Yurok tribal elder Archie Thompson has died:
Archie Thompson, the oldest living member of California’s Yurok tribe and the last known active speaker raised in the tribal language, has died. He was 93.
Thompson died March 26 at a Crescent City, Calif., hospital after an apparent stroke, according to his daughter Sherry O’Rourke.
“It’s our language that truly gives us our identity as Yurok people,” said Thomas P. O’Rourke Sr., the tribal chairman and Thompson’s son-in-law. “He is very much responsible for preserving not just a way of life, but the identity of a people.”
Thompson was one of a handful of remaining full-blooded members of the Yurok tribe, which numbers nearly 6,000 members and is California’s largest.. He was also the last of about 20 elders who helped revitalize the language over the last few decades, after academics in the 1990s predicted it would be extinct by 2010.
He made recordings of the language that were archived by UC Berkeley linguists and the tribe, spent hours helping to teach Yurok in community and school classrooms, and welcomed apprentice speakers to probe his knowledge.
It paid off: A recent tally by the tribe’s language program indicated there are more than 300 basic Yurok speakers, 60 with intermediate skills, 37 who are advanced and 17 who are considered conversationally fluent.
Read the whole thing. An extraordinary individual.
