage by learning the dominant language.

It’s happening at an accelerating pace. According to Vanishing Voices (Nettle & Romaine, 2000), there are now about 6,000 languages, spoken by just 10 percent of the people on earth. The other 90 percent of the world’s population use about 100 languages. Michael Krauss believes that there may be as few as 600 languages that can be regarded as having a “safe” future, based on whether they have at least 100,000 speakers. Extinction is a possibility for the vast majority of the world’s languages, he believes.

A 1992 interview with Marie Smith Jones and Dune Lankard, founder of the Eyak Preservation Council illustrates how the Eyak language was lost. They tell about how the arrival of fish canneries on the Copper River Delta at the turn of the 20th century disrupted fish runs, and how the labor force, hired from outside the community, introduced the community to alcohol and opium. The subsequent arrival of the railroad, schools, the influenza epidemic, statehood, and the establishment of Native Corporations in the 1970′s, which replaced aboriginal land claims in exchange for corporate ownership rights, presented the Eyak people with an overwhelming series of challenges to their cultural integrity.

Said Lankard:

Incorporating the land and its people made us all shareholders of the land. You look out over the horizon and you see all this wonderful land that we have lived on and made our living on for thousands of generations. But when you become a shareholder, which means that you have ownership in the land, it changes your perspective on how you look at that land. Instead of seeing beautiful forests, you see acres and acres of timber. Instead of seeing beautiful mountains, you see mines. You look at everything as a valuable resource rather than as a valuable way of life.

My Alaska Native students refer to their native languages, Koyukon, Tanana, Gwich’in, Inupiaq, and Yup’ik as ‘my language’ when they talk about their own native language, even if they don’t speak it. Their grandparents still use it sometimes, and it tells them important things about who they are. They want to hang onto that.

In a world of global markets, how do we construct enduring identities for ourselves? We don’t much like to think about what we give up in exchange for all of that prosperity.

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A longer Associated Press article, and an older more comprehensive story in the Anchorage Daily News provide more details about Marie Smith Jones.