Benedict Jones

Benedict Jones was born in 1933 to Jesse Nelson Jones and Harry Jones at a fish camp where the village of Koyukuk, Alaska is currently located. Benedict has lived in Koyukuk most of his life, except for 20 years from 1970-1990 when he was in Fairbanks working as a highway maintenance operator. Benedict is well known in the middle Yukon River area as a sprint dog musher and subsistence expert. In winter, he spends lots of time at his trapping camp along the Koyukuk River, and in summer he is often out fishing for salmon. Benedict served on the federal Western Interior Regional Subsistence Advisory Council and on the State of Alaska's Western Arctic Caribou Herd Co-Management Planning team. In 1959, Benedict married Eliza Peter from Cutoff, Alaska, near Huslia, and they had nine children. After retirement, the couple moved from Fairbanks back to Koyukuk, where Benedict has remained active in the community, continues to live a subsistence lifestyle and pass his knowledge on to the younger generation, works with wildlife managers and scientists to document traditional knowledge, and participates in language preservation efforts, including in recent years an effort to document traditional place names in the Koyukuk River region.