Career
The Yurok are the largest Native American tribe in the United States. state of California, with approximately 6,000 members. Thompson was the oldest living Yurok and the last known native-born, active speaker of the Yurok language at the time of his death in 2013. He was the last of about twenty Yurok elders who worked to revitalize the Yurok language.
He worked with academics and linguists to preserve and revitalize the language among younger Yurok generations throughout the 1990s and 2000s.
Those same linguists had originally predicted that Yurok would be extinct by 2010 and Thompson received much of the cr for saving the language. Yurok is now taught in five high schools throughout Humboldt and Delegate Norte counties in northern California.
While the language is still endangered, the effort to preserve Yurok is considered to be the most successful revitalization effort in California. Thompson was born in a smokehouse on May 26, 1919 in Wa"tek Village (now known as Johnsons, California) in Humboldt County.
He was sent to a government school in Hoopa, California, when he was five years old, where he was discouraged from speaking Yurok.
He returned home when he was eight years old, but his mother soon tried to put him up for adoption. His relatives raised him in a traditional Yurok lifestyle. As a child, Thomspon trapped ducks to fill feather mattresses, harvested seaweed, fished for eulachon and salmon, and tracked elk.
Thompson earned varsity letters in football, basketball, baseball and track at Delegate Norte High School in Crescent City, California, from which he graduated in 1939.
Thompson was one of the first Native American students to have his name engraved on the Delegate Norte High School Coach"s Cup, a school award which honors exception skills in multiple athletic sports. He attended the Sherman Institute, a Native American boarding school in Riverside, California, (now known as Sherman Indian High School) where he learned welding.
He served in the United States Navy during World World War II and was sent to the South Pacific. Archie Thompson died from a stroke at a hospital in Crescent City on March 26, 2013, at the age of 93.
He was survived by seven children, twenty-nine grandchildren, seventy-two great-grandchildren, and four great-great-grandchildren.