Indigenous · History Classes · Grades 10–13, College & University

The Extinction Register

History Class · Level band: Grades 10–13 · College · University

English edition — the language editions of the history classes are outstanding and will follow the site’s translation pattern; none is fabricated here.

Beothuk

• People / language: Beothuk people; Beothuk language (classification unresolved — possibly Algonquian, possibly an isolate; the record is too thin to settle it)
• Region: Island of Newfoundland, present-day Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada

STATUS

Extinct — people and language. Shanawdithit, described in the record as the last known full-blooded Beothuk, died on 6 June 1829 in St. John's. With her death the Beothuk were declared extinct as a distinct people, and no speaker of the language remained.

THE COUNT

• At the time Shanawdithit was taken (April 1823): she told William Cormack that, to her knowledge, only a dozen Beothuk survived at that time. (Account recorded by Cormack, winter 1828–29; summarised in the Beothuk literature.)
• Early 19th century, estimates disagree widely: population estimates for the end of the first decade of the 1800s vary from about 150 to 3,000. This register gives both ends of that range and picks neither — the surviving record does not support a single figure.
• By 1768: one encyclopaedia summary puts the Beothuk at fewer than 400 people, pushed north and subsisting on the Exploits River system (Encyclopedia.com, "Beothuk," drawing on the standard histories).
• 1829: zero. After 6 June 1829 there is no documented Beothuk speaker or self-governing Beothuk community.

No pre-contact population figure is entered here: no sourced count meeting this register's standard was located, so none is invented.

WHAT HAPPENED

Documented causes, at evidence level:

• Loss of access to food sources — displacement from the coasts by European settlement cut the Beothuk off from the marine foods (seals, salmon, shellfish) their economy depended on; inland subsistence could not support them, producing undernourishment and starvation.
• Infectious disease — smallpox introduced by European contact, and endemic tuberculosis, which weakened and killed members including Shanawdithit herself, her mother, and her sister.
• Violent encounters with trappers and settlers, including killings and captures (e.g., the 1819 killing of Chief Nonosbawsut and capture of Demasduit, Shanawdithit's aunt).
• A disputed claim, recorded as disputed: that French bounties induced Mi'kmaq to kill Beothuk is alleged in some accounts but is disputed by most historians and is known in the scholarship as the "Mercenary Myth." It is not stated here as fact.

WHAT SURVIVES

• Shanawdithit's ten drawings made for Cormack in St. John's (winter 1828–29), depicting the island, Beothuk implements and dwellings, and Beothuk notions and myths — the only first-person Beothuk account.
• Beothuk vocabulary she taught Cormack as she explained the drawings, preserved in his notes — a fragmentary word record, not a grammar or text corpus. The language cannot be reconstructed to speaking from what survives.
• Archaeological sites (e.g., Boyd's Cove), museum holdings, and the Beothuk Interpretation Centre. There is no Beothuk descendant community to lead a revival; remembrance is carried by neighbouring Indigenous nations and by Newfoundland institutions.

SOURCES

• Cormack's record of Shanawdithit (1828–29), as summarised in "Beothuk people," Wikipedia, accessed Oct 2026 — dozen survivors at her taking; ten drawings; death 6 June 1829 of tuberculosis.
• Ingeborg Marshall, A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk (McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996) — standard history cited throughout the secondary record.
• Encyclopedia.com, "Beothuk" (Gale) — fewer than 400 by 1768; three female survivors by 1823.
• EBSCO Research Starters, "Shanawdithit" — biography, Cormack / Beothuk Institution, death at 28.

Eyak — dAXunhyuugaʼ

• People / language: Eyak people (self-name dAXunhyuu, "the people"); Eyak language — a coordinate branch beside Athabaskan in the Athabaskan–Eyak–Tlingit family, not itself Athabaskan (Alaska Native Language Archive)
• Region: South-central Alaska coast — Copper River Delta, Cordova / Eyak, east to Yakutat, USA

STATUS

Extinct as a native-speaker language (2008); now classified Dormant, with an active reawakening effort. UNESCO's Atlas announcement (2009) listed Eyak among languages that had recently become extinct, in 2008 with the death of Marie Smith Jones. On the Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS) Eyak is now graded 9 (Dormant) — no native speakers, but a heritage community and second-language learners exist. Both labels are recorded here because both are in use by their authorities; this register does not flatten them into one.

THE COUNT

• 21 January 2008: the last native speaker died. Marie Smith Jones (born Cordova, 14 May 1918) died aged 89 at her home in Anchorage. Michael Krauss, University of Alaska Fairbanks: "With her death, the Eyak language becomes extinct." (Associated Press, 23 Jan 2008.)
• About 50 people: the Alaska Native Language Center figure reported at her death for Eyak people remaining by the 21st century (AP, 2008); the Alaska Native Language Archive states Eyak "is now represented by about 50 people but no surviving fluent speakers" (ANLA overview, accessed Oct 2026).
• Earlier village counts (US census record, via the Eyak history): Alaganik village 117 in 1880, 48 in 1890; total Eyak population estimated at 60 in 1900; 120 partial Eyak descendants in Cordova as of 1996.

