Family

In gay communities all over the country, there is a before and an after — a before June 12, 2016, and an after. The shooting at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, killed 49 people and was the largest act of violence against the LGBTQ community in US History. And it happened as Pride events were taking place all over the country, including a reception at Juneau’s Northern Light Church mere hours before.

The reception on June 11 was organized by artist Ricky Tagaban. He wanted to create a space for others who are two-spirited, embodying both a male and a female person. Like writer Vivian Mork. She was amazed that over 100 people came.

“We gathered at the Northern Lights Church to celebrate two-spirited people – gay native people,” Mork said. “It was the first time I’ve ever known of that happening in Juneau.”

Tagaban set out pilot bread and salmon spread, coffee and tea and an open mic. Rick Peterson, President of Tlingit and Haida Central Council, talked about how the council authorized same-sex marriage in February 2015 — months before the Supreme Court ruling. The media went crazy. He did 20 interviews in one day and a reporter kept asking, “Why are you doing this?”

“If you’ve all watched the movie Princess Bride, there’s a marriage scene in there and the Rabbi, or whatever, he’s like, “Love, Love.” And that was my answer to everything,” Peterson said. “She’s like, ‘Why are you doing this?’ Love. ‘Why are you doing this?’ Love.”

Love, it seemed, was the answer in the room that day. Other speakers reflected – some cautiously, some joyfully – on how far America has come. Gay people can get married now. Come out in school. Tribal court judge Debra O’Gara, who grew up in the era of the Stonewall Riots, marveled at how there was less to be afraid of for the next generation.

“I came out 40 years ago and it was the Native community in Seattle who shunned me,” O’Gara said. “And to stand here and see my community is great.”

It’s not perfect, she said, but every year it gets better. A lot of people came away from the reception with the same feeling. And then, the next morning, it was June 12th.

“My heart sank when I saw the headlines the next morning,” Mork said. “I so wanted it to be a horrible Facebook hoax. I didn’t want it to be true. But it was.”

Mork was up early to catch a plane the Louisiana. James Hoagland, who was at the reception and organized Juneau’s Pride Week, is a well-known drag queen in Juneau. Two of his friends were performing at Pulse that night. Over the phone, he learned how one got out quickly and the other hid in a dressing room for hours, only escaping after a SWAT team removed an air conditioning unit – creating an escape portal for hostages in the wall.

Hoagland identified, strongly, with the victims. “Young people who were just out to dance and be in community and have a good time,” Hoagland said. “And that so easily could have been us.”

If the Two Spirit Pride reception affirmed safety and acceptance, Orlando violently asserted an opposite claim: that being gay in America is still dangerous.

“I’ve had nightmares all week about being shot on stage while performing,” Hoagland said. “Somehow, I had to put that aside enough to go forward with the biggest show that we’ve ever had in Juneau on Friday night.”

That drag show, called Glitz, packed Centennial Hall with 500 people. While the shooting was in Hoagland’s words, the “elephant in the room,” it didn’t stop people from coming out for Juneau’s Pride Week. Quite the opposite. “I think people felt even more comfortable and confident being loud and proud because we know we have an obligation too,” Hoagland said.

But after pride week is over, what do you do? What kind of courage do you need to get up in the morning and continue to be yourself? Hoagland’s husband recently said to him, “I may be killed for being gay in my lifetime. And I’ve found peace with that.”

“The victims in Orlando didn’t die for no reason,” Hoagland said. “I hate that they lost their lives, but the fact that they did has changed the world.”

As for Mork, she spent her plane ride writing and recorded this message from her hotel room in Louisiana.

“This is pride month and odds are there is a gay person near you who is hurting over this. Tell them you support them. Tell them you love them. Gunalchéesh.”

Soon after the shooting, the Juneau Assembly took hearings on an anti-discrimination ordinance, for gender and sexual identity. And in a city with no gay bars, the Southeast Alaska LGBTQ Alliance, or SEAGLA, plans to make the rounds at Juneau business with rainbow stickers for the windows. That way, those in Juneau can be assured that if they enter that bar or restaurant, they will be treated with respect inside, no matter who they love.

A pay increase should be a happy event in a person’s life, but for some it can evoke fear. That’s because more money earned could mean less money overall when public assistance programs get cut off.

Rebecca and her husband Mark Dundore own Juneau Treasures Thrift Store. A place that’s filled to the brim with eclectic used items. Their shop is doing well. So well they’re opening a second location that will sell mostly secondhand furniture. But in the course of running their business, they’ve run into some issues with staffing.

They have three employees right now, who make between $10 and $12 an hour. That’s more than Alaska’s minimum wage.

But when they’ve offered pay increases or more hours, they didn’t get the response they expected. One employee was worried she would lose her public assistance.

“We wanted her to work almost full time, and she couldn’t do it because she has six children, and they’re on food stamps,” Rebecca said. “We wouldn’t be able to give enough to get her off the food stamps support entirely, and she wasn’t able to take anymore ‘cause she was afraid she would lose the food stamps.”

Rebecca says it was an awkward situation. They’ve even had employees volunteer to work for free, so as not to make too much money and wind up going over.

“That’s a really serious concern for a lot of people around here,” Rebecca said.

Per capita, Alaska has the most households on public assistance in the nation. That’s according to statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Anna Schetky and her husband live in one of those households. Anna works for Rebecca at Juneau Treasures. She decided to transition to the part-time job after learning of her pregnancy. Before she worked in a stressful environment with at-risk kids, and she hoped the move would be good for her and the baby.

But it meant losing the family’s insurance. So she signed up for Denali KidCare, a Medicaid program.

“Due to the major drop in income, we also were trying to get on WIC,” Schetky said.

That’s food and nutrition assistance for women, infants and children.

“All of those things were kind of looming over us. And we had to sit down and start crunching some numbers,” Schetky said.

She says with that first WIC voucher, she was able to stock up on perishable items, milk and some veggies. It helped supplement what they got at the food bank.

When she first started at Juneau Treasures, she was making about $10 an hour.

“All of a sudden they’re like, ‘Hey, you’re doing a great job, we want to offer you more hours and more pay,’ and I just kind of looked at them and I was like, ‘I don’t know if I can do this,’” Schetky said. “I had to sit down again and start crunching pennies basically, to see if we could still keep these benefits to see if we could make enough money to survive.”

She says the WIC office advised she would be on the cusp of making too much. To be eligible, she couldn’t make more than about $3,800. Her gross household income would be about $4,000 a month. So she decided to drop WIC.

“For right now we’ve had to find our little groove and not really swerve one way or the other because we want our baby to be covered,” Schetky said.

She is still covered by Denali KidCare. The income limit for that is $400 higher.

A WIC representative thought Schetky might still qualify. Being eligible for one might automatically qualify her for the other. But for the past few months, she’s bee paying for the expense out-of-pocket. She wants to grow a garden to help offset some of the cost.

Rebecca and her husband Mark Dundore say they make enough to keep the doors open at Juneau Treasures but not enough to pay more than $12 an hour.

“I think to bridge that gap, we’d have to pay almost $15 or $16 an hour. It’s a small business, with all the other taxes and fees and stuff, we just can’t do that right now,” Mark said.

One of the solutions they’ve come up with is having a bunch of part-time employees, but they realize there’s no easy fix. The problem isn’t as simple as having employees who don’t want to work.

“I would say that’s probably the exception.” Rebecca said. “Everybody we’ve encountered anyway has just worked really hard and been energetic and we’ve really appreciated that.”

For now, they might have to show that appreciation in a weird way: by offering their employees less.

Funding for Chasing the Dream is provided by the JPB Foundation and the Ford Foundation. It’s part of an ongoing series about poverty and opportunity in America. 

When 20-year-old Adam Lanza walked into Sandy Hook Elementary — the same school he attended as a child — he was carrying a few guns, but his main one was a Bushmaster AR-15 rifle.

In a span of a few minutes, 20 students and six educators were dead. In one classroom, police recovered 80 expended bullet casings from the gun. In another, 49.

“How does a kid around the corner get his hands on a weapon that was designed for killing large amounts of people in a short amount of time on the battlefield?” asked Mark Barden.

Barden’s 7-year-old son, Daniel, was killed at Sandy Hook. Now, Barden is one of 10 plaintiffs suing Remington Arms Co., the manufacturer of the assault rifle used in the mass murder, along with the gun’s distributor and seller.

On Monday, a judge will hear arguments about whether the case has legal merit to proceed to trial. That decision is expected to take months.

The plaintiffs argue that the AR-15, a modified version of a gun used by the military in Vietnam, never should have been marketed and sold to civilians.

