The Fighting Eyak By Marilee Enge [[Anchorage Daily News | 22 January 2008]
*Editor's Note:This story was originally published August 22, 1993.* Marie Smith Jones, 75, holds hands with John Johnson, the Eyak historian, during a ceremony marking the bones repatriation.On the eve of the ceremony marking the repatriation of Eyak bones, Marie Smith Jones waits nervously in a Cordova home. The bones had been held at the Smithsonian Institution for more than 60 years. he day they were to bury the bones again on the shores of Eyak Lake, the sky was gray and clouds hung low on the dark green forested mountains that ring Cordova. The last Native speaker of the Eyak Indian language dressed herself in her beaded dance vest and headdress and waited nervously in a little borrowed house not far from where she'd spent her childhood. Marie Smith Jones, 75, had not slept well the night before and weariness was etched in her face. She would be an honored guest at the Russian Orthodox funeral for the unknown Eyak man. She chain-smoked, looking out the window at the mountains and the clouds. The day's weather was fitting, she said. In the old days, Orthodox Eyaks believed that God would lower the clouds so the ancestors could return and be near the living without frightening them. "I believe the ones that's gone are rejoicing their loved one is back here," she said. "We don't hear them. But the departed one hears them." The bones had rested in a vault at the Smithsonian Institution for more than 60 years. This summer, the Chugach regional Native corporation arranged to have them returned to Alaska and repatriated on Eyak Spit, a finger of land that juts into Eyak Lake near downtown Cordova. Similar reburials have taken place in Alaska, and across the Lower 48, as Native Americans take advantage of a new law requiring museums to return their ancestors' remains. It was an important day. Not only were the bones of the ancient Eyak receiving a formal funeral in his ancestral land after being torn from his resting place. But for the first time in recent memory, the tiny Eyak Nation, the most endangered Native group in Alaska, was at the center of a public event. A crowd of about 50 gathered. There were business people, artists, loggers, environmental activists, fishermen. A stern Russian Orthodox priest from Eklutna waved incense over the grave and performed last rites. Then Marie stepped forward. She grasped tightly the hand of John Johnson, the corporation historian who had arranged for the burial. The chief of the Eyaks had a message for her listeners. "I hope this is the healing of everything that has gone wrong," she said. "Last night in my dreams I heard that this man was a healer when he was alive." For Marie, too, it has been a time of healing. When her older sister, Sophie Borodkin, died a year and a half ago, the younger sibling found herself in a position of newfound, but lonely, celebrity. After spending her life in obscurity, and much of it in an alcoholic haze, she had now become someone unique and important. The Last Eyak. And with that realization, she took on an additional role. The elderly woman who came of age in an era of cultural dislocation found a place for herself in the environmental movement, denouncing the Eyak corporation's clearcutting of the coastal rainforest. Days earlier, she had been on the front lines of a seagoing protest against logging in Orca Narrows, not far from Cordova. "Give the birds and the animals back their home," she now told the people gathered at the gravesite. "Let's show them that there is respect in the world and not hate. . . . Ask the loggers to put down their saws." Marie's life is a remarkable odyssey. She was born in 1918 in Old Town Cordova, into the last family that spoke the Eyak language. She recalls that there were only five Eyak families remaining when she was a child. Anthropologists believe the Eyaks never numbered more than 1,000, and by the turn of the century the population had shrunk to about 60. The Eyak language is most similar to Athabascan, but different enough to convince linguists that the Eyaks broke off some 3,500 years ago and lived in isolation. Their language provides clues to their origins that have not been decoded. For example, the Eyak word for "downriver" translates as "into the end of a closed area." In Ahtna, a dialect of Athabascan, the name for Eyak people is "uplanders." "Most places, downriver would be into the ocean, not a dead end," says Michael Krauss, a University of Alaska Fairbanks linguist who has made a thorough study of Eyak. He wonders at their mysterious history. "We'll never know where the Eyaks were all those years." Eyak legend suggests that more recently they migrated down the Copper River from the Interior to the Gulf of Alaska, where they were living when early Russian explorers encountered them. The Russians recognized that the Eyaks were a separate people, but that knowledge was lost on the Americans. It wasn't until the 1930s that a team of anthropologists visited the Eyaks of Cordova and recorded their existence. The study by Frederica de Laguna and Kaj Birket-Smith