Restoration Magazine

Oral Testimony of Michelle Demmert, AKNWRC

U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs Legislative Hearing on the Urgent Need to Reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act December 8, 2021

 

My name is Michelle Demmert, and I am an enrolled citizen and the former Chief Justice of Central Council Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska Supreme Court, and serve as the Law and Policy Director for the Alaska Native Women’s Resource Center.

The rates of violence experienced by Alaska Natives are shocking. Alaska ranks as one of the most dangerous places in the nation for women.1 This is especially true for Alaska Native women.2 While Alaska Natives comprise approximately 19% of the state population, the Alaska Criminal Justice Commission reports that 46% of reported felony level sex offenses involved Alaska Natives.3 Given the many barriers to reporting, we assume this is an underestimate. Available data suggests that among other Indian Tribes, Alaska Native women suffer the highest rates of domestic and sexual violence in the country.4

Alaska has the highest number of missing Indigenous persons, too. As of August 2021, 40% of the missing Alaska Native and American Indian people in NamUs were from Alaska.5

These deaths, these missing women, are the devastating manifestation of centuries of oppression and broken systems that have failed to protect Native women and children from birth to death for generations.  

The combined impact of public law 280, the Supreme Court’s Venetie decision and the timing of historical events in Alaska, leave us Natives dependent on the state for public safety and justice. My written testimony discusses the legal framework in Alaska; today I will focus on what this legal framework means for Alaska Natives.  

It can be difficult to understand a place in America where you cannot call 911 for a quick response within minutes. Such is the case in Alaska.  We do not have a centralized 911 system and the state criminal justice and victim services are located in a handful of urban areas, making them more theoretical than real in rural Alaska. Many villages lack law enforcement.

We might have to leave a message and wait hours, days, and sometimes weeks for a necessary response.  Sometimes the response is nothing more than a phone call saying that it doesn’t rise to the level for an investigation.

Because we lack the necessary resources and infrastructure to manage these issues on our own, our children are often our first responders, and our Tribal leaders and advocates act as law enforcement and preserve crime scenes. I’d like to share two examples: 

  • In a homicide case, it took 11 hours for law enforcement to appear. The 13-year-old victim’s body laid outside across the street from the family’s home. Sometimes these crime scenes are like this for days on end. We have lost our loved ones and are powerless to do anything more than sit vigil protecting a crime scene until law enforcement arrives. 
  • In a 2018 case in a small remote interior village, a victim waited 17 days to get out of the village to safety. During this time, the victim was treated at the clinic and called Alaska State Troopers located in a hub community one hour away by plane. The weather was unflyable for 3 weeks. In addition, she could not get to a regional medical clinic for further treatment, and law enforcement could not get into the community for an investigative report.

The circumstances described above are repeated throughout remote Alaska. They will continue until our local governments have the authority and resources they need to address public safety.

As you have heard, many Tribes outside Alaska have successfully exercised jurisdiction over non-Indians who abuse Native women since the passage of VAWA 2013. Indian Tribes in Alaska were effectively excluded from that legislation because of the use of the term “Indian Country”, which Alaska Tribes lack. We have called on Congress to remove the legal barriers denying Alaska Native victims of violence access to justice from their own Tribal governments, and we are encouraged by current efforts to do so.

We support the creation of a Pilot Project in Alaska. Specifically, we recommend: 

  1. the creation, with DOJ support, of an Alaska specific Intertribal Special Domestic Violence Court Jurisdiction Working Group;
  2. a planning phase with robust technical assistance for code drafting, training, and court capacity building; and
  3. sufficient financial support for costs related to both planning and implementation.

We strongly support proposed amendments to VAWA 2013 related to improvements for SDVCJ.

Conclusion

Thank you for releasing the discussion draft today. It represents an important step forward and we appreciate the bipartisan work of the Chairman and Vice-Chairman to reform the outdated federal laws that prevent Tribal nations––including those in Alaska––from protecting our communities.

In the Tlingit Language, we had no words or descriptions for violence within a family home. Restoring and enhancing local, Tribal governmental capacity to respond to violence against women provides greater local control, safety, accountability, and transparency.  As a result, we will have safer communities and a pathway for long-lasting justice. I look forward to providing additional specific feedback to the Committee on the discussion draft. 

  1. See, e.g., “Missing or murdered? In America’s deadliest state, one family is still searching for answers,” USA Today, June 25, 2019, available at https://n8ve.net/sRMu0.
  2. Alaska Native Women Suffer the Highest Sexual Assault Rates in the Country, ” The Crime Report, Feb. 2, 2021, available at https://n8ve.net/ZAozh.
  3.  Alaska Criminal Justice Commission, “Sex Offenses: A Report to the Alaska State Legislature,” April 5, 2019, pg. 10.
  4.  A Roadmap for Making Native America Safer: Report to the President and Congress of the United States at 41 (November 2013), available at https://n8ve.net/3xTEO.
  5. https://n8ve.net/0WQAA.