WHAT HAPPENED

• Disease — smallpox and influenza "tore through the Eyak Nation… wiping out just about everyone but her family," per Jones's daughter Bernice Galloway (AP, 2008). Regular conversation in Eyak ceased after the death of Minnie Stevens, mother of Marie and Sophie, in March 1961 (Krauss, history of Eyak documentation).
• Assimilation by neighbours and by English — pressure and intermarriage with Tlingit to the east (Yakutat was predominantly Tlingit-speaking by about 1800) and Chugach pressure to the west shrank Eyak territory; the spread of English, and of Tlingit, replaced Eyak in daily life.
• Economic displacement — American canneries competed with Eyak fishers for the Copper River salmon on which the villages depended.

WHAT SURVIVES

• Michael Krauss's documentation, from the 1960s onward (Alaska Native Language Archive, University of Alaska Fairbanks): the 1970 Eyak dictionary, texts and traditional stories, and his edition of the stories and poetic compositions of Anna Nelson Harry; recordings by Robert Austerlitz (1961) and Krauss (1963–75) with speakers including Marie Smith Jones, Anna Nelson Harry, and Lena Saska Nacktan.
• The Eyak Language Project / dAXunhyuugaʼ revitalisation: community effort to revive Eyak as a living spoken language from the Krauss materials — online dictionary with audio, e-learning lessons, immersion workshops, and the annual Eyak Culture Camp in Cordova (August).
• Guillaume Leduey, who taught himself Eyak from Alaska Native Language Center materials from age 12, travelled to Alaska in June 2010, worked with Krauss, and from June 2011 led workshops in Anchorage and Cordova; he is now regarded as a fluent second-language speaker, translator, and instructor, providing instruction and curriculum assistance to the Eyak Language Project (Anchorage Daily News reporting, June 2010–2011). A later community project set out to support at least six Eyak learners to fluency working with Leduey (Native Conservancy / Pawanka Fund project description, 2022) — that is a project goal, not a speaker count, and is recorded as such.

SOURCES

• Associated Press (Mary Pemberton), "Last native speaker of Eyak… dies," 23 Jan 2008 — death date and age, Krauss statement, ANLC figure of about 50.
• Alaska Native Language Archive, University of Alaska Fairbanks, "Overview of the Eyak Language" — family classification, about 50 people, no surviving fluent speakers, Krauss documentation since the 1960s.
• UNESCO, Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger announcement / UNESCO Courier (2009) — Eyak extinct in 2008 with the death of Marie Smith Jones.
• Michael Krauss, "History of Eyak Language Documentation and Study" (2006, with addenda) — 1961 end of regular conversation; Jones the last native speaker.
• Eyak language revival reporting (Anchorage Daily News, June 2010; June 2011) — Leduey.

Yahi (Yana) — Ishi

• People / language: Yahi, the southernmost group of the Yana people; Yahi dialect of the Yana language
• Region: Foothills of Lassen Peak / Deer Creek and Mill Creek country, northern California, USA

Why this entry stands in the register: the brief's Australian case (Kaurna) is outside the Americas and was set aside as instructed. Yahi is the strongest documented Americas substitute: a named last speaker, a dated massacre record, and an unusually complete audio documentation made with the speaker himself.

STATUS

Extinct. Ishi, the last known Yahi, died on 25 March 1916. Note the correction the record itself carries: at the 2000 repatriation of his remains, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History director Robert Fri stated that "Ishi was not the last of his kind" — as a Yahi–Yana man his closest living relatives and descendants are among the Yana people of northern California, who survive. What ended in 1916 was the Yahi group and its dialect as a living community, not Yana descent.

THE COUNT

• Yana population before European contact: approximately 3,000 (standard estimate carried in the Ishi literature).
• 1865, Three Knolls Massacre: approximately 30 Yahi survived the attack on Ishi's family group; cattlemen then killed about half of those survivors, and the remnant hid for some 40 years.
• 1911: one. Ishi emerged alone near Oroville on 29 August 1911, the last of the hiding band after his mother's and companions' deaths.
• 1916: zero Yahi speakers after Ishi's death of tuberculosis on 25 March 1916.

WHAT HAPPENED

• Massacre and bounty-era violence following the 1849 California Gold Rush: the Three Knolls Massacre (1865) and repeated killings by settlers and cattlemen reduced the Yahi from a people to a hiding band of a few dozen, then to a handful.
• Concealment as survival: from about 1870 to 1911 a band of roughly 5 to 20 Yahi (the range given in contemporary summaries) hid in the foothills country; a 1908 survey party's raid on their camp scattered the last family group, after which Ishi lived alone for three years.
• Disease after emergence: living at the University of California's Museum of Anthropology in San Francisco from September 1911, Ishi, who lacked immunity to common diseases, was often ill and died of tuberculosis in 1916.