made the Eyaks the latest Native American tribe to be "discovered," according to Krauss. Just 200 years ago, Eyak territory stretched from Yakutat to Prince William Sound. But they were pushed west by the more aggressive Tlingits and assimilated into the relatively compatible Tlingit culture and language. Their last village was on Eyak Lake, a tiny settlement that was absorbed and obliterated this century by the new town of Cordova. As a young girl, Marie witnessed the final disintegration of her grandparents culture, weakened by white educators who forbid children to use their language, and by disease, alcohol and opium the latter brought to Cordova by Chinese cannery workers. Marie's parents, Minnie and Scar Stevens, carried on a subsistence tradition, but they also worked on the railroad and in the canneries, adapting to the new cash economy. Marie and Sophie escaped the fate of many young Natives of the time, who were separated from their families by missionaries and sent away to boarding school, never to speak their language again. The Stevens' two daughters stayed in Cordova and continued to speak their native tongue. (Their half-brother, Mike Duvall Minnie's son by a previous marriage was sent to a government boarding school.) Marie did not escape the prevailing attitude of government educators, however. At the school for Native children run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, students were punished for speaking their language, even in the schoolyard. There were three Eyak children in school, Marie recalled. The rest were Chugach Aleuts who made up the majority of Cordova's Native community. "You was in fear all the time wondering if you're doing right or wrong. Even if you breathe, you're just wondering if it's right or wrong," she says. "You can understand the fear we're all having." But at home in the Stevens' two-room cabin on Eyak Lake, the language lived. "My mother and dad always spoke Eyak at home," she says. "That was happy." White America had come to Cordova with a vengeance. Workers came to build the Copper River Railroad, then worked the rails transporting copper from the huge mine at Kennecott. Clam and salmon canneries thrived in Cordova, beginning in 1889. Many of the Eyaks' old customs had fallen away. Marie doesn't know just where her grandparents came from or if they had a traditional clan house. The practice of isolating young girls upon puberty had disappeared. Minnie Stevens was a devout Russian Orthodox. "By the time I grew up, they were more in a white-man world," Marie says. "The railroad and everything had started in Cordova. So I missed out on a lot of things." But some traditions died hard. As a child, Marie remembers her mother consulting with the village healer when the local doctor was unable to diagnose Marie's sickness. Marie had grown gravely ill, lying on a cushion on the cabin floor. The elderly shaman, a woman, went away for the night and returned in the morning. "She told my mother, 'You get rid of that mattress. She'll get well.' " Marie did indeed get well. Minnie later cut open the cushion and found that it was stuffed with horse hair. Marie believes she was allergic. According to Minnie and Scar, one of Marie's grandfathers was a shaman who could balance himself on a taut piece of twine tied between posts in their house. "He would swing himself back and forth when he went into his trance," Marie says firmly. "Mother and Dad won't tell me no lies." Minnie Stevens was so strict she would not allow Marie to play outside alone, her daughter recalls. But Marie worshipped her father. "When my dad was home, I was in seventh heaven. I loved being with him. The first few years of your life, until you're 10 years old, the father took you out in the woods and showed you how to take care of yourself if you ever got lost. In the summertime there's all kinds of food out there for us." She learned to eat wild celery, certain flowers and the sweet inner bark of the spruce tree. "I loved my childhood," she says. "I was free then." Her parents told her she first went fishing with the family when she was just 4 days old, secured in a cradle made out of the extra material from Scar's oilskin pants. Each year, the Stevens put up 500 silver salmon for the winter. They waited until September to avoid flies, with Scar hauling the net and Minnie cleaning fish. Then the fish were smoked. Berries were cold packed in seal oil to last the winter. Marie remembers walking up to the mountains in late summer to pick the last salmonberries. Blueberries remain her favorite. Minnie labored in the canneries and Marie joined her there when she was 12 years old. She was assigned to the can line, and says she sometimes turned a can over to jam the machinery when she grew tired. In later years, she dug clams and cleaned fish for the processors. Sophie, who was nine years older, married a Japanese man. They ran a boarding house in Cordova. Young Marie would stay with them in the winters while Minnie and Scar trapped. She remembers no strife between the Natives of Cordova and the white people. But conditions for the Eyak people in those years would have been "surely abominable," says Krauss. Cordova was a lawless frontier town with a dreadful alcoholism rate and institutionalized segregation, he says. The town was run by "Old Doc" William Chase, a self-taught physician and 14-term mayor. Chase was the most prolific collector of Eyak artifacts around, trading alcohol for carvings and cutting down a rare Eyak totem pole in one of the old villages, Krauss says. Chase's collection was eventually destroyed in a fire. It was Old Doc who exhumed the man from Eyak Spit and sent his bones to the Smithsonian. Marie left home at 17 she says it was a rebellion against her mother and married an Aleut man. That marriage didn't last, nor did her next one. "I was considered kind of wild," she says. "I had all the women in Cordova hating me because I got along with men. It was just the idea I felt more free with Dad than I did with Mom. I guess I just figured all women were the same. They were all strict." In the late '40s, she married her third husband, a white man named Bill Smith. They were married for 22 years and had nine children, two of whom died. Marie freely admits that she was an alcoholic much of her adult life. She says she began drinking as a young girl, when Doc Chase prescribed beer for a chronic underweight problem. He got a court order for her parents to make homebrew and she did gain weight, along with a drinking problem. "I didn't like drinking, but I done it because I was bashful and that was the only way I could come out," she says. Bill Smith, who also drank heavily, suffered a variety of health problems and by the 1960s was chronically ill. He spent many years in a veteran's hospital in the Lower 48. Marie sent her seven children to foster homes in Anchorage, and eventually divorced him. She remained in Cordova. "I was glad I got them out of Cordova," she says. "Their friends turned out bad. Although I missed them, I couldn't raise them myself. I didn't know anything about welfare." She says she began drinking even harder after she gave up her children. "To think of it now, it was all a bunch of foolishness, because the pain never went away. The pain's still there." Krauss met Marie in 1961, when he came to Cordova as a young linguist to study and record Eyak. Working mainly with Marie and two other women, he compiled an Eyak dictionary and a book of Eyak texts. He was struck by how those last Eyaks had clung to their culture, des-pite subjugation by the more dominant Native groups around them, and later the Americans. "They had been at the far end of the Eyak lands and were the only ones who were not assimilated to Tlingit, not bilingual or dominant in Tlingit," he says. "They were very distinct. They knew they were very different than anyone else and seemed to be proud of it. It seems there probably was a nasty stigma attached to being Eyak, which they outlived in that awful period when Marie was a child. It does speak volumes for the strength of a people and of the individuals." Krauss worked with Lena Nacktan, Scar Stevens' cousin, and with Anna Nelson Harry. Nacktan was a patient and meticulous grammarian, according to Krauss. Harry was a brilliant poet who had a creative way with the language. "Something like the James Joyce of Eyak," Krauss calls her. "Between James Joyce and Madame Meticulous, they balanced each other beautifully." Marie filled in the gaps. "The language is documented as well as I can do it in its last days," says Krauss. "Thanks to Marie. She helped me because her English was the best of the three." Her grasp of both Eyak and English helped him in the early days of his study, before he became fluent in Eyak. "Marie's knowledge of the language provided a good introduction for me," he says. "And I'm grateful that she is there to answer the last questions we can ask of Eyak." Marie's mother died in 1961, ending for Marie regular discourse in her language. In the late '60s she married Frank Jones, her fourth husband, but the marriage was short-lived and marked by violence. She says she came off a drunk on Halloween night 1970 and swore off alcohol forever. In 1973, tired of her husband's heavy drinking and abuse, she fled Cordova for her daughter's home in Eagle River. She moved to a series of low-income apartments, and lived for a time in Willow Park, a decrepit housing project that has since been razed. For years, she lived quietly in Anchorage, attending church regularly and visiting with her children and grandchildren. She's remained sober. She lives today in a modest Fairview apartment, subsidized by a state housing program. Though they weren't close, the loss of her sister, Sophie, the only other Native Eyak speaker, in February 1992 left her lonely at first, Marie says. "At first it was real hard. God has helped me to calm down. At times I do get depressed, but I pray and get over it," she says. Her significance in the decline of Alaska Native culture is profound, according to Krauss, director of the Alaska Native Language Center at Fairbanks, which seeks to record and preserve Native languages. "She is the last speaker of what will become the first Alaska lang-uage to go extinct," he says. "There are 20 Native languages in the state. All but two (Yup'ik and Inupiat) are no longer spoken fluently by children. Eyak appears to be the first to go. Native languages are nowhere near as well kept as (Alaska's) so- called locked-up wilderness. They are as fragile as the tundra and we've done a serious job on it. "Let Eyak be a lesson to us all about how we need to control our destructive ways. Not just the natural environment, but the human environment." Marie's own children never seemed interested in learning their mother's language, and Marie never pushed. But two years ago, a 16-year-old granddaughter asked Marie to teach her. "That was the happiest day of my life," she says with a smile. It also taught Marie that one's own language can be fleeting. "She had "seal" written down on her list. And you know, it wouldn't come back to me. I had to call my sister to find out. Between the two of us, we got it right. Then and only then is when I realized you can lose your language. "Now, I talk to myself to keep it. Sometimes I point around here and say yahsh (doll) and ditl'a'k (paper)." Krauss urges her to call him collect in Fairbanks when she wants to speak Eyak, but she worries about imposing. "That's why it's so good whenever we can meet. When Michael and I meet we don't care about anybody else," she says. Several years ago, a chance encounter changed everything. A young Eyak man had been challenging the village corporation and caught Marie's attention. Glen "Dune" Lankard complained that the leadership of Eyak Corporation wasn't responsive to the shareholders and that its primary business of logging the forests around Cordova was destroying Eyak ancestral lands. Lankard is the grandson of Lena Nacktan, and Marie's third cousin. "Marie watched me for about a year," he recalled. "She finally realized I was not going to back down. She says, 'I would like to help you. I have been waiting for someone like you to come along for 60 years.' " Together, Marie and Lankard sued Eyak Corporation to stop logging on land they regard as traditional Eyak sites. The lawsuit was unsuccessful. So they joined Cordova environmentalists in urging state and federal authorities to halt cutting in places like Orca Narrows and to set aside the coastal forest as pristine habitat. Lankard believes the Eyak Indians were cheated out of land by the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. The village corporation that was created under ANCSA for the Native people around Cordova is dominated by the more populous Aleuts, traditional enemies of the Eyaks, he says. He is seeking to have 70,000 acres of land deeded to the Eyak Indians. By Lankard's count, 27 people with Eyak blood remain. Only two beside Marie are full-blood. But others say the Eyaks wouldn't have qualified for a village corporation at all, had it not been for the Aleuts and Tlingits of Cordova. They didn't have enough members to be recognized as a homogenous group under ANCSA, says John Johnson, historian for Chugach Alaska Corp. He also questions whether the Eyaks have any stronger claims to the land around Cordova than other Native groups. They might have settled the area most recently, he says, but archaeological sites show that the region was inhabited by the Chugach Aleuts long before the Eyaks arrived. Still, Lankard maintains that the Eyak people have been treated shabbily because they are a minority within their village corporation. "The Eyaks have no voice," he says. "As long as we have the forest, the land and the sea. . .we will subsist for another 10,000 years. As long as the corporation owns the land, they will clearcut it, strip-mine it and sell it." Marie endorses his plan. "He's got the know-how," she says. "I don't have the big doctor words. I'm the chief. I'm supposed to have a warrior, which Dune is. God sent him to me, I know he did." At a potluck after the repatriation ceremony, Marie greeted one of the loggers whom she had demonstrated against three days before. He suggested she was being manipulated. "Nobody is guiding me," she responded. "I am doing this on my own." Lankard admits that he needs Marie. She enables him to argue that the old ways can still be preserved. "When Marie dies, the language goes with her, the Eyak beliefs, the way they think, their legends, legacies," he says. "When Marie dies, they'll be able to steal our land without opposition. They'll look at me and say, 'You're assimilated. Get out of here.' Everyone is waiting for the Eyaks to die. Then the issue will be settled forever." Marie's goals, too, are ambitious. She dreams of endowing a scholarship for young Indians at the University of Alaska, so they might study with Krauss and perhaps even go on to law school. Eyak lawyers are needed for the fight. "I know that the kids are waking up now. The excitement of the white-man world is going away from them slowly. I think they will turn toward their own. I'll always pray for that." She believes that God has been preparing her for the fight. "I think I was chosen to bring back the Eyaks."
