By Victoria Barber

Terzah Tippin Poe was 11 years old the day she first felt truly alive. She'd just watched her mother die after more than five years of fighting a brutal battle with breast cancer.

"It was like I woke up from a dream, and snapped awake, everything from that moment on became very, very vivid," Terzah says.

"It was a defining moment – when I woke to my own mortality. At that moment my life path changed."

It's been a path that spanned countries, careers and towns – from tiny Alaska villages to a foreign metropolis; from working cosmetics counters and the occasional modeling gig to managing communications at international corporations; from her personal battle with the disease that killed her mother to a public life as a politician's wife.

Terzah is a tall, elegant woman in her 40s with a shiny cap of short-cropped, black hair and striking features. On a sunny afternoon in early spring she reflected on her sometimes jagged course as she made coffee in her 1940s bungalow in downtown Anchorage. It's a small but beautifully appointed home, with modernist leather couches and pieces by Alaska artists like Perry Eaton, Percy Avugiak and Duke Russell decorating the walls. Two boisterous huskies run through the front yard, and hanging on the wooden fence is campaign sign for her husband, Bob Poe, who is running for governor.

In many ways the turns of her story outline the growing pains of a generation – of children who grew up in the boom-time pipeline years; Alaska Natives who saw their regional corporations crumble, then climb; a career woman coming up the ranks when Alaska Native professionals were making their mark; men and women who built on the victories of their parents' generation and took it further, creating a world that could barely be recognizable to those who helped create it, those who came before – like Terzah's mother.

"I think she would be very proud and I think she'd be amazed – I don't think she would have imagined a world where I would have gone this far," Terzah says.

Childhood interrupted

Terzah's mother, Lillian Mollie Hopson Tippin, was a tiny – 4 foot, 11 inch tall – ladylike Inupiaq woman from Barrow who was educated at Mt. Edgecumbe and was passionate about community service, a trait she passed on to her daughter. When Terzah was growing up, Hopson steered her toward ballet, piano lessons and Girl Scouts rather than Inupiaq lessons or cultural classes. Terzah regrets never learning to speak Inupiaq, but said she knows her mother acted with the best intentions.

"She really wanted me to have all the advantages, and to her that meant being acculturated into a non-Native world," Terzah says.

The idea that Alaska Natives can "live in both worlds" is repeated often enough now, but wasn't in vogue when Terzah was growing up in Fairbanks. Still, Terzah was connected to her Inupiaq roots, surrounded by her relatives who lived in the hub town and came through from the North Slope. As the weather warmed, her parents would send her off to Nalukataq, the whaling festival, and she'd come home with a garbage bag full of muktuk, her family's share of the catch. In Barrow, Terzah would stay with her large extended family during the endless Arctic summer days, biking with her young cousins through still-light streets until two or three in the morning.

It was a happy childhood, but when Terzah was 5 years old, tragedy struck. Her mother, just 37, had been diagnosed with breast cancer, a disease that killed her maternal grandmother at 36. Her father had to continue working to keep the family afloat. Terzah took the role of caregiver as her mother underwent cobalt treatments and surgery, going with her mother to doctor's appointments and taking care of the home.

Over six years her cancer had mastesticized throughout her body, and doctors "ended up taking off body parts, one by one." She died at just 42 years old.

The image of her mother's suffering has haunted Terzah. Even at a young age she knew that with her family's history of breast cancer, there was higher possibility that she might one day fall to the same disease, to have her life cut short.

"It made me frantic. It still does. Like I'm trying to get everything in, trying to get everything done. That's what I feel like."

Growing pains

When Terzah's mother died it changed everything. Terzah's older brother moved out, her father was emotionally devastated and Terzah was called on to hold the pieces together at home. Kids at school didn't know how to talk to her – they'd never known anyone whose mother had died. Also, because her mother was diagnosed during a six-week period when her father was between jobs, she'd been uninsured. They could have gone to the old Native hospital (then located in downtown Anchorage), but Terzah's father felt that she'd get the best care at Providence hospital. The resulting medical bills impoverished the family.

