Longtime Chilkat Valley resident Marilyn Wilson died June 26. She would have been 88 this month.
Wilson was born Aug. 3, 1938, in Juneau to Norwegian mother Nancy Burke and Lingít father Ben Wright of Angoon. Marilyn was Teikweidí, brought in by the late Esther Shea of Ketchikan, and her Tlingit name was Gush gu ge’. She spent much of her youth in Skagway, as well as in Angoon with her father’s mother, who raised her on a daily breakfast of oatmeal and seal oil.
In an interview earlier this year, Wilson described growing up as one of the few Alaska Native students in Skagway, and at one point, on a school trip to a movie theater, being forced to sit in segregated seating, alongside her future husband, Paul Wilson.
“I don’t want to think about the bad things,” Wilson said of the memory. “We all know they happened. We have to figure out what to do about it.”
Doing something about it is how Wilson spent decades — fighting for Alaska Native self-governance and to preserve traditional ways of life. She was a chapter president and Grand Camp Executive Council member in the Alaska Native Sisterhood (ANS) and served for years on the Federal Subsistence Board and on the Chilkoot Indian Association Tribal Council.
Wilson had high standards for those around her. When there wasn’t kindergarten in Skagway for her children, she homeschooled them, with “flash cards and math class and everything. She made up for the no school and then some,” said son Stanley Wilson.
Son Paul Kelly Wilson remembers one time years later, when he had committed to go help a friend fishing, but stayed out late the night before at the Fogcutter. Come time to fish in the morning, he was still in bed.
“She woke me up with an ice-cold pitcher of water and dumped it over me,” Paul Wilson said, remembering how his mother responded. “I was hungover, dragging butt, and she was just saying, ‘you said you’d do something, so you get up and do it.’”
She held to those principles through the decades, said friend Georgiana Hotch. Come retirement age, Hotch, also a longtime ANS member, said she felt like she had “paid her dues,” and wanted to step back from the organization. “I didn’t want to work so hard anymore, but she wouldn’t have it,” Hotch remembers. “‘You have work to do,’ she told me. “She was very blunt.”
“I just loved her,” Hotch said. “It’s hard to find friends like that, that talk to you so openly. I never took any insult.”
Wilson held herself to the same high standards. She leaves behind an office filled with a lengthy paper trail — stacks of ANS resolutions and meticulous research from her years of service. She had been teaching herself to use a new laptop to continue her work and recordkeeping.
Wilson and husband Paul would teach younger generations about how to harvest and prepare traditional foods, including bringing back to life the processing of fresh hooligan for hooligan oil on the Chilkat River.
As teachers, their instruction was always very specific, said relative X̱’unei Lance Twitchell. “It was always, ‘it’s in the brine for seven minutes, and when that timer goes off you’re getting it out of that brine.’ They’d tell us about the need to return salmon parts to the river in specific ways: don’t just leave it on the river bank, don’t just throw it out your car. It’s a process to acknowledge this relationship between the salmon and people.”
Much of the work she put in, like teaching, extended beyond her official leadership positions.
Her children remember her learning to cook and bake double batches: one cake to sell at a fundraiser, one identical cake for the house.
Twitchell said along with his grandmother, Wilson would focus on the grandkids that “needed it the most.”
“They had enough love to go around, but they had a way of knowing who needed that right now. She had expectations of how you were supposed to live and behave. They’d chew you out if you did the wrong thing, but in terms of letting you have your own identity, you could be yourself and they’d love you.”
Paul Kelly Wilson remembers growing up surrounded by community — gatherings with the Sisterhood, churches, the Elks, the American Legion, the women’s auxiliaries, and the women’s Emblem Club, gatherings at the house. It was a web of organizations and friendships his mother loved, he said, and they returned the love in kind.
When hard times came and the family considered moving out of town, Paul Kelly Wilson says elders around the valley “showed them so much love it coaxed them into staying.”
“What do you do when people show you all that love and kindness and respect?” he said. “You just return it in kind.” Along with passing down their strongly held faith, Paul Kelly Wilson said, “that’s the way my mom and dad always put it into our heads.”
There was no doubt, many said, that what Wilson received back from the community was well earned by what she had given.
For decades, no one left the Wilson house hungry. They were given fish or hooligan oil to take home, or invited to a picnic or barbecue. Twitchell remembers sitting around dinner at their home talking about what they’d be having for breakfast, “because we had so much fun just sharing meals together,” he said.
In her later years, Wilson enjoyed exercise classes at the pool, lunch at the Haines Senior Center, and frequent visits from family.
She retained a long list of champions and admirers in town. She saw the product of her life’s work too, in how some things changed. She attended this year’s Elizabeth Peratrovich Day celebration, the first one to bring together students from the Haines School and the Klukwan School.
“We were made to feel low,” Wilson said at the time, explaining why she had put so many years into organizing the celebration. “Our kids are proud, and that needed to be done.”
Wilson was focused on sharing what she had — a vault of knowledge and history, as some described her — with those who would come next: her children, grandchildren, and younger community members.
When Twitchell was learning Lingít and the history of his family tree, he’d ask around for bits of information, and people would tell him, “go ask Auntie Marilyn,” he remembers.
“That’s how we put these pieces back together. I think it was her loving job to remember who everyone was and how we’re all connected.”
Wilson is survived by her children Stanley Wilson, LaVerne Bryant (Eddie), Paul Kelly Wilson (Marlene), Duane Wilson (Jennifer), and Mariah; her grandchildren James (Amanda), Aaron (Roslyn), Lee, Mary (Ted), Josh (Tanisha), Hannibal, Bradley, Polly (Dylan), Saldie, Zachary, and Liam; great-grandchildren Kennedy, Keira, Nayellie, Caleb, Kyle, Cassandra and Ellis; many nieces, nephews, and many of “her kids” that called her mom and grandma; and by her siblings Dolly and Jackie, and sister-in-law Beatrice.
Wilson was preceded in death by her parents; son Bradley; brothers Arnold, Alex, and Kadashaan; and her husband Paul.