Lisa Murkowski: Alaska's Native Daughter Quiz

Answer: The 1950s

Lisa Ann Murkowski was born on May 22, 1957, to Francis "Frank" Hughes and Nancy Rena Gore Murkowski. A third generation Alaskan, she came into the world in Ketchikan, Alaska Territory, two hundred thirty-five miles (three hundred eighty kilometers) south of Juneau where her father was stationed with the U.S. Coast Guard.

Answer: Territory

The United States purchased Russian America from the Russian Empire by treaty in 1867, during the administration of president Andrew Johnson. On March 30 of that year, U.S. Secretary of State William Seward agreed to a proposal from the Russian Minister in Washington, Edouard de Stoeckl, to purchase the territory for $7,200,000 (about $157,609,945.95 in 2025 dollars). The Senate approved the treaty on April 9, President Johnson signed it on May 28 and the area that would come to be called Alaska was formally transferred to the United States on October 18, 1867, some ninety years before Lisa Murkowski was born.

For some decades Washington paid little attention to 'Seward's Folly' - they couldn't even settle on a name for the area. It was the Department of Alaska from 1867 to 1884, the District of Alaska from 1884 to 1912 and the Territory of Alaska or Alaska Territory from 1912 till statehood.

President Dwight Eisenhower supported statehood but, unsurprisingly, the process was complicated. Finally, on May 28, 1958, H.R. 7999 passed in the House of Representatives. The Senate passed the bill on June 30, and the President signed it into law on July 7 of that year. On January 3, 1959 he signed the official proclamation admitting Alaska as the forty-ninth state, when young Lisa was about eighteen months old.

Answer: The fourth of six children

The Murkowskis had six children: Carol, Michael, Mary, Lisa, Eileen and Brian. During Frank's service in the U.S. Coast Guard and, later, as he pursued his career in banking, the family moved frequently, including to Wrangell, Juneau, Fairbanks, and Anchorage, fuelling Lisa's love of her native place and of the outdoors.

Answer: Roman Catholic

Lisa attended Monroe High School, the only high school in the Diocese of Fairbanks and the northernmost Roman Catholic high school in the Americas, graduating in 1975. In 2010, she returned as the graduation speaker, telling the "Fairbanks Daily News", "I still look at blue and gold and can't think of anything but Monroe High School." She attended Georgetown, a highly respected Catholic university in Washington D.C.

In 2025, she was one of twenty-four Catholic members of the U.S. Senate.

Answer: Started law school

After graduating from Monroe High School in Fairbanks in 1975, Lisa attended Georgetown University in Washington D.C, graduating with a B.A. in Economics in 1980. For law school, Lisa chose Oregon's Willamette, the oldest university west of the Mississippi, with the oldest college of law in the Pacific Northwest. She earned her J.D. in 1985.

Her grit and determination were tested, as it took five attempts before she finally passed the bar in 1987. She then worked as an attorney in the Anchorage District Court Clerk's office from 1987 to 1989. From 1989 to 1998, she was a commercial lawyer in private Practice in Anchorage.

Answer: Yes

Lisa Murkowski married Anchorage businessman Verne Martell on August 22, 1987. They have two sons. Nick is a lawyer, while his younger brother, Matt, followed his father into the business world.

Answer: House of Representatives

Lisa Murkowski was first elected to the Alaska House in 1998, being re-elected twice. During her tenure, she introduced legislation establishing a Joint Armed Services Committee, sat on the Alaska Commission on Post Secondary Education and chaired both the Labor and Commerce and the Military and Veterans Affairs Committees.

She never served the third term to which she'd been narrowly re-elected, resigning before the start of the 2003-2004 legislative session. Her father Frank, a sitting U.S. senator, won the Alaska governor's race in the 2002 election, and appointed Lisa to fill out the remainder of his Senate term.

Answer: appointment

In December 2002, newly elected Alaska governor Frank Murkowski appointed his daughter Lisa, then a member of the state's House of Representatives, to fill the U.S. Senate seat he had resigned to run for governor. Upon being sworn in on January 7, 2003, Lisa became the thirty-third woman to serve in the U.S. Senate and the first from Alaska, the sixth senator from Alaska and the first native-born Alaskan.

As of 2025, she had been re-elected to four full terms; in 2004, 2010, 2016 and 2022.

Answer: King Salmon

The Chinook, or King Salmon, is the largest species of Pacific salmon. A distinctively colored fish, it is blue-green, red or purple on the back and the top of the head, with silvery sides, white ventral surfaces and black spots on the tail and the upper half of the body together with a black gum line. Typically ranging from 24 to 36 inches (60 to 90 cm) in length and weighing 10 to 50 pounds (4.5 to 22.7 kg), adult fish may reach up to 58 inches (150 cm) and 130 pounds (59 kg).

While its natural range runs from Japan to Russia and Alaska, the species has been successfully introduced elsewhere, including in the North American Great Lakes, Patagonia and New Zealand. A favorite of sport fishermen, like Sen. Murkowski, Chinook are also prized for their nutrient-rich meat, which can be either pink or white, depending on the salmon's diet.

Though primarily an outdoorswoman, Sen. Murkowski also enjoyed the distinctly sedentary pastime of stamp collecting.

Answer: No

From her first foray into politics in 1998, Lisa Murkowski was consistently what one might call an old fashioned, mainline Republican; that is, socially moderate to liberal, while maintaining a conservative view of business and economics. For example, she champions the constitutionally guaranteed right of women in the U.S. to obtain an abortion, as well as the Equal Rights Amendment, an amendment that was, in its various forms, part of the Republican Party platform from 1940 to 1980. At the same time, she supported oil and gas exploration in the ecologically sensitive Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

In her Alaska House races as well as her 2004, 2010 and 2016 U.S. Senate races she won, if narrowly, over candidates put forward by the right wing Tea Party movement. Her 2022 U.S. Senate campaign pitted her against a MAGA candidate backed by then former president Donald Trump.

As of her 2022 Senate reelection campaign, Sen. Murkowski never lost a general election, even after calling for Trump to resign in the wake of his supporters' violent January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol and joining six fellow Republicans and all Democrats and Independents by voting to convict him in his February 2021 impeachment trial (his second) for incitement of insurrection in connection with that attack, a vote that fell short of the needed two-thirds majority.

the Alaska Republican Party censured Murkowski for her vote, and demanded her resignation.. Nonetheless, with broad support from her Senate colleagues from both sides of the aisle and in defiance of Trump's stated opposition, she achieved her best electoral showing yet in 2022, with 53.7% of the vote.

Murkowski and Susan Collins of Maine were the only two Senate Republicans to vote with Democratic President Barack Obama over 70% of the time. She voted in accordance with Pres. Trump's position approximately 72.6% of the time during his first term, and with Pres. Joe Biden about 67% of the time. In the first ten months of Trump's second term, she continued to forge her own path, voting sometimes with the president, notably on the so called Big Beautiful Bill, and sometimes against him.

She was the only Republican among 207 members of Congress who filed a brief in October, 2025 with the U.S. Supreme Court challenging Trump's use of emergency powers to impose tariffs without congressional approval. The same month, she voted with Democrats on a resolution to block the bombing of Venezuelan boats in international waters, similarly without congressional approval. To Murkowski, these matters were not about party loyalty, but rather about the Constitution, whose Article 1 expressly assigns authority over tariffs (taxation) and war to Congress.