Eyak

Where the Copper River meets the Gulf of Alaska, around today's town of Cordova, lies the homeland of the Eyak, a small Alaska Native nation of the Northwest Coast. They spoke a language of their own, the closest relative of the great Athabaskan family. Eyak descendants live today in Cordova, Yakutat and elsewhere in Alaska and the wider United States, and the Native Village of Eyak is a federally recognised tribe.

The Eyak name for themselves is ’i:ya:GdAlahGAyu:. Its root, ’i:ya:G, was first the name of a single village near Mile 6 on today's Copper River Highway and came from the Alutiiq language of their Chugach neighbours; its meaning is uncertain, perhaps "hiding place" or "river mouth". Under English influence it spread to cover the whole people. Their historic lands reached from the Cordova area eastward as far as the Martin River and inland to Miles Glacier. There were four main villages, including Alaganik and Orca, plus summer fishing camps at places such as Point Whitshed.

According to Eyak history, their ancestors came down the Copper River from the interior to the coast, drawn by its rich salmon runs. Place names tell a longer story: many Tlingit names along the Gulf coast, meaningless in Tlingit, have Eyak roots, which linguists take as strong evidence that Eyak speakers once lived much further along the coast towards south-east Alaska. Over time Tlingit spread northward around Yakutat, and many mixed Eyak–Tlingit groups switched to Tlingit within a few generations.

Being few in number, the Eyak were often raided, and the Chugach pressed on their western border. Relations with the Tlingit to the east were friendlier, and intermarriage led most Eyak to merge into Tlingit society. Traders from the Russian Empire recognised the Eyak as a distinct people, marked their lands on maps and sent missionaries. After the Americans arrived, salmon canneries competed for the fish on which the Eyak lived, and new diseases cut their numbers. Alaganik had 117 people in 1880 and 48 in 1890, and the total Eyak population was estimated at about 60 in 1900. Survivors gathered near Orca, which grew into the town of Cordova.

The linguist Michael Krauss worked with the last speakers to describe the language. Marie Smith Jones of Cordova, the last first-language speaker, died on 21 January 2008. A young Frenchman, Guillaume Leduey, had meanwhile taught himself the language from printed and recorded materials of the Alaska Native Language Center and, after working with Krauss, began leading workshops in Anchorage and Cordova in 2011. The Eyak Language Revitalization Project offers an online dictionary, lessons and immersion workshops, and an Eyak culture camp is held every August in Cordova. The language is still classed as dormant, with no native speakers.

The Native Village of Eyak was set up under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971. Because membership is limited to people who live in Cordova for most of the year, many Eyak descendants elsewhere do not qualify, and in 1996 about 120 people of part-Eyak descent lived in the town.

Our maps for 1530, 1600, 1650, 1700, 1715, 1783 and 1800 show an approximate territory labelled Eyaq on the Gulf of Alaska. The outline is drawn much larger than the Copper River Delta homeland, stretching along the coast towards south-east Alaska; on the 1800 map it borders Rupert's Land to the east.