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41 NARF Legal Rev. 1 (2016)

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NARF Expands its Work to Protect

     and Advance the Indian Vote


  Back in 2006, NARF was asked
to prepare a report on the
impact of the Voting Rights Act
(VRA) in Alaska. This opened a
new chapter in NARF's work.
While NARF had litigated some
VRA cases in the Dakotas in the
1980s, voting cases are highly
technical and highly specialized
and when certain litigators
moved on, the work naturally
slowed in this area. However, as
NARF delved into this issue, it
discovered that Alaska had been
violating the VRA since the very
day it passed in 1975. For more
than 30 years, the needs of the
indigenous language speakers in
Alaska (Yup'ik, Inupiaq, and
Gwich'in among others) had
been ignored. All elections were
all English, all the time despite a
clear requirement in the VRA to translate all voting
materials into Native languages. As a result, voter
registration and turnout were low, and many of
those who were voting would later tell us they did
not really understand what they were voting for.
This article looks back and examines the renais-
sance in NARF's voting work, and shares its plans
for the future.

  The first major voting case NARF brought during
this renaissance was the Nick v. Bethel case. We
have detailed this case in previous articles and so
will not repeat the full case history here. Suffice
it to say, this was the first salvo in an overhaul of
Alaska's electoral system and NARF's first step.


All Alaska photos by Jenni Monet.


WINTERISPRING 2016


VOLUME 41, LO

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