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Marie's Dictionary
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Marie's Dictionary

2014 · EN · STATUS: [ STREAMING ]

Marie Wilcox is the last fluent speaker of Wukchumni, a language once spoken by a Native American tribe in California's San Joaquin Valley. The film follows her at her kitchen table, typing entries into a dictionary she has spent seven years building word by word, sounding out pronunciations into a recorder so future generations can hear the language spoken correctly. Her daughter, Jennifer Malone, helps organize the project and records Marie reading through the growing word list, while family members talk about growing up hearing fragments of Wukchumni but never learning it themselves. Interviews trace how government boarding schools and decades of assimilation pressure stripped the language down to a single elderly speaker, and the dictionary emerges as an attempt to reverse that before it disappears entirely. The camera lingers on Marie's hands working the keyboard and her face as she recalls words her mother used. It is a small, specific portrait of what it looks like to try to save a language alone.