The church I attend hosted the regional convention of the Pacific Northwest Conference of the Mennonite Church over the weekend and one of the results was that I spent some time shuttling around folks from Outside, most of whom hadn’t visited Alaska before.

There was a lot of what you might expect: “No, it doesn’t actually get dark, just a little bit dimmer than this.” “Yeah, there are moose everywhere in the city, but you still might not see one.” “No I don’t really have a lot to say about her.”

But there were also much more rewarding conversations. I spent one car trip to the airport with Paul Unruh, who helped coordinate Mennonite Disaster Service’s response to last year’s Yukon River flooding. Unruh is a former Fairbanksan now exiled to Kansas, and he talked about what it was like living in Fairbanks in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s when pipeline workers first flooded the town. But it’s another of those conversations that sticking in my head right now. One of the attendees mentioned that his son was into prehistoric animals. Mammoths in particular. We talked a little bit about the extinct creatures and how curious it is that, despite their extinction, their actual remains (not just fossils) are still preserved in permafrost, long after the species ceased to exist.

Then my guest wondered aloud about the prospect of using some DNA from those occasional finds to bring the species back to life.

I don’t know why—having grown up as Jurassic Park and its successors were making their way onto the big screen—I hadn’t already wondered this myself.

It turns out that the idea isn’t exactly a new one. Google “Mammoth Creation Project” and you’ll come across a handful of articles about a group trying to do just that. The articles mainly date from 2005 and 2006 (though a few are more recent) and if the group has since disbanded or enjoyed any successes, I was unable to find evidence.

There are, of course, ethical and perhaps moral considerations that come into play, but more fascinating still is simply the strangeness of restoring something once thought lost forever—especially when that something is a living creature.

Those potential new mammoths waiting to come into existence in a laboratory somewhere were what I first thought of when I read Kyle Hopkins’ piece in the Anchorage Daily News about a potential new speaker of the Eyak language. In case you missed it (and it’s worth seeking out) here’s a recap:

Eyak was the language spoken by an Athabascan people group of the same name who lived in the Copper River Delta area, near present-day Cordova. The past tense is appropriate, because on January 21, 2008, Marie Smith Jones, the last native Eyak speaker, died. Today, the only person who could carry on a conversation in Eyak is Michael Krauss, a linguist living in Fairbanks.

Enter Guillaume Leduey, a 21-year-old resident of Le Havre, France. Leduey is in Alaska learning Eyak from Krauss and considering whether he wants to take up the singular role Krauss, now 75, plays as the only living speaker of the language. The story is a fascinating one—especially riveting are the exchanges between Leduey and Jones’s daughter—but one passage in particular leapt out at me.

“There were never more than a few hundred Eyak in known history and theirs was the first of the 20 Alaska Native languages to go extinct, Krauss said. Yup'ik, which is spoken by young people in some western Alaska villages, remains the healthiest, but they all will fade unless new generations are taught the languages, he said. ‘Eyak is predictably the first, but the question is who is next?’ Krauss said.”

If Eyak occupies a place akin to the mammoth—gone from the wild, but its DNA preserved intact enough that it might be revived someday—then Alaska’s other Native languages must be something like the polar bear. Alive for now, but with scant hope of surviving the coming changes.

I’m surprised to find myself feeling something like anger at this mini-epiphany. I guess I should’ve always known these languages are endangered. But somehow that knowledge hadn’t sunk in very deeply until I read Krauss’s bleak assessment.

Polar bears or beluga whales may be doomed to extinction in the long run. But they’ll enter into oblivion in a blaze of glory—battled over in courts, the halls of Congress and editorial pages.

Languages, unfortunately, don’t have an Endangered Species Act. Sure, there’ll be media coverage when (if?) the last speaker of Yup’ik or Alutiiq dies. But the causes of language extinction are trickier than just habitat loss or climate change, and you can’t force people to undertake the task of keeping one alive.

But the loss of a complete system of looking at the world—of communicating it—might be just as devastating as the loss of genetic diversity we suffer every time the last individual of another species dies.

All we can do, I think, is hope that someone—whether another generation of Alaska Native youth, or an obsessed outsider—is inspired enough to accept the task of speaking and thinking in a way that most of the rest of the planet has forgotten about.

krestia.degeorge@anchoragepress.com