USA Today awards its “Woman of the Year” honor to about 60 women nationally every year, including one from each state. Past awardees include Kamala Harris, Goldie Hawn, Quannah Chasinghorse, and Nicole Mann — the first Native American woman in space.
The award honors women who are “using their voices for change” and comes with feature stories about each woman. This year, author Lily Tuzroyluke was Alaska’s awardee.
“It was a great surprise and a great honor,” she said. “I thank my people for bringing me this far.”
Tuzroyluke is Iñupiaq, L’ingit and Nisga’a, a First Nations tribe in present-day British Columbia. The 46-year-old author's debut work, “Sivulliq: Ancestor,” published in 2022, is a historical novel set during the commercial whaling boom of the late-1800s.
“It's a story of survival and making a trek across Arctic Alaska, up into Arctic Canada, Herschel Islands,” Tuzroyluke said. “The theme of it is a mother's love and cultural knowledge.”
The novel is set in 1893, as smallpox has decimated Indigenous communities in Northwest Alaska. In the middle of that devastation, white men attack Kayaliruk, an Iñupiaq mother. When she regains consciousness, she learns her young daughter has been kidnapped by a New England whaling captain.
In pursuit of the kidnappers, Kayaliruk travels hundreds of miles through brutal Arctic storms, witnessing the effects of colonization and sickness along the way.
“I wanted to show resilience and survival of what an Indigenous mother, Iñupiaq mother would have to do for her children to survive,” Tuzroyluke said.
Most of the book takes place in villages around Tuzroyluke’s home community of Point Hope, or Tikiġaq in Iñupiaq. She said as an Indigenous author, it is important for her to tell the stories of her ancestors.
“Tikiġaq is the oldest continuously living settlement in America, so many researchers, historians, and quote-unquote ‘explorers’ have traveled to Point Hope and written about Point Hope, but from the non-Native perspective,” Tuzroyluke said. “Not all of them saw us as human beings; they saw us as savages or not having a soul.”
Tuzroyluke spent two years working on the book full-time. She devoted a large chunk of that to research. She said the story was inspired from first-hand accounts from tribal leaders and elders, as well as Tikiġaq’s oral stories from recorded archives.
In researching nineteenth century whaling, Tuzroyluke explored archives of the Massachusetts towns of Nantucket and New Bedford, as well as shiplogs and census records. Then she made an interesting discovery — there may have been more people of color involved in the whaling industry than she had previously thought.
Tuzroyluke said learning about African American crewmen allowed her to explore the time through another lens beyond Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives.
“It does offer a different nuance, dynamic into your storytelling which is reflective of the time period,” Tuzroyluke said.
Tuzroyluke has already started working on her second novel, also historical fiction, which takes place in 1950s Canada. It will focus on trauma around residential schools. She said she hopes it will bring more attention to crimes the Canadian government and various religious institutions committed against Indigenous people.
“It is about reclaiming our stories, and it's important that we tell our stories from our own perspective — how we view the universe and our peoples’ history, the land history,” Tuzroyluke said. “I think not enough has been written of how healthy we were as a nation, as Indigenous peoples, before we were affected by sickness and epidemics and famine.”
Lily Tuzroyluke’s book “Sivulliq: Ancestor” is out now. Tuzroyluke said she hopes to complete her second novel by the end of next year.
