A bridge to the past

Archie Thompson today. The Daily Triplicate/Bryant Anderson

“She didn’t speak English, and I used to make fun of her all the time, but that’s how I learned. She spoke to me every day,” Thompson said. “I learned (Yurok) as I went along. She’d teach me as I went.”

For Thompson, the Yurok language is infused with memories of the sprawling Klamath ranch and the many Yuroks he met there.

“We had a ranch with plenty to eat, and I remember all the old Indians used to come down there to eat, some for days or weeks or months, and we fed all of them, and we didn’t cost them money, and we would talk.

“Sometimes there would be nothing but old Indian people sitting around the stove talking Yurok, and I always remember that.”

Archie Thompson as part of a Del Norte High School graduating class in the ’30s, bottom far right.

“They all laughed and someone would tell a good story. It was all Indian talk, and they wouldn’t talk no white talk at all.”

Many decades later, the 90-year-old Thompson is the elder Yurok who is passing on the language to a new generation. Twice a week, Thompson sits in on Yurok language classes for high-schoolers at Klamath River Early College of the Redwoods in Klamath, where he serves as a living resource, one of a handful of surviving fluent speakers.

Thompson participates in the national Foster Grandparent program, which is run locally by North Coast Opportunities, a regional non-profit.

His work is so valuable that it has been recognized nationally — this year he traveled to Washington, D.C., to receive the Silver Honor in the Mentor Category from the MetLife Foun­dation and the National Association of Area Agencies on Aging.

The trip was a special experience for Thompson. He hobnobbed with First District Congressman Mike Thompson, and he traveled to North Carolina to see his son, Archie Jr., a retired paratrooper with sons and grandsons of his own — Yurok men who speak with incongruous Southern accents. Thompson speaks of his son with evident pride. 

“He’s got a big home back there. He’s not hurting for nothing.”