She drank like a fish and smoked like a chimney.
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| Marie: the last Eyak on earth |
But Marie Smith Jones lived to the ripe old age of 89 and when she died, she left the world a poorer place.
For she had a gift that was possessed by no one else on earth. Marie was the world’s last speaker of Eyak - a language that is now, with her death in 2008, extinct.
Marie grew up in the Eyak ancestral homeland - a 300 mile stretch of remote coastland in the Gulf of Alaska. She spent her early years playing in the muddy sands of the Copper River delta, close to Prince William Sound.
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| Marie's homeland: Copper River |
The Eyak were a mysterious people whose history is poorly documented. The neighbouring Chugach people called them Ungalarmiut, meaning ‘the people living to your left as you face the ocean.’
In the 18th century, they came under increasing pressure from more powerful tribal groups and were pushed into ever-remoter territory. This, coupled with diseases introduced by American settlers, contributed to their decline.
In 1880, the population of one of their principal villages, Alaganik, was recorded at 117; by 1890 it had declined to 48.
In 1933, when Marie was in her early teens, there were just 38 Eyak-speakers left. Outsiders suddenly realised that their unique language needed to be recorded before it was too late.
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| Elderly Eyak: no future |
North American and European academics began to show up with tape recorders, anxious to catch what they could of this extraordinary language.
It was incredibly rich in adjectives. There was a special word for the silky mud that squished between Marie’s toes when she crossed the Copper River delta. It was c'a.
The splintered driftwood that she found on the shoreline was called 'u'l, but it had a different name if it was not broken.
If someone from another tribe asked Marie what she was called, she would introduce herself by her native name, Udachkuqax a'a'ch, which means ‘a sound that calls people from afar’.
In the early years of the 20th century, the majority of Eyak people were fishermen, like Marie’s father. Eyak vocabulary was rich in words for marine life, with special words for red abalone, black abalone, ribbon weed and tubular kelp, drag nets and different sizes of rope.
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| Cordova: the Eyak capital: 'Anyone here speak Eyak?' |
One word, demexch, meant a treacherous spot in the ice over a body of water: a foolish place to walk, but a good one to squat beside with a fishing spear.
Marie had little interest in the Eyak language when she was young. She married a white man from Oregan, William Smith, moved away and brought up nine children.
She tried to teach them a few Eyak words but they had absolutely no interest in learning a language that so few people spoke. For Marie, Eyak increasingly became a language for talking to herself,
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| Eyak land: a wild place of rugged beauty |
When her older sister died in the 1990s, she suddenly realized that she was the last of a line: she became a vigorous activist, campaigning for Eyak burial grounds, Eyak history and, of course, its unique language.
She realized that the near-death of the spoken language inevitably spelled the death of Eyak culture. When she was a small girl, Marie had been taught stories of a mischievous Creator-Raven, of a magical loon and of tiny men who wielded fish-speaks no bigger than a matchstick.
Now, with her as the sole-surviving Eyak, many of these stories were irrevocably lost.
Marie had scant regard for academics, but there was one who she respected deeply. Michael Krauss of the University of Alaska had formed a passionate interest in Eyak and persuaded Marie to cooperate with him to produce an Eyak grammar and dictionary.
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| Boa Sr: the last speaker of Bo |
Shortly before her death, Marie was asked how she felt about the inevitable extinction of her language. She answered with another question: ‘How would you feel if your baby died?’
According to National Geographic, a language dies every 14 days, which means that by the end of this century almost half of the world’s 7,000 languages will be extinct.
Only last year, the world’s last speaker of Bo - an ancient language from the Andaman Islands that had existed for more than 70,000 years - went to her grave.
And in Mexico, there are only two remaining speakers of Ayapaneco, another ancient tongue.
The two men live just 500 metres from each other.
Unfortunately, they are not on speaking terms.
My latest book, Wolfram: The Boy Who Went to War is available here, price £11.40. The American edition will be published in October.
'Idiosyncratic and utterly fascinating... an extraordinary tale of hardship, horror and amazing good fortune' James Delingpole, The Daily Mail
'Engaging, page-turning and thought-provoking... a fascinating subject' Victoria Hislop
