Last native Eyak speaker dead at 89

By MARY PEMBERTON, Associated Press Writer Wed Jan 23, 4:03 AM ET

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - 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.