The Myth of Elizabeth: History, Memory, and Race in Alaska, 1867–2020

• Main Author: Coen, Ross
• Other Authors: Findlay, John
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: American history; Native American studies; Black history; History; tlingit; Tsimshian; Tsimshian*; Alaska
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1773/47589

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2021 This dissertation examines a pivotal moment in the history of Alaska Native civil rights, the enactment of an anti-discrimination law in 1945 that guaranteed equal access to public facilities without regard to color or race, to show how such stories become mythologized in public memory. Sponsored by the Alaska Native Brotherhood, an Indigenous rights organization comprised of Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian peoples of Southeast Alaska, the law passed following a contentious debate in the territorial legislature in which Elizabeth Peratrovich (Tlingit) delivered impassioned testimony that refuted the bigotry of anti-equal rights legislators. Rightfully canonized as a civil rights hero, Peratrovich is today the most famous woman in Alaska history with a state holiday in her honor. As with other figures from historically marginalized groups, such as Sacagawea, Harriet Tubman, and Rosa Parks, however, the story of Peratrovich’s heroism has been exaggerated, embellished, and even falsified for the purpose of turning it into a myth, a term that in this context refers to a people’s collective memory about their past, which helps to sustain certain beliefs about the world and their place in it. Accordingly, the story of Alaska’s anti-discrimination law has been coopted by numerous groups and individuals for the purpose of validating social and political imperatives of the present moment in which the story was being told. In particular, White Alaskans have cited Peratrovich as evidence of White-Native reconciliation and the supposed achievement of full equality for all, both of which function to erase Indigeneity from the historical record, justify the settler colonial appropriation of Native lands, and perpetuate the marginalization of Natives from state institutions. Drawing on both Native testimonies and records of Alaska’s White-dominated political institutions, this dissertation shows how Indigenous histories are regularly framed according to settler colonial prerogatives and shaped by the interaction of myth, memory, and history.