Alberta Daisy Schenck Adams was a teenage civil rights activist in the struggle for equality by the indigenous peoples in the United States Territory of Alaska. Her 1944 challenge to segregation practices was cited during the Territorial Legislature's proceedings in passage of Alaska's 1945 anti-discrimination law, a decade before the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawed segregation in public schools, and before Rosa Parks in Alabama sparked a public bus boycott by refusing to give up her seat to a white person.

Elizabeth Peratrovich was an American civil rights activist, Grand President of the Alaska Native Sisterhood, and a Tlingit who worked for equality on behalf of Alaska Natives. In the 1940s, her advocacy was credited as being instrumental in the passing of Alaska's Anti-Discrimination Act of 1945, the first state or territorial anti-discrimination law enacted in the United States.