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.

Jones was a survivor from the start, her daughter said. Many of her siblings died young when smallpox and influenza tore through the Eyak Nation of south-central Alaska, "wiping out just about everyone but her family," Galloway said.

"She was a woman who faced incredible adversity in her life and overcame it," Galloway said. "She was about as tenacious as you can get."

Jones was born in Cordova on May 14, 1918, and grew up on Eyak Lake, where her family had a homestead. She married Oregon fisherman William F. Smith on May 5, 1948. He worked his way up the coast and put down roots in Alaska when he reached Cordova and met her mother, Galloway said.

The couple had nine children, seven of whom are still alive. None of them learned Eyak because they grew up at a time when it was considered wrong to speak anything but English, Galloway said.

Jones moved to Anchorage in the early 1970s to be closer to her children. She struggled with alcoholism until she was in her early 50s, and quit drinking, Galloway said.

Jones twice spoke at the United Nations on peace and the importance of indigenous languages, Galloway said. She also became active in environmental issues.

"There was a transformation of our mother into a very pro-active, politically active individual," Galloway said.

Krauss described Jones as a "wonderfully ordinary Eyak lady who lived to a ripe old age not because of an easy life but because of a rather hard life, coming up and surviving as an Eyak in the 20th century."

For the last 15 years, Krauss said, Jones was the last of her kind.

"That was a tragic mantle that she bore with great dignity, grace and spirit," he said.

With Jones' help, Krauss compiled an Eyak dictionary and grammar. Jones, her sister and a cousin told him Eyak tales that were made into a book.

She wanted a written record of the language so future generations would have the chance to resurrect it, Krauss said.

Nearly 20 native Alaskan languages are at risk of becoming extinct, he said.

"This is the beginning of the end unless we do something," Krauss said. "Alaska Native languages are the intellectual heritage of this part of the world. It is unique to us and if we lose them we lose what is unique to Alaska."

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On the Net:

Alaska Native Language Center: http://www.uaf.edu/anlc/


HERE

 

In this 2001 photo, Chief Marie Smith Jones is photographed at a powwow in Chickaloon, Alaska.  all rights reserved. Photographer's name not given.    HERE