Tuesday’s Elizabeth Peratrovich Day celebration brought a new first, at least in recent memory: the Haines and Klukwan schools joining together to celebrate the Alaska Native civil rights pioneer. But by and large, much of the celebration has become familiar, and a yearly tradition for the current generation of students.

It wasn’t always that way, said some longtime Chilkat Valley residents, including parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents gathered alongside the students in the Haines High School bleachers for the event. 

It was a message former mayor Jan Hill delivered to the crowd, before leading the Chilkat Dancers during Tuesday’s celebration. Said Hill, a Haines High graduate, “we didn’t get to celebrate Elizabeth Peratrovich Day when some of us were in school here.” 

It’s been 81 years since Alaska’s anti-discrimination bill passed the territorial legislature, spearheaded by Peratrovich’s activism. The bill outlawed segregation, which, though lifetimes ago for the students at Tuesday’s celebration, remains living memory in the community. 

“My mother is still alive and my mother had to live through the era when there were signs in Juneau businesses that said no dogs and no Indians,” said Skeenyáa tláa Tuesday afternoon. 

Others grew up in the direct aftermath of the bill, and remember discrimination continuing in different forms despite changes to the law.

Longtime Peratrovich Day organizer Marilyn Wilson grew up in Skagway in the 1950s — an Alaska Native student in a nearly all-white high school class. 

“People were prejudiced against Natives,” Wilson said. “Sometimes they don’t know any better, because that’s the way they were raised. They had false notions about our culture.” 

On one high school basketball trip to Whitehorse, Wilson remembers she and her husband-to-be were pulled away from the rest of the class in a movie theater and forced to sit in segregated seating.

Wilson, who later settled in the Chilkat Valley, went on to become an Alaska Native Sisterhood chapter secretary, then president. It was as Alaska Native Sisterhood Grand President that Peratrovich testified in front of the territorial legislature in 1945. 

“We worked hard,” Wilson remembers, of the Alaska Native Sisterhood. 

Her oldest son, Stanley Wilson, remembers the same.  As a young child seeing his mother speaking on the ANS podium, Wilson said he remembers thinking, “so these are the people that stole my mother.”

Marilyn Wilson long pulled double duty between the organization and her family, raising five children. 

“When we had fundraisers I’d bake a cake or a pie,” she said. “I learned quickly I had to bake double batches, bake a cake for home.”

Through it all, Wilson saved and still has a thorough paper trail, including documents and resolutions, recording the work being done. Including, she said, the Alaska Native Sisterhood starting programs in school to recognize Alaska Native culture, making today’s celebrations possible.

Stanley Wilson said he recognized the same: the history being made.

“To be a witness to our history through my mother’s eyes and her actions, to witness it as a son, I’m blessed with it,” Wilson said this week. 

But growing up in the Chilkat Valley, two decades after his mother’s own high-school experience, Stanley Wilson recalls the prejudice persisting. Sometimes it was interpersonal: one friend and classmate, who lived just blocks away, had parents who wouldn’t let Wilson inside their home — because he was Native, as Wilson understood it. 

Others say they had similar experiences in those decades. 

Mary Jane Valentine, sitting near Marilyn Wilson in the bleachers during Tuesday’s celebration, recalled a local police officer telling her future husband not to marry her on account of her race.

But discrimination took more tangible forms as well, some said. The Wilson family owned on front street. In the late 1950s, it was seized, the Wilsons said, because of unpaid property taxes. Marilyn Wilson says she had been in Skagway before the property and was on the way to junior college in Sitka when she heard it had been seized. Neither she, nor her parents, ever received a property tax bill, she said. 

The Wilson family’s property was on land around modern-day downtown that Stanley Wilson said was village land — largely Native families. Much of that land transferred ownership under similar circumstances to the Wilsons, according to one Chilkat Valley oral history, held in the Haines Sheldon Museum archives.

“People would come in and pick up the property by paying the back taxes on it, so people weren’t even understanding why they lost their land, let alone why somebody else was able to get it for the lousy fifty bucks or something,” said Lee Heinmiller in the 2003 oral history, in conversation with Richard Young. 

As for Stanley Wilson, he believes the former village areas around downtown would still be in the possession of Native families had they been treated fairly. 

In the oral history, Young tells Heinmiller that “when we get down to land issues, it gets too sensitive to even really discuss it.” 

Those tensions around how to discuss the issue is also perhaps a small difference between the older and younger Wilson.

“I find my son thinks about all the bad things,” Marilyn Wilson said. “I don’t want to think about the bad things. We all know they happened. We have to figure out what to do about it.” 

The “doing something about it” is why Wilson said she makes an effort to get a ride over to the Peratrovich Day celebration each year. To her, it’s a manifestation of years of work from generations of people. And progress too, though still far from any kind of finish line. 

“I think there always will be discrimination,” Wilson said. “But we have to act accordingly, act on what we want to happen. What the ANS did in my lifetime here in Haines, we tried our best to change it. Look at the Elizabeth Peratrovich Day program at the school. All those children, all the adults — some of them we worked with when they were children — that’s the culmination.”

At the celebration, Hill said she noticed this year most of the students remembered what they had been taught in past years. “After the first lesson, they were singing and dancing with us and doing all the right motions we’ve been teaching them.”

That’s what Wilson has seen too. 

“We were made to feel low,” Wilson said. “Our kids are proud, and that needed to be done.”