WHAT SURVIVES

• 148 wax-cylinder recordings (5 hours 41 minutes) of Ishi speaking, singing, and telling stories in Yahi, made by Thomas Talbot Waterman and Alfred L. Kroeber — selected by the Library of Congress as a 2010 addition to the National Recording Registry; the cylinders' sound has since been recovered with optical (IRENE) technology.
• Edward Sapir's work on Yahi (summer 1915): Ishi was interviewed on his language by Sapir, who had previously worked on the northern Yana dialects; Sapir's Yahi material anchors the linguistic record.
• Ethnographic documentation by Waterman and Kroeber of Yahi material culture, family structure, and naming — made with Ishi at the museum, 1911–1916.
• Repatriation: Ishi's brain, sent to the Smithsonian in 1917, was returned on 10 August 2000 to the Redding Rancheria and Pit River tribes under the National Museum of the American Indian Act; his cremated remains were also returned for burial in a place kept undisclosed.

SOURCES

• "Ishi," biographical record (Wikipedia synthesis of the Kroeber/Waterman literature), accessed Oct 2026 — Yana c. 3,000; Three Knolls c. 30 survivors; emergence 29 Aug 1911; death 25 Mar 1916.
• Theodora Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds (University of California Press, 1961) — the standard narrative source.
• Library of Congress, National Recording Registry (2010 selections) — 148 cylinders, 5 hrs 41 mins.
• Smithsonian Institution repatriation reporting (2000) — Robert Fri statement; return of brain and remains, 10 Aug 2000.

Miami-Illinois / Myaamia — myaamia

• People / language: Myaamiaki (Miami people) and the related Illinois Confederation peoples (Kaskaskia, Peoria, Tamaroa, Cahokia, Wea); Miami-Illinois language (endonym myaamia), Central Algonquian
• Region: Historically Illinois, Indiana, western Ohio, Michigan and adjacent areas along the Mississippi and Wabash rivers; today centred on the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and Miami communities in Indiana and Ohio, USA

STATUS

Dormant → Reawakening — do NOT call this language simply extinct. The community's own term is "sleeping": many Miami members describe the language as sleeping rather than extinct, because it was not irretrievably lost. Ethnologue (Gordon, 2005 ed.) classified Miami-Illinois as extinct, but Miami linguist Wesley Y. Leonard — a citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma — argues in print that it "is not and never was extinct; it was merely sleeping," and that with reclamation efforts begun in the 1990s "it might now be said to have been awakened." UNESCO-derived listings carried in secondary summaries describe it as "Revitalized," and on the EGIDS scale as "Reawakening." This register follows the community and Leonard: status = Dormant (sleeping), now Reawakening.

THE COUNT

• Early 1960s: the last fluent first-language speaker died. Leonard (2008): "With the passing of the 'last' fluent speaker in the early 1960s, Miami really was a sleeping language for about thirty years." A commonly repeated specific year is 1962 for the last full first-language speaker (secondary summaries).
• A conflicting date, flagged not resolved: some reference mirrors give the last native speaker's death as 1989. The sources disagree; Leonard's scholarly account (early 1960s) is the one anchored to a named author and date, and this register gives it precedence while recording the conflict.
• 2016: an estimated ~500 tribal members used the language on a regular basis (estimate carried in the Miami-Illinois reference literature, 2016). This is a count of users/learners in the revival, not of first-language speakers, and must not be quoted as the latter.
• Baldwin's children were raised as native speakers of Miami — the first new first-language generation of the awakening (Myaamia Center record).

WHAT HAPPENED

• Forced division and removal: language shift to English only "had been occurring since the nineteenth century and was driven by the forced division of the Miami community in 1846" (Leonard 2008) — part of the community removed west under the Indian Removal era, part remaining in Indiana — "and English-only practices in the federal Indian boarding school system, among other reasons."
• By the time the last fluent speakers died in the early 1960s, transmission to children had already ceased; what remained was documentation and heritage, with "no individuals with substantial knowledge of the language" — Leonard's defining criterion of a sleeping language.

WHAT SURVIVES

• An unusually deep archive: documentation from French missionaries (late 17th–mid-18th century) through 19th- and 20th-century linguists such as Albert Gatschet — Baldwin and linguist David Costa located nearly 250 years' worth of documentation; the archive, much of it in the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives, is what the awakening is built from.
• David Costa, The Miami-Illinois Language (PhD dissertation 1994; book 2003) — the reconstruction of the language's grammar on which teaching materials rest.
• Daryl Baldwin, who taught himself Myaamia from the historic documents and raised his children speaking it, and the Myaamia Center (est. 2001) — a joint venture of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, which Baldwin directs; 2026 marks the Center's 25th anniversary. Its outputs include the Myaamia dictionary (myaamiadictionary.org), children's books, audio materials, apps, and a compilation of traditional stories recorded in the early 20th century from the last native speakers.
• Heritage education at scale: the Center reported 26 full- and part-time staff, 46 students, and around 120 graduates of the Myaamia Heritage Award Program at its 25th anniversary (2026 reporting) — programme figures, recorded as such, not speaker counts.

SOURCES

• Wesley Y. Leonard, "When Is an 'Extinct Language' Not Extinct? Miami, a Formerly Sleeping Language," in Indigenous Language Revitalization in the Americas (2008) — Ethnologue (Gordon 2005) "extinct" classification; last fluent speaker early 1960s; 1846 division and boarding schools; sleeping-language criteria.
• Myaamia Center / Miami University — Center mission, Baldwin biography, dictionary and programme resources; Daryl Baldwin, "Baldwin Reflects on Language Revitalization Efforts," aacimotaatiiyankwi.org (2026).
• "Miami–Illinois language," reference synthesis (accessed Oct 2026) — extinct in the 1960s; ~500 users (2016); conflicting 1989 date in some mirrors, flagged in the text above.
• Oxford Free Press, "Myaamia Center celebrates 25 years at Miami" (2026) — staff/student/graduate figures; ~250 years of documentation.

