April 14, 2006
Tundra Drums wins Alaska press award
It's well past time I wrote more about my fun experiences in Alaska, working for a chain of rural newspapers. (See more here.)
But first congratulations are in order.
The Tundra Drums weekly newspaper in Bethel, Alaska, has won an award in the Alaska Press Club 2006 contest for its examination of the rural justice system in Western Alaska.
My friend Naomi Klouda, the editor of the Tundra Drums, asked me to set up a Web page with the series, which you can see here.
Kudos also to former Alaska Newspapers editors Rose Ragsdale and Alex DeMarban for their keen interest in the matter of rural justice and support for Naomi's investigation.
I played a small role in the series, as the designer (by long distance) of Part 1. (Kristy Bernier, my former boss, designed Parts 2 through 4.)
In this isolated part of the world, villagers may have to wait "hours, days or even weeks for a distant non-resident trooper" to come investigate crimes, given limits on what each village's public safety officer can do. It's amazing to wonder -- given the vast distances and adverse weather of this area, as well as the interplay of tribal and Western notions of justice -- how crimes are handled.
To the social anthropolist, the situation also raises the question of how a public safety officer, often a native of his village, can be expected to impartially deal with crimes such as a cousin or friend bringing in alcohol to a dry village.
Domestic violence, assault and theft, often related to abuse of alcohol, occurs in these villages. And many deaths ruled as suicide occur under murky conditions and may actually be homicides. Part 2 of the Tundra Drums series describes villagers with eyewitness accounts of fatal attacks that did not lead to investigations or the filing of charges.
Part 2 also describes how the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, just across the border in the Yukon, station an officer in every Native village.
Naomi, who I previously wrote about here -- "Beautiful slippers from Western Alaska" -- says farewell to her job this week after two eventful years in the harsh Bush country of Alaska, and plans to locate to the more congenial and artsy town of Homer, on the Kenai Peninsula.
It's a well-deserved change of scenery. Many of us who know Naomi, shown below, admire her prodigious energy and courage in an extremely demanding editing job in one of the harshest climates on Earth.
Sometimes we'd be assembling the paper and she would mention "it's blowing 50 miles an hour out there" or "they cancelled the Kusko 300 [sled race] because it's too cold" -- explaining that a pan of water thrown in the air froze immediately, even before falling to the ground, and the dogs might not survive.
The morning after the November 2004 election, all communication was cut off for hours to the paper, and I (working in Baltimore, 4,000 miles away) pulled together a table of local election results via the board of elections Web site in Anchorage. That may be a testament to the Internet, but it also tells that it's not so easy running a newspaper in rural Alaska. It takes a lot of perseverance and calm.
Naomi also faced down some who tried to intimidate her (via a hit-and-run car accident while she was out walking her dog) into not revealing problems with the local hospital and with court and crime issues. Without harping too much on the point, Alaska, as wondrous and grand as it is in most ways, is not always an easy state for women, and rural Alaska more so.
Naomi dealt with a lot in Bethel, from $9/gallon, spoiled milk to the intricacies of the Yup'ik and gussak (white) societies. Hope she enjoys Homer. Say hi to the otters and eagles for me and hope you catch some fine halibut!
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