Marie Desma Wilcox (November 24, 1933 – September 25, 2021) Als

, October 9, 2021. was a Native American who was the last native speaker of

Wukchumni The Wukchumni () are a Yokuts tribe of California with about 200 members, residing on the Tule River Indian Tribe of the Tule River Reservation, Tule River Reservation. 3000 years ago, they broke off from the main Yokuts group and settled in the re ...

, a dialect of Tule-Kaweah, which is a Yokutsan

indigenous language An indigenous language, or autochthonous language, is a language that is native to a region and spoken by its indigenous peoples. Indigenous languages are not necessarily national languages but they can be; for example, Aymara is both an indigen ...

spoken by the Tule-Kaweah Yokuts of

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

. She worked for more than 20 years on a dictionary of the language.

Life

Wilcox was born on a ranch in

Visalia, California Visalia ( ) is a city in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley of California. The population was 141,384 as per the 2020 census. Visalia is the fifth-most populous city in the San Joaquin Valley, the 38th most populous in California, and 183 ...

, the youngest of seven children of Beatrice Arancis and Alex Wilcox, a farm hand. She was raised by her grandparents in a one-room house in the Venice Hills and after completing eighth grade, she also became a farm hand and a fruit packer. With Joe Garcia, she had four daughters and a son. She lived in Woodlake, California and died in a hospital in Visalia after her aorta ruptured when she was leaving a grandson's birthday party.

Wukchumni language

Wilcox's grandmother spoke Wukchumni; after her death, Wilcox began working on a dictionary of the language as a tribute, with computer and other assistance from Nicholas Luna, an

Apache The Apache ( ) are several Southern Athabaskan language-speaking peoples of the Southwestern United States, Southwest, the Southern Plains and Northern Mexico. They are linguistically related to the Navajo. They migrated from the Athabascan ho ...

. She included sound recordings of each word in the dictionary, and after the appearance in 2014 of a documentary on her work in the ''

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...

op-ed An op-ed, short for "opposite the editorial page," is a type of written prose commonly found in newspapers, magazines, and online publications. They usually represent a writer's strong and focused opinion on an issue of relevance to a targeted a ...

section, her family and other members of their tribe became interested in reviving the language. She and her daughter taught it; at her death Wilcox was teaching classes at the Owens Valley Career Development Center, which are to continue. The dictionary was copyrighted in 2019, but is unpublished. As of 2014, it was estimated that the Wukchumni tribe had fewer than 200 members. In the early 2010s, when a relative died, Wilcox became the last remaining fluent speaker; at her death, there were at least three, including one of her daughters.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wilcox, Marie 1933 births 2021 deaths 20th-century Native American women 20th-century Native American people American lexicographers Linguists from the United States Women linguists American women non-fiction writers People from Visalia, California Last known speakers of a Native American language 21st-century Native American women 21st-century Native American people Native American women writers