Katie John, the matriarch and elder of Mentasta Lake has died, it is believed that Katie was 98 at the time of her passing.

Katie John was the lead plaintiff in a case that would define subsistence fishing rights in the state of Alaska. With the assistance of the Native American Rights Fund, John would sue the United States after the Alaska Board of Fisheries denied use Katie and another elder of an abandoned fish camp in what is now part of the Wrangell-Saint Elias National Park and Reserve. Subsistence fishing had been closed in that area since 1964.

The court ruled in John’s favor in 1994, although appeals would carry on for quite some time after that. After years of appeals through the federal court system, the case was due to be appealed once again to the Surpreme Court in 2001.

After traveling to the Upper Copper River to John’s fish camp in 2001, Then Governor Tony Knowles, dropped the appeal for the final time, much to the chagrin of Republican lawmakers.

Knowles said at a press conference in Anchorage when he announced his decision, “I cannot continue to oppose in court what I know in my heart to be right.”

In 2011, John received an honorary doctorate from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, bestowing on her the title Honorary Doctor of Laws.

Hearing the news of Katie John’s passing, Alaska’s Senator Lisa Murkowski stated in a press release, “Katie John was an Alaska icon who devoted her life to ensuring that her Ahtna people had the opportunity to carry on traditional subsistence fishing in their ancestral homeland. She was unafraid to challenge any bureaucrat standing between her Native people and their opportunity to fish, whether that was a State of Alaska that didn’t recognize that ANILCA’s rural preference included fishing or a National Park Ranger trying to tell her that she couldn’t fish from her ancestral village within the Wrangell-St Elias National Park.

“Katie John’s life was that of an authentic Alaskan. It is my sincere hope that in the loss of culture bearers like Katie we have not lost forever a piece of Alaska’s soul.”

Katie John died early Friday morning at the Alaska Native Medical Center.