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| Eliza (right) explains a document to her daughter, Susan Paskvan |
Last week we welcomed Koyukon linguist Eliza Jones to the
Alaska Native Language Archive to help sort and catalog some 30 or so boxes of language materials accumulated during her career at the Alaska Native Language Center. Eliza was one of the founding members of ANLC in 1972. Following her retirement in 1990 she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. But she has continued to work to document and teach the Koyukon language for the past two decades. She is co-editor--along with Jules Jetté--of the Koyukon Athabaskan Dictionary, a massive work of scholarship which represents the combined work of two dedicated scholars. Jetté died eleven years before Jones was born, so the dictionary collaboration spans more than six decades of research.
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Page of notes taken by Eliza
while working with Koyukon
speaker Charlie Brush |
The publication of the Koyukon Dictionary in 2000 was followed by the relocation of ANLC to a new building in 2002. As a result many of the reference materials used during the production of the dictionary were never properly re-integrated into the archive collection. Working in the Archive last week Eliza was able to identify a number of unpublished texts, sorting them by speaker and village. Everything was sorted into boxes corresponding to categories such as grammar, geography, curriculum, texts, names, etc. Now we will have our work cut out for us re-cataloging and re-boxing these materials as we prepare it for scanning by our partner Digital Photographic Services. There is much work yet to do, but we hope that soon much of this information will be made accessible to Koyukon language learners and others with an interest in Koyukon language.
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| Jim Kari looks over manuscript lexical material compiled by David Henry and annotated by Eliza -- possibly not consulted during the compilation of the Koyukon dictionary |
Eliza left Fairbanks for Koyukuk on Friday afternoon. We were sad to see her go but thankful for all the time she put into sorting this valuable material--and for her willingness to make it available for future generations of scholars.
By the way, there's a nice biography of Eliza Jones on
Project Jukebox.
