Matilda Kinnon was born in Victoria, British Columbia, the younger daughter of a Tlingit mother named Kut-XooX, and a Scottish father named James Kinnon, who was employed by the Hudson Bay Company. After her mother died from tuberculosis, young Tillie was raised by a maternal aunt and uncle in Wrangell, Alaska.
She learned to play the organ to bring music to more school and church events. Tillie Paul helped to found the New Covenant Legion in 1905, a Christian temperance organization intended to reach Native communities considered especially at risk from alcohol abuse. The New Covenant Legion in turn became the Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska Native Sisterhood, advocacy organizations for Alaska Native rights.
Tillie Paul"s sons William and Louis were leaders in the Alaska Native Brotherhood.
In 1922, she assisted a Tlingit relative, Charlie Jones, in voting, which was considered a felony. Tillie Kinnon married twice.
Her children included civil rights attorney William Lewis Paul, the first Alaska Native elected to the territorial legislature. She remarried to William Tamaree in 1905.
She died in 1952, at a hospital in Wrangell, age 90.
In 1979, an infirmary building on the campus of Sheldon Jackson College was named for Tillie Paul. In 2015, Tillie Paul"s great-granddaughter, Debra O"Gara, was named Tribal Court Presiding Judge by the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska.
She also lectured on Tlingit culture in Sitka as a member of the Society of Alaskan Natural History and Ethnology.
