Vanishing Voices

One language dies every 14 days. By the next century nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on earth will likely disappear as communities abandon native tongues in favor of English, Mandarin, or Spanish. Language follows power. In an increasingly homogenized era, languages that dominate world communication and commerce push smaller languages toward extinction. In the Americas there are 866 languages approaching extinction. In the western United States alone there are 54 endangered languages, and the last fluent speakers of these languages are over 60 years old. Most of these surviving endangered language speakers are women. Who are these last matriarchs of North America and what is lost when a language goes silent? We began this project by creating archival tintype photographs of Marie Wilcox, the last known speaker of Wukchumni; Lucille Hicks, one of two remaining speakers of Kawaiisu; Gertrude Killian, one of the last known speakers of Northern Mono; Mammie Oxereok, one of the remaining speakers of Inupiaq; and Florence Pestrikoff, one of the few remaining speakers of Alutiiq. These beautiful women of disappearing languages are located in Central California, the Mojave Desert, the Sierra Mountains, the Yukon Territory, and the Aleutian Islands of Alaska.