In Memoriam Michael E. Krauss, 1934–2019. Linguist, Humanist, and a Pioneer for Better World

Michael Krauss, a towering figure in the studies of Northern Indigenous languages and the first director of the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (1972–2000), passed away on August 11, 2019, in Boston, four days short of his eighty-fifth birthday. He had a distinguished career of almost sixty years in the documentation and promotion of the world’s endangered languages at many levels—from one minority language (Eyak) to entire language families (Esko-Aleut and Athabaskan), from the circumpolar region to humanity at large. Krauss entered the field with more Northern Indigenous languages fluently spoken than today, even if in linguistic “obscurity.” His life ended with shelves and libraries of language materials he helped create and cohorts of linguists inspired by his work, yet with fewer Native children able to speak their ancestral tongues. During his lifetime, the winds of globalization reached the ever-remote corners of the globe and the general public came to understand, if reluctantly, the imminent threat to the world’s linguistic (and biological) diversity. Krauss helped promote this message against forces of ignorance, cultural chauvinism, and government-led acculturation; he fought these powers incessantly, often ferociously all his life. As a result, he left the world a better place, at least as our vision of the value of Indigenous minority languages is concerned. Born in 1934 in Cleveland, Ohio, and trained at leading American schools (BA University of Chicago, 1953; MA, Columbia University, 1955; PhD, Harvard University, 1959), Krauss was also a European-educated intellectual. He spent almost five years, between 1955 and 1960 studying, researching, and living in Paris, Copenhagen, Dublin, rural Ireland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands. He spoke fluent Irish, Danish, Icelandic, and Faroese, in addition to French, some Russian, and, in some degree, scores of Alaskan Indigenous languages. His exposure to the plight of the ever-shrinking Irish Gaelic and to the efforts of the Icelanders and the Faroese to preserve their unique tongues prepared him well when, in 1960, he found himself teaching French in a small Department of Linguistics and Foreign Languages in North America’s northernmost university, located in what was then College, Alaska, and officially named the University of Alaska Fairbanks only in 1975. The fledgling university had neither resources nor interest in any work on Alaskan Indigenous languages. Krauss had to overcome this attitude starting from scratch. He successfully gained the support of the university and lobbied the Alaska state legislature to produce bills to fund research and education in Indigenous languages (in 1972); build a new institutional tool for this mission, the Alaska Native Language Center (ANLC) (1972); and found the Alaska Native Language Archives, first within the Center and, later as an independent body, now the Michael E. Krauss Alaska Native Language Archive (since 2013). Krauss’s mission in support of endangered Northern languages was founded on three guiding principles that he formulated early in his professional career. First, that each language is a unique and irreplaceable form of human knowledge and that we are richer and stronger collectively when we speak many tongues, not just the chosen few. Second, that minority language viability is advanced (though in no way assured) when the language develops literacy and orthography, thus adding the power of writing and reading to its age-old forms of oral transmission. Third, reading and writing in one’s mother tongue is empowering only when there are meaningful texts to read and not just schoolbooks, dictionaries, children stories, or propaganda pamphlets. In following his principles, Krauss, an academic linguist, was inevitably pushed into the societal and political arenas to argue against the then-common views of Northern minority languages in the …