Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
in one door and Elizabeth Peratrovich comes out another. Dressed in one of those magnifi-
cent Tlingit button blankets, she dances her way on stage, back to the audience as is tradi-
tional in Tlingit dancing. When the dance is done, she doffs the blanket and spreads it
gently across the front of the stage, where it remains throughout the rest of her one-wo-
man performance of “When My Spirit Raised It's Hands: The Story of Elizabeth Peratro-
vich.” It is a big bright splash of red and black and mother-of-pearl, and it never lets the
audience forget that Elizabeth Peratovich was first and foremost a Tlingit Indian of South-
east Alaska, and proud of it.
She is slim and elegant in a neat navy blue suit with a soft white blouse and white
gloves, hair done up in a smooth French roll beneath a white pillbox hat. She looks like
she should be taking tea with Jacqueline Kennedy at the White House. She speaks clearly
in a soft voice of immense power and dignity. “I realize I don't look like the picture book
Indians,” she tells us, “but I am most certainly Tlingit.”
At this point I have surrendered completely to the illusion, it's not Diane up there any-
more, it's Elizabeth Peratrovich come back to life, and I'm an eyewitness to events that
have shaped the land in which I was born.
To be civilized, according to white America, Elizabeth tells us, is not to speak Tlingit,
not to wear traditional garments like the button blanket spread across the foot of the stage,
not to dance the traditional Tlingit dances at all, not to eat Native foods. Her husband,
Roy, president of the Alaska Native Brotherhood, wants to leave their village “to fight dis-
crimination in the territorial legislature in Juneau.” Elizabeth, president of the Alaska Nat-
ive Sisterhood, is reluctant to leave home but knows the fight must be fought.
In Juneau, she finds discrimination made manifest by a sign in the window of Mel's
Diner:
NO NATIVES OR DOGS
Elizabeth removes the sign and places it in the window of the U.S. Army Recruiting
Station, in front of the panel that reads “We Want You.”
