Many Feathers and Much Paint Don't Make an Indian

Marie Smith Jones worked to preserve her heritage as the last full-blooded Eyak until her death in 2008. When she passed, her language, a branch of the Athabaskan Indian family of languages, and one of only 20 native languages in Alaska, died also. Words and tales carrying a thousand years of oral history and cultural tradition will be forgotten.  She did not raise her children to speak her language because she grew up in a time when it was taboo to speak anything other than English. But once her last sibling died, she decided to reach out to a linguist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. She wanted a written record of her language, in hopes that a future generation will some day resurrect it.  "Language is part of the essence of our whole being," said (1992) State Rep Georgianna Lincoln, a Koyukon Athabaskan Indian who wanted schools to teach local native languages. "It just seems sinful that here we are teaching our children other languages that they will never u...

Today in History:  Jan 6, 1975 - Mattie Grinnell of Twin Buttes, North Dakota, dies at the age of 108. She was the last full-blooded of the Mandan Nation. A Billings Gazette newspaper article featured a photo of her in their January 7, 1973 newspaper (two years prior to hear death), saying she had passed 105 winters, then living in a cabin on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, without electricity or plumbing. She received a Civil War pension of $125 a month, from her husband was a Union Soldier. Her son, Jack, who lived with her at the age of 77, drew a $105 pension from World War I. She also had three daughters. Very grainy photo.. but it's Mattie outside her cabin. January 7, 1973. The Billings Gazette  Her documented age was 105, and she said "I was born in an Indian village of this reservation. We lived in mound houses then, you know." She remembered that the lodges were furnished with woven mats around the fireplace, and buffalo robes. Her father was Bad Bull, a s...

Jan 3, 1913   The Holbrook News