Opinion: Alaska Natives play big role in shaping state history

Monday, May 9, 2011  

"Six years before our country gave women suffrage, Alaska granted women the right to vote. In 1922, a Tlingit chief, Charlie Jones, was jailed for voting. His protest led to Native Alaskans getting the right to vote two years before Native Americans. In 1944, Roberta Schenck, a Native woman, sat in the "White's Only" section of the movie theatre in Nome. She was dragged out and jailed. Schenck was Alaska's Rosa Parks. Because of her bravery and the moving testimony of Elizabeth Peratrovich, Territorial Gov. Ernest Gruening signed an anti-discrimination law on February 16, 1945.

A total of eight men have been executed in Alaska; two white, three Native, one "unknown" and two African- Americans. Seventy-five percent of convicted murderers were white, yet 75 percent of those executed were not. The ratio didn't add up. Botched executions resulted in decapitation and extensive hang time. In 1957, the Territory of Alaska abolished the death penalty.

We are an unlikely bunch of environmentalists. In 1958, the Inupiat village of Point Hope protested the nuclear detonation of Project Chariot to create a port on the North Slope. As a "thank you," the federal government buried the contamination from the 1962 Nevada Test Site at the Chariot location. The cancer rates are staggering."

Get the Story:
Shannyn Moore: From Alaska's origins to today, liberalism has shaped our lives (The Anchorage Daily News 5/8)