Anchorage Daily News

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Ted Stevens, with a few sentences tucked into a spending bill, is moving to end federal funding for Alaska tribal courts and tribal police officers. Instead, several million dollars in Department of Justice grants would be diverted to the state of Alaska to pay for state court magistrates and Alaska's Village Public Safety Officer program.

Stevens, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, explained the shift as a matter of efficiency. There isn't enough money for each of Alaska's 227 federally recognized tribes to have its own court system and police force, says a committee report explaining the provision in the Justice spending bill it passed last week.

"Therefore, the committee has included a general provision in the bill clarifying that funds should not be made available to tribes in Alaska for courts or police until a more efficient delivery system can be developed, such as consolidation," the report said.

Tribal advocates say Stevens is trying to impose one of his long-held views -- that the federal government should fund regional groups to provide service in rural Alaska rather than individual Alaska tribes.

"It's very much an attack on the tribal community. The tribal community is in shock," said Heather Kendall-Miller, an attorney in the Anchorage office of the Native American Rights Fund.

Stevens' move raises long-simmering questions about the role of tribal courts and police in Alaska.

Alaska tribes don't have the same "Indian Country" powers that Lower 48 tribes have to enforce laws within certain geographic areas. But Alaska tribal courts do have the power to decide custody and adoption cases, and they have asserted their jurisdiction on a range of other matters.

Attorney General Gregg Renkes said Alaska tribal police should not have been receiving federal law enforcement grants at all.

"There's no such thing -- there shouldn't be tribal law enforcement in Alaska. There's no jurisdiction," he said.

Kendall-Miller said many of the grants under the federal Community Oriented Policing Services don't require criminal jurisdiction.

"Issues related to domestic violence and public safety are often civil in nature," Kendall-Miller said. "This is not an issue of state jurisdiction versus tribal jurisdiction. It is an issue of maximizing scarce resources to provide a level of public safety in village Alaska."

Nobody knows exactly how many tribes have courts, said Donna Goldsmith of the Alaska Inter-Tribal Council, which has sponsored training for tribal courts. "Not every community wants one or has one," she said.

The courts cover a broad spectrum, Goldsmith said. Some are formal and are similar to state courts; others are rooted in the traditional judicial systems that tribes have used for generations such as sentencing circles. Judges might be a panel of elders, a single person selected by the tribe or the tribal council, Goldsmith said. Tribal courts in Alaska generally deal with minor offenses and family issues.

In Shageluk, an Athabascan village of 150 some 300 miles northwest of Anchorage, the three-person court handles about 20 new cases a year, each of which requires several court appearances, said Rebecca Wulf, tribal administrator.

Although the court occasionally handles lesser criminal offenses such as public drunkenness, most of its work involves child protection and custody cases, she said. The tribal court allows the issue to remain in the village.

"We have a lot of young parents out here. They get into trouble," and the tribe helps out with drug and alcohol treatment and counseling. The court assists by finding local families to care for their children, Wulf said, "instead of them having their kids taken away by the state. We try to do it at our end, locally."

Shageluk's court also works with the tribal court in nearby Grayling to settle custody issues, she said, rather than have all the participants fly an hour or more to Aniak or Bethel, where the nearest magistrates are located.

Last year, the Department of Justice distributed grants worth about $4 million to Alaska Native tribes or tribally based groups to help villages establish and run their courts, train tribal judges and support tribal police, among other functions. It was unclear Tuesday whether all of that grant money would be funneled to the state if the bill containing Stevens' amendment is approved by the Senate and signed by the president.

Without tribal courts, many villages would have no means of dealing with low-level crime, said David Case, an Indian law attorney. He said tribal courts have the legal authority to handle such cases, and they do so to fill a gaping void.

The state has drastically cut its Village Public Safety Officer program, and the troopers don't have the resources to visit remote villages unless a serious crime occurs.

For the state to put a magistrate and Village Public Safety Officer in each community would cost far more than the Department of Justice now gives to Alaska tribes, Case said.

"With tribal courts ... the agency that operates the court is in the village. ... You have to have the people on the ground to deal with it, and you have to train and pay them," Case said.

Julie Kitka, president of the Alaska Federation of Natives, said a recently convened working group concerned about the problem is asking the Senate Indian Affairs Committee for an oversight hearing on law enforcement in rural Alaska.

Lisa Sutherland, an aide to Stevens, said the senator remains committed to improving life in rural villages.

"This amendment clarifies the law that has been in place since statehood that gave all criminal and civil law jurisdiction to the state of Alaska," Sutherland said. "It allows villages to continue accessing funds for law enforcement through the VPSO and to courts through additional state magistrates. We cannot sustain 227 different tribal court systems in Alaska."

Case said she's repeating a long-held myth about that federal law.

"It didn't extinguish tribal existence or whatever tribal jurisdiction there was," he said. The concept is pretty simple, he added.

"They were here first. Our law recognizes that," Case said.

Reporter Joel Gay contributed to this story from Anchorage. Reporter Liz Ruskin can be reached at lruskin@adn.com.