They stayed in Fairbanks a year when Terzah's father proposed a change – he'd been offered a job in Juneau as chief financial officer of KTOO radio.

Terzah knew that it was hard for her father to stay where there were so many reminders of her mother, so she agreed. "He told me where he was coming from and I said let's go, let's move down there," Terzah says.

It turned out to be far more difficult than she had imagined.

A driven, straight-A student who was already being mistaken for an adult, Terzah found the junior high in Juneau to be "an undisciplined mess," where students still threw spitballs and there were few extracurricular activities. Unlike her Fairbanks school, Terzah's was the only Native face in the crowd.

Still, she excelled, showing up for class and acing her tests. So it was a surprise when, at end of ninth grade, the principal pulled her aside and asked her if she "wouldn't be more comfortable somewhere else."

"It's hard to describe the vibe you get, but to this day you talk to someone of color and they know what the code words are," Terzah says. "What I knew was that they were sending all the Native students to the alternative school downtown, Project Careers."

The next year Terzah walked into Project Careers and felt like she'd been sent on a one-way trip to the bottom of the educational barrel. No one seemed to care whether students showed up for class or graduated, let alone making the attempt to challenge them academically.

And, as far as she could tell, everyone enrolled was a minority.

"I knew what it was," Terzah says. She told her father that she wanted to drop out.

Normally a father might protest such a move, but "he believed me, he saw what was going on."

At 15, Terzah went with her father to the Juneau school board to get permission to take her GED and legally drop out of high school. She then asked the chancellor of the University of Alaska Juneau (now the University of Alaska Southeast) to enroll as a younger student. Determined to continue her education, she was taking English, philosophy and modern dance by the next semester.

But then her path changed, again.

"I was 16 and I decided it was time to hit the road," Terzah says.

Terzah bounced between Seward and Juneau until, at 19, she wound up in Vancouver, British Columbia, the city she fell in love with. For the next six or seven years, Terzah was freewheeling, a time she remembers fondly as a chance to reclaim some of the carefree fun that she'd missed.

"It gave me a chance to stop the carnival for a minute, that was this crazy life with my mom dying – always fighting the system for the things I wanted to do," Terzah says.

Terzah married a Canadian and lived in the city with a circle of artistic friends. She bartended, waited tables, even worked the occasional modeling job with an agency called "Touch of Culture," where she was billed as "international ethnic."

"It was almost like going to finishing school, because it was this beautiful, international, artistic city, where I had a support group of healthy, active, engaged people," Terzah says. "I regrouped."But at 27, Terzah's path turned back to Alaska (she remains great friends with her ex-husband, she says), and back in Juneau.

Baranof connection

She landed a job bartending at the legendary Baranof Lounge, the Juneau hangout where many believe the real work of government gets done. But she looked at the progress made by Native women leaders like Heather Kendall Miller and Eileen MacLean and knew immediately that she needed to go back to school.

"I remember standing behind that bar, and it was the nicest bar in town where you get to have interesting conversations with all kinds of people, but I knew that to get on the other side of the bar I had to have a degree," Terzah says.

It was also at the Baranof Lounge that a young government official named Bob Poe took a stool and struck up a conversation. She didn't realize it, but it wasn't the first time they'd met. Poe remembered her from when she was 16 and serving doughnuts at Sam's Bakery in the downtown Foodland ("of course, he knew I was entirely too young," she says). Years later she met him again when he and a girlfriend happened to dine at a Vancouver restaurant where Terzah worked. He just hadn't made an impression on her. But that night "he made me nervous," Terzah says.

"And I knew that was it."

Two years later they were married. Terzah wrapped up a degree in journalism with a focus in social research from University of Alaska. After graduating she did some radio journalism and landed a job at Nerland Agency, a major advertising firm, and then with the Department of Environmental Conservation in Juneau.

Then, in 2000, she got a job offer in Anchorage she couldn't refuse. She left Bob and their pet husky in a nine-and-a-half foot trailer in Juneau to finish out the session and moved to Anchorage to become the director of marketing for Heritage Tours at Cook Inlet Region Inc.

The day she pulled into the CIRI parking lot, Terzah says, was one of the proudest of her career.

