the town dandy / By Hank Sims

Fall of the Great

I only metAileen Figueroa once, when I wrote a story about Yurok youth reclaiming their language two years ago. She was 92 years old at the time, and it seemed like she was right about four and a half feet tall. The conference we were at lasted several hours, over two days, and if I recall correctly she spoke barely a word. But from the moment she entered the room until the moment she left it, her presence commanded the place. She inspired awe.

Figueroa died last Friday at the age of 95, and reading the press release I realized that even though she was a historical figure here in the county, I really only knew a tiny piece of her story. She was one of the last native speakers of the Yurok language, and she worked generously and tirelessly to reawaken the language of her people. She was tutor not only to the students at the American Indian Academy in McKinleyville, but to the linguists at UC Berkeley and, really, to just about anyone who took a serious interest. She was a master basket weaver.

These things I knew. The part I missed was that she was also a founder of the Westhaven Volunteer Fire Department and a mainstay at that organization’s annual Blackberry Festival. And that at least some of the children of Westhaven remember her for her great flock of geese, which she would shoo up and down the road.

She was one of the last of her kind — one of the direct bridges to a time and a people and a way of life that was taken away by force, leaving a vacancy in the life of this county forever. Her passing is an immense loss to her family, to her tribe, and to everyone who holds Humboldt County dear.

There will be an all-night memorial service for Aileen Figueroa at the Westhaven Fire Department (446 6th Avenue, Westhaven) this weekend, from 7 p.m. Friday to 7 a.m. Saturday. “All singers and drummers are invited to honor her,” the press release says. Services will be held on Saturday, April 19, at 11 a.m. at the McKinleyville High School Main Gym. It will be followed by a reception at Trinidad Town Hall. For information on how to contribute to her family, write drvigil@hotmail.com. To donate to the Aileen Figueroa- Jessie Exline Scholarship Fund for Language Preservation, you may send checks to the Yurok Elder Wisdom Preservation Project, 788 S. Westhaven Drive, Trinidad, Calif., 95570.

In the meantime, go to the home page of UC Berkeley’s Yurok Language Project (linguistics.berkeley.edu/~yurok/). The project has posted a nice tribute to Figueroa, and if you click on the “Audio Dictionary” link you can listen to Figueroa and other members of her generation speaking some of the old words of this place.

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