Yaghan / Yámana

• People / language: Yaghan (Yagán, Yámana) people; Yaghan language — a language isolate
• Region: Islands south of Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego to Cape Horn — the world's southernmost Indigenous population — centred today on Puerto Williams / Villa Ukika, Navarino Island, Chile (with communities also on the Argentine side)

STATUS

Extinct as a native-speaker language (2022), with rememberers and an active revitalisation effort. Cristina Calderón, the last known native (first-language) speaker, died on 16 February 2022, aged 93. She had said in 2017: "I'm the last speaker of Yaghan. Others can understand it but don't speak it or know it like I do." Yaghan people themselves survive — a Yaghan community, including Calderón's family, lives at Villa Ukika — so it is the language's native transmission, not the people, that this entry records as ended.

THE COUNT

• Late 19th century: 2,500–3,000 people (population estimate for the late 1800s carried in the Fuegian-language scholarship, after Aguilera).
• 1881–1883: from perhaps 3,000 to only 1,000 — the drop attributed to measles and smallpox epidemics in those years (Fuegian history summaries).
• 1933: as low as 40 people (same scholarship, after Aguilera).
• 16 February 2022: one native speaker → zero. Calderón was the last known native speaker at her death (AFP via NPR, 18 Feb 2022).
• Rememberers / partial speakers: NO sourced number exists. Calderón's own 2017 statement establishes that others "can understand it but don't speak it," but no census, UNESCO entry, or reporting located for this register puts a number on rememberers or partial speakers. This register records the fact and refuses to invent the figure.

WHAT HAPPENED

• Epidemic disease: in the 1880s about 90 percent of the Yaghan people died from infectious diseases Europeans brought (Nautilus, 2025, on the Bridges dictionary research); smallpox (including a serious epidemic in 1876), measles, whooping cough and typhoid are named across the record.
• Missionisation and settlement: from 1871 Anglican missions concentrated a nomadic canoe people into settlements; Chilean and Argentine settlement, sheep farming, and naval restrictions progressively ended the canoe-based life — today's Yaghan "can no longer canoe or boat freely due to restrictions by the Chilean Navy" (Nautilus).
• Discrimination against the language through the 20th century: many Yaghan "continued to die prematurely and faced discrimination for speaking the language" (Nautilus), driving shift to Spanish.

WHAT SURVIVES

• Thomas Bridges's Yaghan–English dictionary — compiled over more than a decade from the 1860s–70s; reported as about 30,000 words in the standard Yaghan summaries and as about 32,000 words in the recent dictionary research reporting. Both figures are given because the sources differ. Bridges also produced a grammar and translated the Gospel of Luke into Yaghan.
• Cristina Calderón's own work: recognised by the Chilean government as a "Living Human Treasure" in 2009 (under UNESCO's safeguarding convention framework); she spent her last years teaching, telling Yaghan stories, and making traditional reed baskets at Puerto Williams.
• Revitalisation led by her family: her granddaughter Cristina Zárraga and others are working to revitalise the language from the Bridges dictionary and from Calderón's recordings and teaching (Nautilus, 2025). Her daughter Lidia González Calderón, a Yaghan representative in Chile's Constitutional Convention, said on her death: "Everything I do in my work will be in your name."

SOURCES

• AFP via NPR, "Cristina Calderón, Chile's last known Yaghan speaker, dies at 93," 18 Feb 2022 — death at 93; 2017 "last speaker" statement; Living Human Treasure 2009.
• Nautilus, "How a Dictionary Is Helping Archaeologists Uncover the Yaghan Indigenous Culture" (2025) — ~90% died in the 1880s; Bridges dictionary c. 32,000 words; Zárraga revitalisation; naval restrictions.
• Fuegian population scholarship summaries (after Aguilera) — 2,500–3,000 late 19th c.; 3,000 → 1,000 (1881–83); 40 by 1933.
• "Yahgan people," reference synthesis (accessed Oct 2026) — Bridges grammar and 30,000-word dictionary; language isolate; Calderón (1928–2022) last full native speaker.

