Tillie Paul

Tillie Paul (January 18, 1863 – August 20, 1952) was a Tlingit translator, civil rights advocate, educator, and Presbyterian church elder.

Matilda Kinnon was born in Victoria, British Columbia, the younger daughter of a Tlingit mother named Kut-XooX, and a Scottish father named James Kinnon, who was employed by the Hudson's Bay Company. After her mother died from tuberculosis, young Tillie was raised by a maternal aunt and uncle in Wrangell, Alaska. Her adoptive family gave her the name "Kah-tah-ah." Later she returned to using the name "Tillie Kinnon" when she was admitted to Amanda McFarland's Presbyterian Home and School for Girls.

Tillie Paul worked as a translator and missionary educator within the Presbyterian Church. Paul started a school at Klukwan, Alaska with her first husband, Louis Paul, in the mid-1880s; they were the first Native American couple commissioned as missionaries by the Board of Home Missions. A few years later, as a widow with three very young sons, she moved to Sitka, Alaska to work at Sitka Industrial Training School, where she served as matron of the girls' dormitory, occasionally as a teacher or nurse. She also lectured on Tlingit culture in Sitka as a member of the Society of Alaskan Natural History and Ethnology.

With a fellow teacher, Fannie Willard, she created an alphabet for writing Tlingit language, and compiled a Tlingit dictionary. She learned to play the organ to bring music to more school and church events. Some of her translated hymns and prayers are still in use among Tlingit Christians today. Tillie Paul helped to found the New Covenant Legion in 1905, a Christian temperance organization intended to reach Native communities considered especially at risk from alcohol abuse. The New Covenant Legion in turn became the Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska Native Sisterhood, advocacy organizations for Alaska Native rights. Tillie Paul's sons William and Louis were leaders in the Alaska Native Brotherhood.

In 1922, she assisted a Tlingit relative, Charlie Jones, in voting, which was considered a felony. Her son defended both the voter and Tillie Paul at trial as American citizens, and won, setting a precedent that was soon solidified in the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.

In 1931, Paul was the first woman ordained as an elder in the Alaska Northwest Synod of the Presbyterian Church, in the first year that Presbyterian women could be so ordained.

Tillie Kinnon married twice. Her children included civil rights attorney William Lewis Paul, the first Alaska Native elected to the territorial legislature. Tillie was widowed as a young woman when her first husband died by (presumed) drowning in 1887. She remarried to William Tamaree in 1905. She died in 1952, at a hospital in Wrangell, age 90.

In 1979, an infirmary building on the campus of Sheldon Jackson College was named for Tillie Paul.

In 2015, Tillie Paul's great-granddaughter, Debra O'Gara, was named Tribal Court Presiding Judge by the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska.