Whole Life of Marie Wilcox 1933-2021

The writer of the dictionary saved a Calif. Native language

For many years, Marie Wilcox was the guardian of the Wukchumni language, one of several Indigenous languages that were once common in Central California but have either disappeared or nearly disappeared. She was the only person for a time who could speak it fluently.

She started writing down words in Wukchumni as she remembered them in the late 1990s, scrawling on the backs of envelopes and slips of paper. Then she started typing them into an old boxy computer. Soon she was getting up early to devote her day to gathering words and working into the night.

After 20 years of labor, of hunting and pecking on her keyboard, Wilcox, who died at 87 on Sept. 25, produced a dictionary, the first known complete compendium of Wukchumni.

“The dictionary was her whole life,” Jennifer Malone, one of her daughters, said in a phone interview. “The language was dying, and she brought it back.”

In 2014, while Wilcox was still revising and editing the dictionary, filmmaker Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee made “Marie’s Dictionary,” a short documentary video about her achievement for The New York Times Opinion section, in its Op-Docs series.

When her large extended family held a party and watched the documentary together, they understood for the first time what she had been doing all those years, said Malone, who, with a handful of others, helped her mother edit and format the dictionary. Until then, she said, they had not fully appreciated her work or valued the connection between their lost language and some of their cultural traditions.

Within short order, many family members started learning Wukchumni. And other Native American tribes were inspired by her story to revitalize their own disappearing languages.

Wilcox died at a hospital in Visalia. She had been attending a birthday party for her 4-year-old great-great-grandson when she was stricken by a ruptured aorta as she was getting in a car to leave, Malone said.

There are an estimated 7,000 languages in the world today, a majority of which originated with Indigenous people. Many of these are only spoken, not written, and they have no dictionaries. Because of forced assimilation, relocation, and other factors involving Native people, most of these languages are on the verge of dying out.

Marie Desma Wilcox was born Nov. 24, 1933, on a ranch in Visalia, in the San Joaquin Valley. Her father, Alex Wilcox, was a farmhand. Her mother, Beatrice Arancis, had seven children, of which Marie was the youngest. She often referred to herself as “the end of the trail.”

Source: The New York Times