Taíno

• People / language: Taíno peoples of the Greater Antilles and Bahamas (Lucayan Taíno); Taíno language — Arawakan (Maipurean), the principal language of the Caribbean islands at Spanish contact
• Region: Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, the Bahamas, and parts of the Lesser Antilles and Florida Keys

STATUS — READ IN THREE LAYERS; DO NOT FLATTEN

The word "extinct" is applied to Taíno in textbooks. The evidence supports three different statements, and this register keeps them separate:

• Language: Taíno as a community language ceased. It was largely replaced by Spanish during the 16th century, though it may have been spoken in isolated areas into the 19th century. No first-language Taíno speech community is documented today. (Layer verdict: language — extinct as a community language, with reconstructed/revival varieties now taught by descendant communities; see What Survives.)
• Population genetics: Indigenous Caribbean ancestry demonstrably survives in present-day Caribbean people (2018 and 2020 ancient-DNA studies, below). (Layer verdict: ancestry — documented continuity, not total extinction.)
• Identity: Living communities in the Caribbean and its diaspora identify as Taíno and organise as Taíno — tribal groups, cultural centres, and the Smithsonian-recognised Taíno heritage movement. Their position, in the words of Taíno descendant and Smithsonian project member Jorge Estevez, is that the true story is "one of assimilation, certainly, but not total extinction." Genetics cannot by itself settle an identity claim, and this register does not use it to do so; it records the communities' own position as theirs. (Layer verdict: identity — living, asserted by the communities themselves; contested in some scholarship.)

THE COUNT

• At contact, the 2020 evidence cuts the old figure down: Fernandes et al., Nature (2020), analysing 263 ancient individuals — then the largest ancient-DNA study in the Americas — developed a method estimating the pre-contact Caribbean population at "likely in the tens of thousands, rather than the million or more reported by Columbus and his successors" (Florida Museum / Harvard Medical School summaries of the paper). Both figures are given: the million-plus is the colonial-era claim; the tens of thousands is the 2020 genetic estimate. Neither is a census.
• 2018 Lucayan genome (Schroeder et al., PNAS, 2018): a ~1,000-year-old Lucayan Taíno woman from Preacher's Cave, Eleuthera, Bahamas, sequenced to 12.4-fold coverage — the first ancient Caribbean genome. Compared against 104 contemporary Puerto Ricans (1000 Genomes Project), the 10–15% Native American ancestry in that sample was shown to be closely related to the ancient Bahamian genome — "demonstrating an element of continuity between precontact populations and present-day Latino populations in the Caribbean" (paper abstract).
• Colonial censuses still counted "indios" for centuries after the supposed disappearance: Puerto Rico's Spanish censuses recorded 1,756 individuals classified as "indio" in 1771 and 2,302 in 1778 (Figueroa, Breve Historia de Puerto Rico, via the Taíno-revival scholarship). Whatever the categories meant to the counters, the paperwork of extinction does not match the paperwork of the censuses.
• No sourced modern census count of Taíno people exists — modern states in the region do not enumerate a Taíno category — so none is given here.

WHAT HAPPENED

• 16th-century collapse: conquest, enslavement under the encomienda system, forced displacement, and epidemic disease (smallpox, measles) destroyed Taíno polities and the language's speech communities within generations of 1492. "Conquest, enslavement, forced displacement and disease transformed Indigenous Caribbean societies" — and survivors were absorbed into colonial society, which is precisely the mechanism (assimilation, intermarriage) by which ancestry and practices continued while the record declared the people gone.
• The extinction claim itself is a historical artefact: for centuries the assumption that the Taíno "had simply disappeared" rested on early colonial reports of decline. Contemporary historical research, archaeology, and genetic studies have challenged that narrative (Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Caribbean Indigenous Legacies Project, from 2011).

WHAT SURVIVES

• The loanword legacy — the largest of any entry in this register: Taíno was the first American language Europeans heard, and its words entered Spanish and then world languages: canoe, hammock, hurricane, barbecue, tobacco, maize, cassava, potato (batata), guava, papaya, iguana, savanna, manatee, mangrove, cay/key, cannibal, cacique — plus island and place names across the Caribbean (Cuba, Jamaica, Bahamas among the commonly listed derivations).
• Ancient-DNA documentation (2018; 2020) as above — evidence about ancestry, held separate from identity in this entry as in the studies' own careful framing.
• Living descendant/identity communities: Taíno organisations and cultural centres in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba (including the documented community around Caridad de los Indios, Guantánamo, studied by José Barreiro of the Smithsonian NMAI), Jamaica (including Maroon communities carrying Taíno practices), and the US diaspora; language-reconstruction teaching (e.g., the Naguaké Taíno community's Taíno-Borikenaíki, a reconstructed variety built from attested Taíno plus related Arawakan languages — recorded here as a reconstruction, not as survival of the classical language).

SOURCES

• Schroeder et al., "Origins and genetic legacies of the Caribbean Taino," PNAS 115 (2018), PMCID PMC5877975 — Lucayan genome, 12.4-fold coverage, continuity finding; University of Leiden NEXUS1492 summary — 104 Puerto Ricans, 10–15% ancestry figure.
• Fernandes et al. (Reich lab), "A genetic history of the pre-contact Caribbean," Nature (2020) — 263 ancient individuals; tens-of-thousands estimate; via Florida Museum of Natural History and Harvard Medical School reporting, Dec 2020.
• Smithsonian Magazine / Science reporting on the 2018 study — Jorge Estevez (NMAI) and Jada Benn Torres (Vanderbilt) statements.
• Figueroa, Breve Historia de Puerto Rico vol. 1 — 1771 (1,756) and 1778 (2,302) "indio" census figures, via Forte (ed.), Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean scholarship.
• "Taíno language," reference synthesis (accessed Oct 2026) — Arawakan classification; replaced in the 16th century, possibly spoken in isolated areas until the 19th; loanword list.