"When I was growing up in the '80s it became pretty touch and go for a lot of Native corporations. So when I came to CIRI, and it was one of the coolest buildings in town, and it was filled with Native faces, up to the corporate floor, it was like – Yes, we have made it," Terzah says.

After three years of marketing CIRI's $100 million tourism division, Terzah left to explore the policy side of Native issues and become the director of communications at the Alaska Federation of Natives. She spent a year there before deciding to strike out on her own as a full-time consultant, seeing what she called a "hole in the market."

"Agencies, companies and nonprofits are really interested in rural Alaska communities, but they don't know how to reach them, they don't know who to call," Terzah says.

Terzah's clients included Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corp., First Alaskans Institute and Koahnic Broadcast Corp. Her career "was going gangbusters."

Then she got a phone call from the doctor's office.

Confronting a killer

Just a year older than her mother when she'd been diagnosed, Terzah had stage two breast cancer. The doctors discovered a 2 centimeter lump in one of her breasts.

Terzah was shocked. But she was also relieved.

"I knew that I would get it, it was just – when would it happen? Would I catch it early enough?"

Her doctor told her the lump could be removed or a mastectomy could be performed on the affected breast. Terzah chose to have both her breasts removed and to undergo as much chemotherapy as her doctor thought she could handle.

"I was bound and determined not to have the same fate as my mother," Terzah says.

Over the next six months of surgery and treatment, Terzah noticed a problem that confronts many cancer patients. As she progressed through chemo, her appointments got more and more complex – she had to see more doctors and undergo more treatments to make sure that she would survive. But at the same time it was getting harder for her to manage all the meetings and information as her body weakened and the mental fog that accompanied chemo clouded her thinking.

She shared her frustration with her friend and mentor Susan Ruddy, now president of the Providence Foundation, who brought the issue to Al Parrish, the president of Providence Alaska Care Health Systems. The discussion led to fundraising, focus groups and campaigning, and the result was the Providence Cancer Center, designed to give cancer patients coordinated care to ease the healing process.

But while going through treatment, Terzah also continued to run her consultancy. The way her business was structured, everything went through her – she was the linchpin that kept it all together. Even though she was sometimes too sick to function, she would still show up every morning.

The decision to keep working was a choice she wouldn't recommend to anyone, Terzah says. But she felt she had to do it.

"I was driven by the probably unreasonable fear that I would disappear if I stopped working."

Toward the very end of her treatment Terzah was trying for her biggest client yet. TransCanada was looking to build a gasline through Interior Alaska, her region, and needed someone to help communicate with communities along the proposed route. It was just 10 days after her final dose of chemo and she had a meeting arranged for the next day – her 39th birthday.

Getting the contract would be a crescendo of her career to that point, but Terzah was still in bad shape from treatment. Her head was shiny-bald from chemo, and she considered wearing a wig to the meeting. But in the end she donned a power suit in red and went as she was.

"I knew enough about what they were looking for that we were going to have to spend a lot of time together, and I was not going to wear a wig," Terzah says. "I had no breasts, no hair and you know, that was OK. I had my brain, and I had a cool meeting set up and I thought – this is the moment where my brain gets this gig or it doesn't."

The next day she found out the job was hers.

Peripatetic career path

Terzah will often describe her career as peripatetic, meaning roving or wandering. It's a word that hails from Aristotle's method of lecturing to his students while walking around and it's fittingly applied to Terzah, who built her career by seeking out, calling up, going to, and talking with people.

Much of Terzah's professional life is spent flying to different corners of the state, meeting with people. While she's recently worked intensively with resource development companies – first with TransCanada, now as the social performance manager at Shell – a big part of her work is figuring out what would help communities participate in the discussion. If resource development groups are interested in getting village residents to the table, Terzah's the one making sure there is a table to sit around.

It seems simple – after all, what's so difficult about picking up the phone or sending an e-mail? But as Terzah worked with corporations and rural communities, she grew intimately aware of the ways communication breaks down between a corporate and village culture.

