Frontier of Injustice: Alaska Native Victims of Domestic Violence
![handle is hein.journals/moderam8 and id is 54 raw text is: FRONTIER OF INJUSTICE:
ALASKA NATIVE VICTIMS OF
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
By: Laura S. Johnson'
I. Introduction
The village of Nunam Iqua, which means
end of the tundra in Yup'ik, is located on a fork of
the Yukon River in Alaska, close to the Bering Sea.2 In
October 2005, an Alaska Native resident of Nunam
Iqua became violent, beat his wife with a shotgun
and raped a 13-year-old girl in front of three other
children.3 Though the villagers called the Alaska state
police, it took the state police officers more than four
hours to reach Nunam Iqua; they had to charter a
plane and travel 150 miles from the closest village with
state police presence.4 The assailant, Angelo A. Sugar,
was convicted in September 2006 and sentenced to
twenty-seven years imprisonment, but his eight-hour
rampage5 brings to light the particularly challenging
problems that Alaska Native villages face in dealing
with domestic violence. The village of Nunam Iqua is
a Native entity within the state of Alaska, recognized
and eligible to receive services from the Bureau of
Indian Affairs by virtue of status as an Indian tribe.
After the widely publicized Sugar incident, Nunam
Iqua's Mayor acknowledged that there was no public
safety officer or village police officer in Nunam Iqua
because the village had run out of funding for a village
police officer in 2004.7 Given that domestic violence
is rarely an isolated incident, the tragic events that
unfolded at the end of the tundra raise questions
about what remedies are available to help victims of
domestic violence in Alaska Native villages
Domestic violence and sexual assault occur
in staggering rates in Native communities across the
United States.8 As a state, Alaska's rates of sexual assault
and domestic violence are already significantly higher
than the national averages, and for Alaska Native
women, the likelihood that they will experience
violence or abuse during their lifetimes is shocking.'
Nearly seventy-five percent of Alaskans either have
experienced or know someone who has experienced
domestic violence or sexual assault, compared to the
national average of one in four women and one in
thirty-three men.o For Native Alaskan women,
not only are the statistics worse, but also the chance
that they will receive needed protection or victim
assistance is grim.
Native Alaskan women are 10 times
more likely to be sexually assaulted
than all other Alaskan women. These
women are often cut off from the
avenues to justice - literally. Since
many Native Alaskan women live in
rural villages that have no connect-
ing roads to the main cities with
police stations, they have a difficult
time filing complaints. The Alaska
Network on Domestic Violence
and Sexual Assault reports that 30
percent of Alaskan women have
no access to victim services where
they live. According to [Amnesty
International], police are themselves
handicapped - often underfunded
- in trying to get to the villages
when complaints arise. And in
interviews Amnesty International
conducted with Native Alaskan
sexual-assault survivors, respondents
said that police and medical pro-
fessionals often wrote them off as
being drunk when they complained.
Doctors and police wouldn't follow
up on investigations.12
2
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Frontier of Injustice: Alaska Native Victims of Domestic Violence
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