Akuntsu

• People / language: Akuntsu people; Akuntsú language — Tupari branch of the Tupi family
• Region: Rio Omerê (Igarapé Omerê) Indigenous Territory, Rondônia, western Brazil

STATUS

Critically endangered — a people of four, as of December 2025. The Akuntsu are not extinct: three women survived into 2025 as the people's only members, and a son was born on 8 December 2025. Whether the language and culture can transmit to that one child, whose father is Kanoê, is an open question the sources themselves leave open — FUNAI's president called the child "a symbol of the resistance of the Akuntsu people," not a guarantee. Observers cited across the record describe what was done to the Akuntsu as genocide; that characterisation is attributed here, not adopted as this register's own legal finding.

THE COUNT

Every figure below is dated; the sequence is the entry.

• Mid-1980s: a village of about 30 individuals. FUNAI teams found traces of a village "containing about thirty individuals" (Instituto Socioambiental, Povos Indígenas no Brasil — Akuntsu, from FUNAI local reporting); the same record says the group "probably experienced their last large conflict with whites" in that period.
• The massacre: more than 15 dead, named by the survivor. Konibu (Kunibu), the Akuntsu shaman and chief, recognised the pottery and tools FUNAI unearthed as his former village's, showed the scars on his own body, and "recalled with grief the names of the dead, which appeared to number more than fifteen" (ISA). In 1985 FUNAI found the physical evidence: "an entire Indian maloca had been bulldozed and covered with earth by ranchers in an attempt to hide the attack" (Survival International).
• October 1995, official contact: 7 people — two men, three adult women, and two young girls (FUNAI contact record, via ISA and Survival International: "Alarmingly, they numbered just seven people").
• January 2000: 6. The youngest girl died when a tree fell on her father's house during a storm.
• October 2009: 5. Ururú, the oldest member, died.
• 2016–2017: the last man dies; sources differ on the year and the arithmetic, flagged. One reference line states Konibu died in his sleep on 26 May 2016, bringing the population "down to four." The Associated Press's 2026 reporting states: "The last Akuntsu man died in 2017, leaving Pugapia, Aiga, and Babawru" — i.e., three women. Survival International's page (written earlier) already said "they now number just three" on the basis of the 2000 and 2009 deaths alone, which does not square with the 1995 count of seven either. This register adopts the AP/FUNAI 2026 position — three women (Pugapia and her daughters Aiga and Babawru) as the position before December 2025 — and records the 2016/four figure as an unresolved conflict in the secondary record.
• Beginning of 2025: 3 — Pugapia and her daughters Aiga and Babawru, all female (AP, Feb 2026).
• 8 December 2025: 4. Babawru — the younger daughter, in her 40s (FUNAI via the birth record: approximately 42) — gave birth to a boy, Akyp, at the Regional Hospital of Vilhena; the father is Purá (approximately 46), a Kanoê man (FUNAI, via AP, 27 Feb 2026). It was the first Akuntsu birth registered in three decades.

WHAT HAPPENED

• A government-backed development push: from the 1970s, Brazil's military-era occupation of the Amazon — the BR-364 highway across Rondônia, land titles promised to settlers who cleared forest — brought cattle ranchers, loggers, and land speculators into Akuntsu territory (Survival International; AP).
• Massacre by hired gunmen (mid-1980s): because official contact would make the forest an Indigenous reserve closed to ranching and logging, gunmen employed by ranchers attacked the Akuntsu; at least fifteen were killed (see Count). Pupak, the other Akuntsu man at contact, "was shot in the back as he fled the gunmen and still bears the scars" (Survival International).
• A territory recognised but not cleared: the 26,000-hectare Igarapé Omerê Indigenous Territory was delimited in 1999 and declared by the Ministry of Justice in December 2002 (ISA), shared with the Kanoê — yet ranchers' buildings, employees, and herds remained inside it, with FUNAI maintaining a permanent presence and expulsion cases in the courts (Survival International).

WHAT SURVIVES

• Four people (December 2025): Pugapia, Aiga, Babawru, and the infant Akyp, living in the Rio Omerê territory — an island of forest surrounded by cattle pasture and soy and corn fields (AP).
• The language, with its last speakers: Akuntsú is spoken by the surviving women; linguists have worked with the Akuntsu to record and understand their language (Survival International), including linguist Carolina Aragon, who has worked with both the Akuntsu and Kanoê and commented on Akyp's birth (AP).
• Daily contact and cooperation with the Kanoê — the neighbouring people (themselves severely reduced) who first told FUNAI of the Akuntsu in 1995, and with whom the Akuntsu now share hunting, harvesting, and ritual life; Akyp's father is Kanoê, making the child's upbringing itself the meeting point of the two peoples' survival.