With all the projects being considered around the state, many villages are facing a deluge of information, often highly technical, about impacts on their communities. Terzah recognized that while rural residents need to have input they are being swamped with information. At the same time, companies and agencies are trying to get their information out but don't have an effective way to reach the people they need to – they call mayors' offices to find the voice mail is full, a public meeting notice dies on a broken fax machine connection, requests for comment are lost in a sea of requests.

"I've literally never seen as many public meetings as when I go to Nuiqsut, for example, and there just seems to be a public meeting every night about projects that directly impact their community," Terzah says.

It is what Terzah calls "a capacity issue." Sometimes it's people not having the time to go through all the information being thrown at them. Other times it's as simple a problem as broken office equipment. Either way, "there's a lack of effective communication," Terzah says.

It is also a matter of educating those huge, international corporations that "sometimes you're just not going to get anybody."

"If you want to consult with Point Lay or Nuiqsut or Nelson Lagoon, there may not be anybody answering the phone. So your timeline is not necessarily the same timeline that the people in the region have," Terzah says.

Village Voice experiment

For the past three years, Terzah has devoted "blood, sweat and tears" to building capacity in villages. The idea that woke her up at 4 a.m. back in 2007 was to build a structure that leaves the matter entirely up to the villages.

Village Voice is a self-named group that was launched out of a two-day meeting at the Inupiat Heritage Center in Barrow between representatives of all the North Slope villages. What was decided was that two representatives from each village would comprise Village Voice, a committee that meets every three months or so, where members would have a place to talk about the issues they were having with development. Shell committed a half-million dollars over two years to the committee to help solve its capacity issues in the form of community grants. How the money would be spent was entirely up to its members.

The Foraker Group is a company that works to strengthen nonprofits and tribal organizations, and was a key player helping Village Voice get started. Foraker president Dennis McMillian was a third-party facilitator for the project and traveled with Terzah through all the villages of the North Slope for it. He says that the idea behind Village Voice is innovative.

"Terzah basically proposed a huge experiment – different than the way that industry had approached this in the past," McMillian says. "The amount of money that each community got was minimal in the big scheme of things, but that was not the intent. The intent was to build capacity, and get people to meet together to have candid discussions about development – what is good and bad about it."

What was important was that Village Voice acted independently, according to its own vision. While Shell put up the funding for the grants, it never had a seat at the table.

"All that really came from the values of Terzah," says McMillian. "We were the doers, but she was the dreamer."

When it came to the money, communities used it in different ways. One town needed a meeting table and a phone for teleconferences. In Nuiqsut, they used the grant to get matching money so they could hire a full-time community liaison to work with industry. All the grants had to be approved by the Village Voice committee, according to rules they set up.

Shell has fulfilled its commitment to the project, so the future of the Village Voice is uncertain. McMillian says there's a possibility that other groups might step forward to fund additional phases, and he's looking into the possibility of replicating it in other regions of the state.

It's also possible that once communities have used their grants Village Voice will end. But, Terzah says, that wouldn't mean the project wasn't a success.

"The process of formation in my mind was worth every penny spent already, because now for three years people have been getting together and talking about how they envision their communities," Terzah says.

Speeding along at slower pace

Terzah admits she is a bit of a workaholic, but at this phase she's trying to slow down, pace herself more. She's happy in her work with communities, and if Poe wins his bid for governor, she'll move into the role of governor's wife with the alacrity she's given to all her roles. She sees the potential to do a lot of good.

"I know this sounds cliche, but I've been on my death bed and really thought I was dying. I didn't sit there and think – 'Gosh, I wish I had a quarter million in the bank,' or 'I wish I'd become VP of Shell.'"

In the end, it is the work that drives Terzah. And while communications is her field, she sees it as more than that.

"It's about helping empower people to solve their own problems," Terzah says. "It's the only way that you can have self-determination as a human being, as a people. It's understanding what you need to do to solve your own problems.

"It's great when you're in a meeting out in the Y-K Delta or the Interior or Point Lay and the light goes on for people in the room – wow, they really have a say in what happens. It's a great thing."

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Victoria Barber can be reached at 907-348-2424 or vbarber@alaskanewspapers.com.

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