Languages Born Again: Hupa, Karuk, and Yurok

Nine teenagers file in to Kay Inong’s seventh period class at Hoopa Valley High School to learn a subject not available at any other school in the world: Advanced Yurok language. In the next building, Danny Ammon teaches the Hupa language and Phil Albers teaches Karuk. This school is the center of a renaissance in the preservation and restoration of the native languages of these three Northern California Klamath basin tribes. Less than a dozen native speakers in each of the tribes are still alive, some live several hours away from their homeland, and all are elderly...