SOURCES

• Associated Press (Gabriela Sá Pessoa), "With only 3 women left, an Amazon tribe faced extinction. An unexpected birth now brings hope," 27 Feb 2026 — three women at the start of 2025; Akyp born December 2025 (photo caption: 9 Dec 2025, "one day after the birth," FUNAI photo by Altair Algayer); last man died 2017; Joenia Wapichana (FUNAI president) statement; Carolina Aragon.
• Survival International, "Akuntsu" (peoples page, accessed Oct 2026) — 1995 contact via the Kanoê, seven people; 1985 bulldozed maloca; Pupak's wounds; territory invasion. Note: this page's "now number just three" predates the later deaths and is superseded on current numbers by AP 2026; used here for the 1985–1995 record.
• Instituto Socioambiental, Povos Indígenas no Brasil, "Akuntsu" — village of about 30 in the mid-1980s; more than fifteen named dead per Konibu; 26,000 ha territory, declared December 2002; March 2005 membership list from FUNAI's local representative.
• "Akuntsu," reference synthesis (accessed Oct 2026) — dated death sequence (2000, 2009, 2016) and the 8 Dec 2025 birth record naming Purá; the 2016 "down to four" line is the conflicting figure flagged in the Count above.

Wukchumni (Tule–Kaweah Yokuts)

• People / language: Wukchumni people, a Yokuts people; Wukchumni (Wikchamni) — the last surviving dialect of Tule–Kaweah Yokuts, Yokutsan family
• Region: East fork of the Kaweah River, San Joaquin Valley / Tulare County, California, USA

STATUS

Extinct as a native-speaker dialect (2021); a small number of new fluent speakers made by the last speaker's own teaching. Marie Wilcox was the last native speaker. At her death there were at least three fluent speakers — all of them learners she and her family had taught — and her great-great-grandson is being raised speaking the language, so the honest status line is double: the unbroken native line ended in 2021, and a taught line continues. On the EGIDS scale Wukchumni was categorised 8a, "moribund," in 2019.

THE COUNT

• 2014: one fluent speaker. "Wilcox was the only fluent speaker of Wukchumni in 2014" (New York Times, "Who Speaks Wukchumni?", 19 Aug 2014).
• 2021: at least three fluent speakers at her death — the product of Wilcox's dictionary work and the weekly classes she taught with her daughter (New York Times obituary, 6 Oct 2021; Washington Post, 8 Oct 2021). These are second-language fluent speakers; the native-speaker count went from one to zero.
• Death date — sources conflict, flagged: the New York Times obituary reports Marie Wilcox died 25 September 2021, aged 87, in Visalia, after her aorta ruptured. One line in the Wukchumni reference article gives 7 October 2021. This register follows the NYT obituary (25 September 2021) and records the discrepancy rather than silently choosing.

WHAT HAPPENED

• The Yokuts peoples of the San Joaquin Valley were reduced across the 19th and 20th centuries by the same California sequence documented throughout this register's California entries — mission and ranchero eras, Gold Rush-era violence, land loss, and schooling in English — until, of Tule–Kaweah's three dialects (Wukchumni, Yawdanchi, Bokninuwad), only Wukchumni still had a living speaker, and by the early 2010s, after a relative's death, that speaker was one woman.
• Wilcox's own account of the mechanism is personal and precise: her grandparents taught her the language; when her grandmother died she temporarily abandoned it; she returned to it when young tribal members showed interest in learning — transmission had narrowed to a single household line, and she chose to rebuild it deliberately.

WHAT SURVIVES

• The Wukchumni dictionary: Wilcox worked more than 20 years compiling it — remembering, relearning, and setting down the language — with her daughter Jennifer Malone and computer help from Nicholas Luna. The dictionary was copyrighted in 2019 but has not been published (status as last reported); she also recorded an oral/audio version with pronunciations, and traditional stories.
• The teaching line: Wilcox and Malone taught beginner and intermediate Wukchumni classes to tribal members around Tulare County; Malone continues the teaching (Owens Valley Career Development Center). At least three fluent speakers (above) and Oliver, Wilcox's great-great-grandson, being raised by her great-granddaughter Destiny Treglown as a Wukchumni speaker — if he reaches fluency he will be the first native speaker in four generations.
• The film: Marie's Dictionary (2014), a short documentary by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee (Global Oneness Project / New York Times Op-Docs), which carried her work worldwide and drew new learners to the classes.
• Revitalisation is additionally organised through the Master-Apprentice Language Learning Program (California).

SOURCES

• Katharine Q. Seelye, "Marie Wilcox, Who Saved Her Native Language From Extinction, Dies at 87," New York Times, 6 Oct 2021 — death 25 Sept 2021; last native speaker; at least three fluent speakers; daughter's teaching continues.
• Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, "Who Speaks Wukchumni?", New York Times, 19 Aug 2014 — only fluent speaker in 2014; dictionary in progress.
• "Wukchumni dialect" / "Tule–Kaweah Yokuts," reference syntheses (accessed Oct 2026) — EGIDS 8a moribund (2019); dictionary copyrighted 2019, unpublished; Master-Apprentice Program; the conflicting 7 Oct 2021 death date flagged in the Count above.
• Washington Post, "Marie Wilcox, who saved her tribe's language, dies," 8 Oct 2021 — at least three fluent speakers at her death.

