Eva Edwards brings more than four decades of professional experience to her position as Emergency Preparedness Coordinator for the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, including more than 15 years in emergency management. Everything she has done is grounded in a lifetime of service to Alaska Native organizations and communities. Before entering the emergency management field, she spent many years working in a wide range of roles supporting Alaska Native people across the state after having grown up in Alaska herself.
Edwards is a Deg Hit’an Athabascan born in Holy Cross, a small community on the Yukon River. “I am the tail end of the baby boomers, and my parents’ generation had a difficult life,” she said. When Edwards was eight months old, her mother passed away, and she went to live with an aunt in Fairbanks. After her aunt died when Edwards was nine, she moved to Anchorage, and later, at age fourteen, to Nikiski to live with a foster family. Growing up on a 160-acre homestead running sled dogs, riding horses, processing moose and fish, tending to chickens and geese and gardening established a strong work ethic and resilience in Edwards that she has drawn on throughout her career.
From the ages of 10 to 26, Edwards also worked as a set net commercial fisher. She briefly stepped away from fishing to attend cooking school and work as a cook at a theme park in Fairbanks. “Then my foster mother called and said they needed help on the commercial fishing sites, so that was the end of my cooking career,” Edwards recalled with a laugh.
After completing a year at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Edwards returned to Holy Cross as a young adult and accepted a position with a nonprofit ANCSA (Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act) organization in 1980. She later moved to Anchorage to work and raise her family, and has lived there ever since.
Over the course of 24 years, Edwards worked extensively for Alaska Native organizations, including 12 years with an ANCSA nonprofit in Anchorage. “My work experience includes working with every Alaska Native cultural group in Alaska at the for-profit corporate, nonprofit, tribal and village community levels,” she said. “I am very familiar with the governmental and economic infrastructure in rural Alaska.” This familiarity was an asset when she entered the field of emergency management.
After working for an ANCSA for-profit corporation based in Fairbanks, Edwards applied for a position in emergency management with the State of Alaska, leading to a 13-year career as a Training Specialist with the Alaska Division of Homeland Security & Emergency Management. In that role, she delivered emergency management and homeland security training to state, federal, local, tribal and private-sector partners across Alaska and authored the Alaska Credentialing Program Manual. Edwards retired from state service in August 2023.
In April 2024, Edwards came out of retirement to accept her current role as Emergency Preparedness Coordinator for the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC). The ANTHC Emergency Preparedness Program supports 37 Tribal Health Organizations, seven tribally operated hospitals, 178 Tribal health clinics and 229 Tribes statewide. “There’s only me and my boss here right now,” Edwards said, “and with Hurricane Halong in October, we have been stretched very thin.”
Despite the challenges, Edwards remains deeply motivated by her commitment to help Alaska Native communities that have been chronically underserved. “It’s amazing to be a part of this,” she said. “I think about where I came from and what I had to learn along the way—not only about my own identity, but the challenging history of my Alaska Native people.” She also enjoys the work, adding “I was trained as a FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] and Tribal instructor, and thoroughly enjoy delivering training.”
Edwards became involved with the Northwest Center for Evidence-Based Public Health Emergency Preparedness (NWPHEPR) through her supervisor and attended the inaugural Northwest Preparedness and Resilience Conference in September, 2025. She sees this collaboration as critical to strengthening Tribal Health Organization preparedness through credentialing support, policy templates, exercises, technical assistance and regulatory guidance.
Edwards longstanding connections to and insights into a wide swath of Alaska Native and Tribal communities bring a critical perspective on groups the NWPHEPR aims to support. “This group [NWPHEPR] is just getting started,” Edwards said, “So first we need to build relationships and clearly understand each other’s needs.”
We at NWPHEPR are honored to have Edwards as part of our team and look forward to continued collaboration.