Editor’s note: Links to biographies of all ten honorees are included in this story.
Ten women will be inducted into the Alaska Women’s Hall of Fame on Tuesday October 21, including Joaqlin Estus, one of Alaska’s first Native journalists.
Estus lives in Anchorage and is now retired. She most recently was a national correspondent for Indian Country Today. She has also worked as news director at KNBA.
Estus is Lingít with ties to Wrangell, but she is not the only Alaska Native to be honored this year.
“Another Alaska Native is my great grandmother, Tillie Paul-Tamaree,” Estus said. “She was a civil rights leader in the early 20th century.”
Estus says it is an honor to be inducted along with her great-grandmother.
“It’s fascinating,” said, Bonnie Jack one of the organizers of the Alaska Women’s Hall of Fame program. “It wasn’t done intentionally.”
Jack says both Estus and her great-grandmother were nominated separately by different people.
Last week, when Estus helped to co-host KNBA’s live coverage of the Alaska Federation of Natives convention, she talked about how her great-grandmother got arrested in 1922.
“She was walking down the street, and she saw Charlie Jones, Chief Shakes,” Estus said. “She stopped to visit with him, and he had just been kicked out of voting.”
Estus says her great-grandmother accompanied Chief Shakes back to the polls, where he was again refused the right to vote. The poll workers told Shakes they couldn’t let him vote, because he wasn’t a citizen. The two were indicted. Tamaree’s son, William Paul, later successfully defended them.
Tamaree’s husband, Louis Paul, started the Alaska Fisherman Newspaper, which reported Native news in the 1920’s. Paul’s brother, William, Sr., was a lawyer who wrote blistering articles about racism and helped lay the foundation for the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.
“My family was considered by the white communities they lived in as rabble rousers,” Estus said. But through her father, Paul Estus, who came from a farming family in Missouri, Estus had a window into two worlds. In his job as editor of the Wrangell Sentinel, Paul exposed his daughter to the issues of the day.
Before moving to Wrangell, Estus grew up as a small child in California. She said she had not yet felt the racial hatred some Alaska Natives experienced in Wrangell. She initially felt culture shock -- but a turning point came when she realized she wanted to be a force for healing and harmony -- to make it her life mission to educate Alaskans about the beauty and richness of Native history and culture.
When she moved to Juneau in 1985 to take a state job as an Alaska Coastal Management program coordinator, a path presented itself.
She volunteered at KTOO, the public radio station in Juneau. Soon, she found herself with a new job, helping to launch Southeast Alaska’s first programs on Native issues.
Estus’ talents soon caught the attention of larger markets like Minnesota Public Radio, but she later returned to Alaska to work in journalism and public relations.
In her decade as communications director at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, she held monthly training sessions on Alaska Native history and culture. She also published the statewide Mukluk Telegraph, pioneering ways to build bridges across Alaska.
Estus’ bridge building goes beyond journalism. In 2023, she worked to produce materials to convince the national Presbyterian Church to apologize for the church’s racist actions against Dr. Walter Soboleff, a Lingít minister, whose popular church had been torn down. She is also one of the primary organizers of the Sharing Our Knowledge Conference in Southeast Alaska, which brings academics, researchers and Alaska Natives together for a week of cross-cultural learning. She is one of the founding members of the Alaska Native Media Group, which mentors Native communications professionals.
Two other Alaska Natives are being inducted into the Hall of Fame, Katherine Gottlieb and the late Ada Blackjack Johnson.
Gottlieb is a Supiaq leader in Native health care, who served for 30 years as president of Southcentral Foundation.
Johnson was Inupiaq and the sole survivor of a doomed Arctic expedition in the 1920s. Ada’s granddaughter will share her story.
Four other inductees to the Alaska Women’s Hall of Fame will be part of Tuesday’s ceremony along with Joaqlin Estus:
- Judy Caminer of Anchorage. She created the Chugach Park Fund.
- Lisa Parker of Soldotna, who spent 20 years in Cook Inlet’s oil and gas Industry
- Sue Sheriff of Fairbanks, a literacy advocate.
- Dr. Rosalyn Singleton of Anchorage, who worked to vastly improve the rate of immunization in Alaska.
Two other women are being recognized after their death:
- Dorothy Urback, a Seward businesswoman who died last year.
- Fanny Quigley, a pioneer mining legend, who sold meals from a tent in Denali.
The ceremony for the new inductees starts at 6:00 p.m., Tuesday, Oct. 21. To watch the livestream, go to the Alaska Women’s Hall of Fame website. A recording of the presentation will remain on the website.