Haida — X̱aad Kíl / X̱aayda Kil (Canadian choice)

• People / language: Haida Nation; Haida language (X̱aat Kíl, X̱aadas Kíl, X̱aayda Kil, Xaad Kil) — a language isolate, with Northern (Masset) and Southern (Skidegate) varieties and the Alaskan (Kaigani) dialect
• Region: Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, Canada; and Prince of Wales Island, Alaska, USA. Chosen for this register as the Canadian case because it is an isolate with a current, precisely published national-census count (Statistics Canada, 2021 Census, reported March 2025) and an explicit UNESCO Atlas classification — the two authorities the brief asked to be joined in one entry.

STATUS

Critically endangered — Northern Haida is classified Critically Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger. The language is not dormant: it has mother-tongue speakers, a majority of its current speakers learned it as a second language (a revitalisation signature), and an organised immersion movement. It is at the edge by the numbers below, not over it.

THE COUNT — read the definitions; the figures measure different things

• 245 people could speak Haida well enough to conduct a conversation (Canada-wide), and 105 had Haida as their mother tongue — Statistics Canada, Census of Population 2021, in Indigenous Language Families: Isolates and other Indigenous languages (released 31 March 2025; collaborative report with the Office of the Commissioner of Indigenous Languages). Averages from the same report: mother-tongue population average age 54 years; speaker population average age 43 years; only 34.7% of speakers acquired Haida as a mother tongue; 30 silent speakers (mother tongue, no longer able to converse); 155 people spoke Haida at home.
• 190 — a different, narrower count, not a contradiction: Statistics Canada's 2021 Census in Brief, Indigenous languages across Canada (Cat. 98-200-X, March 2023), Table 1 counts First Nations people in British Columbia who could speak the language: Haida 190 in 2021, down 56.3% from 2016. The 245 figure is Canada-wide and all respondents; the 190 is the BC First Nations subset. Both are Statistics Canada; they answer different questions.
• Fluent Elders are far fewer than conversational speakers: a January 2024 Mission & Service (United Church of Canada) story on the Skidegate immersion work reported that nine Elders — average age over 80 — represent about half of the fluent Haida speakers who remain, implying roughly two dozen or fewer fully fluent speakers. This is community-project reporting, not a census, and "fluent" is a stricter bar than the census's "well enough to conduct a conversation" — the gap between ~18–20 fluent Elders and 245 conversational speakers is the difference between those two bars, and this register states both rather than merging them.
• Historical scale, as reported, flagged as such: the same 2024 story states "once there were over 15,000 fluent speakers of Haida." That is the story's figure, not a sourced census baseline, and it is recorded here as a reported claim, not as a register count.

WHAT HAPPENED

• Residential schools and assimilation policy: "because of assimilation tactics like residential schools, almost all Haida people speak English at home" (United Church story, 2024) — children were punished out of the language, which is why the fluent remnant is concentrated among Elders over 80 and why so many of today's speakers are adult second-language learners (65.3% of Haida speakers learned it as a second language — Statistics Canada, 2021 Census).
• The speaker decline within living memory is in the census itself: −56.3% among BC First Nations speakers between the 2016 and 2021 censuses (Statistics Canada, 2023) — even as learner numbers province-wide rose (First Peoples' Cultural Council, Report on the Status of B.C. First Nations Languages, 4th ed. 2022: province-wide, 3,370 speakers, 6,985 semi-speakers, and 17,103 learners across all 34 B.C. First Nations languages — B.C.-wide programme totals, not Haida figures).

WHAT SURVIVES

• The language, spoken: 245 conversational speakers (2021), a living mother-tongue core of 105, and 30 silent speakers identified by Statistics Canada itself as a reclamation resource.
• Immersion and teaching on Haida Gwaii: the Skidegate Haida Immersion Program's Elder-led work — the nine Elders teaching words, phrases, songs and stories through the Longhouse at Skidegate, with more than 120 online lessons reaching learners worldwide (United Church, 2024).
• Haida-language art as transmission: the feature film Edge of the Knife (Haida: SG̱aawaay K̓uuna, 2018), made in Haida with Elder speakers — cast member Sphenia Jones spoke Haida on screen for the first time in more than 60 years, having been taken to residential school as a girl.
• Institutional standing: Haida is an official language of the Council of the Haida Nation, and is recognised in Alaska; documentation and archives sit with the Alaska Native Language Archive tradition and B.C.'s FirstVoices / First Peoples' Cultural Council programmes.

SOURCES

• Statistics Canada, Indigenous Language Families: Isolates and other Indigenous languages, 31 Mar 2025 (2021 Census) — 245 speakers; 105 mother tongue; average ages 43 / 54; 34.7% mother-tongue acquisition; 30 silent speakers; 155 home users; 65.3% second-language speakers.
• Statistics Canada, Indigenous languages across Canada, Census in Brief, Cat. 98-200-X, issue 2021012, March 2023 (2016 & 2021 Censuses) — BC First Nations table: Haida 190, −56.3%.
• UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger — Northern Haida: Critically Endangered (classification as carried in the Haida language reference record).
• United Church of Canada, "Preserving Culture through Language Revitalization," Jan 2024 — nine Elders ≈ half of fluent speakers; "over 15,000" historical claim (flagged in text); 120+ online lessons; residential schools.
• First Peoples' Cultural Council, Report on the Status of B.C. First Nations Languages, 4th ed. 2022 — B.C.-wide totals (3,370 speakers; 17,103 learners), context only.

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