Yurok people see victory in decades-long effort to revive language
Renaming of California state park to Sue-meg after nearly a century comes after language was nearly destroyed
Skip Lowry interacts with nature much like his Yurok ancestors did – in the Indigenous Yurok language. There’s the original name for a purple flower, low-slung Yurok homes and sweet huckleberries. “Our worldview is harbored within the language,” said Lowry. He has been working for years to master the language and now works as a California state parks interpreter, guiding visitors through the Indigenous history of a state park on the foggy northern California coast.
Yurok members have always referred to the state park where Lowry works – a craggy point north of Eureka – as Sue-meg, but for around 150 years the region was known as Patrick’s Point and the park, established in 1929, kept the name. Patrick refers to Patrick Beegan, an Irish settler who built a cabin on the peninsula in 1851 and fled the area after his arrest on charges of killing a Yurok boy. He later resurfaced in the historical record for instigating an attempted massacre of Indigenous people in the region.
