91��Ƶ

Mary Jane Fate has often been blunt about describing conditions she saw as a child in rural 91��Ƶ in the mid-20th century.

"Mom and Dad worked as a team, and we stayed on the trap line, living in tents, all winter,” Fate was quoted by The Washington Post in 1978. “Often we were left alone. Some might call it child abuse, but to us it was necessity.

"We fished for a living in the summer. We had to follow the animals. The whole goal of life was just to survive.”

Despite the hardships, she clearly retained a love for the land and lifestyle. She and her husband for decades have maintained a traditional salmon-fishing camp just upstream from her home village of Rampart on the Yukon River.

She saw education and economic development as antidotes to the harshest realities of a pure subsistence existence, though. So she worked to promote their benefits for 91��Ƶ indigenous people. In the process, she served on a remarkable number of public and private organizations.

Fate attended the Mount Edgecumbe boarding high school in Sitka then returned to Fairbanks and took university classes. In the 1950s, she met and married Hugh “Bud” Fate, who then went to dental school. They settled in Fairbanks and raised a family.

During the 1960s, Congress was debating legislation to settle 91��Ƶ Native land claims, and efforts to ensure equal rights for minorities were receiving national attention. Fate helped organize the Fairbanks Native Association to strengthen the social and political standing of Interior 91��Ƶ’s people. She also joined the board of the Tundra Times, a statewide newspaper published in Fairbanks that focused on 91��Ƶ Native issues and was edited by Howard Rock, an Inupiaq man from Point Hope.

Following the claims settlement in 1971, Fate spent decades helping to lead the Rampart village corporation, which was created to receive a share of the land and monetary compensation.

In Fairbanks, Fate helped found the Breast Cancer Detection Center in the 1970s. She also served on the 91��Ƶ Airlines board for 25 years. From 1993 to 2001, she served on the University of 91��Ƶ Board of Regents. She then spent four years on the federal Arctic Research Commission.

Doyon Ltd., the regional for-profit Native corporation for Interior 91��Ƶ, named Fate its Citizen of the Year in 2012.

More online about Mary Jane Fate:

• at the 91��Ƶ Women’s Hall of Fame, into which she was inducted in 2014

• about a Doyon Foundation scholarship established in her name in 2017

• from 2011 that puts her work in the context of 91��Ƶ’s evolving educational system

• from the Tundra Times, on whose board she served, announcing the one-time publication of a 35,000-copy edition

• from The Washington Post, quoting her comments to a conference of rural women in Washington, D.C., as Congress was debating whether to put millions of acres of 91��Ƶ land in new federal parks and refuges