Her name is Marie Smith. She is 87 years old and lives in Anchorage, Alaska. And she is the last person alive who can speak fluent Eyak, which was once shared by a whole Indian people and is now on the verge of extinction. Years ago she confessed, in English, to an Associated Press journalist: “It’s horrible to be alone”. The only person who Marie can talk to in Eyak – since the death of her sister, years ago – is linguist Michael Krauss, who has been working with this native language of Alaska in an attempt to save it since the sixties.
Eyak, historically spoken in south-central Alaska around the mouth of the Copper River, is part of one of the branches of the family of native American languages Na-dena. At the end of the nineteenth century the Eyak people, a group that was always relatively small, succumbed to the pressures of neighbors living along the Gulf of Alaska. In particular from the Tlingit: their expansion led to a kind of peaceful fusion of the two cultures. The Tlingit language was preferred by the new mixed generations over Eyak: a voluntary process.
Later the European colonizers arrived to exploit the salmon fishing, bringing with them alcohol and diseases and depriving the Eyak of their source of income (which was in fact salmon). In 1900 there were already only about sixty Eyak. And to top it all off the American government decided that native languages were not to be used any longer.
The Eyak village currently occupies a small area in the city of Cordova. Marie Smith is a symbol: she is not just involved in a cultural battle to save her language and the identity of her people (there are about fifty Eyak today), she is also involved in an environmental battle to defend the integrity of her mother land from those who want to exploit the natural resources, damaging the habitat of the salmon. A habitat that was already damaged by the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, when the oil tanker struck a reef in the Prince William Sound and released more than 38 million liters of petroleum into Alaskan waters.
The protection of language and culture are tied to the protection of the land and vice versa.
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