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Peratrovich facts

Published on February 11th, 2010

By ALASKA NEWSPAPERS STAFF

• Alaska passed its own civil rights legislation two decades earlier than the country as a whole passed similar legislation, the first state to pass such a law since Civil War times.

• Two years prior to her death, Elizabeth attended a monthlong program at Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn., on adult Indian education, according to Loretta Montgomery, her daughter.

Frank Peratrovich said his mother heard Martin Luther King Jr. speak at the university on how to desegregate churches. She was quite impressed with Martin Luther King, he said.

• Elizabeth Peratrovich died in 1958 of cancer. In 1988, the Alaska Legislature designated Feb. 16, the day the act was signed into law, as Elizabeth Peratrovich Day.

• Nine days before the first Elizabeth Peratrovich Day celebration in 1989, Roy Sr. died.

• Their eldest son, artist Roy Peratrovich Jr., sculpted a bronze bust of his mother, which is displayed on the ground floor lobby of the Alaska State Capitol. Roy Jr. is also nearing completion of a soaring statue for Peratrovich Park in Anchorage, which honors his parents' name.

Because his mother is from the Raven clan, the monument is titled "Flight of the Raven."

He said it will show a simile of his parents bringing light to the world just as the raven did in the Tlingit creation story.

• Roy Jr. said it took people years to realize what his mother had done and he credits a family scrapbook his father kept as the trigger that helped recognize Elizabeth for her work. In it are the accomplishments of Roy and Elizabeth Peratrovich and correspondences with government leaders.

Copies are housed at the Alaska Heritage Museum and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

• Roy Sr. was elected grand president of the Alaska Native Brotherhood in 1940 and served in that capacity for five years. Elizabeth was grand president of the Alaska Native Sisterhood in 1945, the year the bill was passed.

• In the family scrapbook preface, Roy Jr. writes: "It is important to note that the speech my mother gave to the Territorial Senate in 1945 was never officially recorded. ... I am told mother never had any speaking notes; however, she and dad had prepared themselves the night before this particular session of the Territorial Senate by trying to anticipate questions that night asked by opponents to the Anti-Discrimination Bill."

• The Peratrovichs, both Ketchikan High School graduates, felt the sting of discrimination when they moved to Juneau.

They didn't want their three children to grow up in a society that said that was right. Instead of teaching their children to hate back, the Peratroviches showed them how change is accomplished: Through constant work and passion; through hope and perseverance.