Legislator Profile: Alaska Representative Tiffany Zulkosky.

• Author: Weiss, Suzanne

Two years before the Columbine massacre, a school shooting on Feb. 19, 1997, left two people dead and two wounded in the remote village of Bethel on Alaska's southwest coast.

For Tiffany Zulkosky, then a middle-school student in Bethel and today a freshman member of the Alaska House of Representatives, the events of that day and the widespread news coverage that followed were deeply disturbing and remain fixed in her memory.

"It was a very formative moment," she recalls. "It opened my eyes to current events, which I hadn't had much interest in before, but even more so to the negative perceptions of the outside world about Native communities like Bethel, which in reality are so resilient and beautiful and tight-knit."

Zulkosky's mother is a sixth-generation Minnesotan who headed to Alaska for a summer vacation after graduating from high school, wound up taking a job for a regional air carrier and eventually put down roots in Bethel, where she built a career as a social worker. Zulkosky's late father, a Yup'ik Eskimo, was a commercial fisherman and seasonal carpenter.

In high school, Zulkosky excelled academically, became "a nerdy journalism kid" and went on to earn a degree in communications at Northwest University in Kirkland, Wash. Just before she graduated in 2006, there was another formative moment: an opportunity to participate in the inaugural Conference of Young Alaskans, which brought together hundreds of people, ages 16 to 25, from across the state to discuss their concerns and aspirations.

A Turning Point

"Hearing people talk about issues in communities like mine and seeing it through the lens of equity and inequity--that was a turning point for me," she says. "I came away from that experience knowing that our communities deserved better."

Not long after, Zulkosky returned to Bethel, where she began working for a nonprofit job-training organization, the People's Learning Center, and campaigned for an open seat on the Bethel City Council on the theme of "New Generation, New Perspective." A year into her term, her fellow councilmembers selected her to serve as mayor.

Hearing people talk about issues in communities like mine and seeing it through the lens of equity and inequity--that was a turning point for me."--Representative Tiffany Zulkosky Bethel, located about 400 miles west of Anchorage, serves as the hub community for a region roughly the size of Oregon that's home to 25,000 predominantly Alaska Native residents living in...