National Tribal Environmental Council

"Sivunemta Nalluksaghiit Seghleghqestet" – Our Ancestors Did Not Know Criminals

On April 28th at the Doubletree Hotel in Albuquerque, NM, Steven E. Sumida, MA, JD presented "Sivunemta Nalluksaghiit Seghleghqestet: Our Ancestors Did Not Know Criminals," a Traditional Justice Training program funded under a grant awarded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance to Pribilof Aleuts, Inc.

This unique and innovative program is designed to address the problem of high rates of suicide, domestic violence, and assaults occurring in Native American subsistence cultures. The program includes real stories of how remote Alaska Native communities are restoring and implementing traditional indigenous value systems to replace western/European court structures. Pre-contact systems that enforced values (as opposed to laws)are better suited to addressing cultural destruction, forced assimilation and the conflicts that arise when western/European legal system values are imposed on indigenous communities, thereby destroying the traditional values.

Sumida used the same traditional government training for two years in rural Alaska to train tribes on how they can enforce their environmental codes to protect the environment and manage sewage lagoons, handling of honey buckets, solid waste disposal, recycling and hazardous waste designation areas, and enforcing environmental health practices at subsistence camps. The first step was to get rid of all of the western laws that had incompatible underlying values and no enforcement mechanisms. The environmental codes were boiled down just to fact statements. This was shared in the community through a series of community meetings and discussed in the context of values, and once the values were talked about and how the values were applied historically to similar situations, if conflicts still existed, posters were made for special enforcement issues.

The difference from the western system relating to these environmental issues is that the laws and regulations do not actually need to be written down. It is primacy of the values over the rule of law. However they could write down laws and have primacy of the written law over the values just like the west, which would still work, because now, having gone through this process, the written laws would be based on their own traditional values rather than western values.

Sumida developed these training programs through personal observation and experience gained while working as an Alaska Legal Services Corporation attorney for Inupiaq seniors in the Arctic region of Alaska. He has provided Traditional Justice Training programs to over 40 remote off-road Alaska villages for over 10 years.

The training illustrates how the western/European values and governance systems conflict with traditional values, and how the small isolated villages lack the sufficient governance infrastructure into which to assimilate or conform. The loss of traditional government combined with the lack of a replacement western government have contributed to the bleak current status of Natives in Alaska, as illustrated by the following facts and statistics:

• Native women suffer more than a third of reported domestic violence while making up only about a fifth of the Alaska women.

• Natives make up more than a third of prisoners but are less than a fifth of the overall population.

• Natives are the victims of half of the child abuse, yet they make up only one-quarter of the children in Alaska.

• Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder among Native babies doubled in the 1990s and they are over ten times as likely to suffer from this affliction than non-Native babies in Alaska.

Alaska Natives average 42 suicides per 100,000, compared to the average in the U.S. of 11 per 100,000. Put another way, the Alaska Native suicide rate is 382% higher than the national average. Compare that rate to the suicide rate of the Pine Ridge reservation which is 150% higher than the national average, and it becomes increasingly obvious that the loss and destruction of traditional values have had a most alarming and negative consequence for the indigenous population of rural Alaska.

Concepts significant to Traditional Justice that are presented in Sumida's training include, but are not limited to the following:

• Sharing

• Honesty and fairness

• Forgiveness

• Self sufficiency and unity

• Caring for and respect of elders in the community and respecting the wisdom of their experience

• Harmony in the community and family and caring for the welfare of children

• Cooperation and responsibility to the village and family

• Respect for the environment, land and nature and protecting the subsistence way of life

• Humor and spirituality

These values, according to Sumida, are a system of governance, just like laws, and when recognized and implemented as such, are capable of regulating community behavior. Through a program of Cultural Restoration Activities, traditional values such as traditional knowledge, subsistence and subsistence language, and community and family harmony can be restored. One such example follows:

Steven Sumida, MA, JD, is a practicing attorney with experience as a civil and criminal trial lawyer. He has served as executive director or program manager for several Alaska Native organizations, and is currently the Executive Director/Program Manager for Pribilof Aleuts, Inc., the nonprofit arm of Tanadgusix Corporation. He has conducted Traditional Justice Trainings in over 40 remote off-road Alaska villages for over a decade. His Traditional Justice Trainings are the only such programs to implement pre-contact Alaska traditional justice systems.