Eyak language dies with its last speaker--or does it?

From the Alaska Public Radio Network: Eyak language dies with its last speaker. "The last traditional speaker of the Eyak language died yesterday, making the language extinct. Eyak Chief Marie Smith Jones was 89 years old. She was the last person to have learned the language the traditional way, taught as a child from her parents." (click on the icon at the bottom of the story to listen to the full report).

The loss of native languages is of course by no means unique to the northwest. See this list of extinct languages, or even more heartbreaking this list of recently extinct languages with (in many cases) the date of death of the last speaker.

But as is often the case with these maudling media stories, there is more here than meets the ear. Marie Smith Jones spent some of her last decades working with linguist Michael Krauss to record and document the Eyak language, and the language is being taught to Eyak youth through The Eyak Language Preservation Project. This Seattle Times obituary has additional information about Marie Smith Jones and the Eyak.

Map from the Alaska Native Language Center

(Most of the links above are lifted from this Metafilter post.)

The Whale Hunt / A storytelling experiment / by Jonathan Harris

"In May 2007, I spent nine days living with a family of Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost settlement in the United States . . . I documented the entire experience with a plodding sequence of 3,214 photographs, beginning with the taxi ride to Newark airport, and ending with the butchering of the second whale, seven days later. The photographs were taken at five-minute intervals, even while sleeping (using a chronometer), establishing a constant 'photographic heartbeat'."

The Whale Hunt / A storytelling experiment / by Jonathan Harris

This site gets more intriguing the more time you spend there. Harris tells the story of a trip to Barrow Alaska to tag along on a whale hunt. Aside from a brief statement, the story is told entirely through a series of photographs. What makes it work is the innovative website and the way the photographs are presented--explained here.

Though it would be much more difficult, one could use some of these ideas to organize and display a large collection of historic photographs such as the Curtis photographs.