Ernestine Hayes

Ernestine Saankaláxt Hayes (born 1945) is a Tlingit author and an Emerita professor at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau, Alaska. She belongs to the Wolf House of the Kaagwaaataan clan of the Eagle side of the Tlingit Nation. Hayes is a memoirist, essayist, and poet. She served as Alaska State Writer Laureate 2017–2018.

Hayes was born in Juneau at the end of the Second World War when Alaska was still a territory. For the first several years of her life, Hayes lived with her grandmother in the Juneau Indian Village while her mother was in and out of hospitals for tuberculosis. At the age of fifteen, Hayes and her mother moved to California, where Hayes lived for twenty-five years. Provided by Wikipedia