Cindy Kilpatrick and Cyni Crary standing at the entrance to Alaska's Suffrage Star, the newest exhibit at the Nolan Center.
Photos of Tillie Paul Tamaree and Charlie Jones, featured as a part of a new museum exhibit on the suffrage movement in Alaska.
The Nolan Center's newest museum exhibit, "Alaska's Suffrage Star," opened for public viewing on July 1 last week. The exhibit covers the history of the women's suffrage movement in Alaska, how activists worked to be part of a nationwide movement to give women the right to vote. The exhibit shares the stories of several Alaskan activists, some of them Wrangell locals.
One Wrangellite featured in the exhibit is Tillie Paul Tamaree. Tamaree was a Tlingit woman of the Teeyhittaan Raven clan, according to the exhibit about her. She worked as a tribal historian, teacher, and translator in Wrangell. According to the exhibit, she was one of the founding members of New Covenant Legion, an organization that would later become the Alaska Native Brotherhood, and helped create a Tlingit dictionary. Tamaree also helped advance the cause of suffrage in the 1920s, by helping a relative vote.
"Charlie Jones was turned away by election officials when he attempted to vote in 1922," a placard in the Nolan Center reads. "His relative and English interpreter, Tillie Paul Tamaree, heard what happened and convinced him they should make it right. Together they returned, Charlie Jones successfully voted, and both were promptly arrested."
The exhibit goes on to explain that Jones was arrested for illegal voting and perjury, while Tamaree was charged with "inducing an Indian not entitled to vote to vote in an election." Her charges were dismissed, and Jones was found not guilty of his charges.
In 1924, according to the exhibit, Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act. This granted American citizenship to all Alaska native men and women born in the United States, thus granting them the right to vote.
Other activists featured in the exhibit include Nellie Cashman, the first woman to vote in an Alaskan territorial election, Cornelia Hatcher, prohibition activist, and Lena Morrow Lewis, the first Alaskan woman to run for federal office. The museum is also featuring special screenings of films on Thursday afternoons, on the topic of the suffrage movement.
Alaska's Suffrage Star exhibit will be featured in Wrangell until August 7.
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