Archie Thompson

Who was Archie Thompson?

Archie Thompson was an American Yurok elder. The Yurok are the largest Native American tribe in the U.S. 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 credit for saving the language. Yurok is now taught in five high schools throughout Humboldt and Del 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.