“Now it wasn’t meant to be designed to kill innocent civilians, but the weapon doesn’t know that,” said Josh Koskoff, a lawyer representing the Sandy Hook victims. “And so arming civilians with a weapon whose specific use is to kill people — when gun companies know that people kill people — is negligent.”

But Remington said that’s not the case.

The company and its lawyers didn’t respond to requests for comment, but a recent motion it filed says the assault rifle used at Sandy Hook was lawfully sold and purchased by the shooter’s mother. And it says the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, passed in 2005, protects the manufacturer.

“Car manufacturers don’t get this kind of immunity,” said John Thomas, a professor of law and public health at Quinnipiac University. “Knife manufacturers don’t get this kind of immunity — lawn mower manufacturers don’t. But Congress decided to immunize gun manufacturers and dealers from lawsuits based on acts committed with their products.”

But Thomas said there is an exception to the immunity law. It’s something lawyers call “negligent entrustment” — basically, selling or “entrusting” a gun to a suspicious buyer who plans to commit a crime with it.

Thomas said prior court cases challenging the 2005 law generally focused on acts of negligence in particular sales to individual customers.

“But the plaintiffs in the Sandy Hook case have a creative spin on it, and they say it’s actually negligent to sell to civilians any weapon like an AR-15, an assault rifle, because it’s designed not for target shooting or carrying in your purse to protect yourself in a dark parking lot, but it’s designed for military use,” Thomas said.

Attorney Katherine Whitney said Remington will challenge that assertion. She previously represented a retailer that sold to the person who opened fire at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo.

“Their argument is, ‘Hey we’re not a seller. Because we’re not a seller, this negligent entrustment exception doesn’t apply,’ ” Whitney said.

Still, the case has made progress. In April, a judge decided there was jurisdiction to allow the case to proceed in a Connecticut court.

The judge also opened up the process of evidence discovery, which means plaintiffs are optimistic they’ll soon access AR-15 marketing materials and interview company executives at Remington.

Copyright 2016 Connecticut Public Radio. To see more, visit Connecticut Public Radio.

Bethel’s Senior Center is closing its doors. Orutsararmuit Native Council, or ONC, runs the program and will keep many of its services. But starting next month, it will no longer offer a space for seniors to gather, talk, and eat. Seniors will remain fed and supported, but they could be spending a lot more time alone.

It’s 9:30 in the morning at the ONC Senior Center. Albert Kawagley and I are waiting for a half hour for the other elders to show up.

Kawagley: I’m 67, going on 68, a young man yet. [Laughs]

Albert’s been coming to the center every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for six years. He said many of the elders grew up in Bethel and have known each other since childhood.

KYUK: What will you miss most when this closes down?

Kawagley: My friends, playing cards with my friends here and not just watching the four walls that surround me.

The closure is happening July 1. At that time, elders will no longer have a place to eat lunch, talk and play bingo three days a week.

Program Director Nikki Hoffman said ONC is closing the center to prevent a $200,000 budget deficit.

“What I fear with the loss of this program is a risk for isolation and loneliness and their primary care providers could increase risk for burnout,” Hoffman said.

The program mainly runs off state grants but the funding problem isn’t with the state’s budget cuts. It’s with the Senior Center itself, housed in the Lion’s Club building.

“The grant award that we get for the adult day is $111,000,” Hoffman said. “75% of that would be used directly for the facility.”

Three positions are also being cut. One of those, the Program Manager, is held by Denise Kinegak.

“And so this is what they do,” Kinegak said. “They usually come in, wash up, and then they head over here. Check our the birds, of course. Whenever we get new food donations, they’re always quick to check out what we have, so they know what’s in stock.”

The birds are about a dozen ducks and geese lying on a table—subsistence donations that will be taken home and used for future lunches.

The elders move to different parts of the room. Most get a snack. Some start a game of Rummy or begin quilting. Others watch Jeopardy. I approach one elder, eating a pastry and wearing a big red sun hat.

Catherine Peters is 82. “Or am I 83?” she laughs. Peters said she lives with her son who works during the day. She can’t cook or leave the house by herself. All this, she said, makes the Senior Center so important.

“Sometimes we’re lonesome at home,” Peters said. “Our families can’t be all the time with us in the home. I’ll miss talking with my friends here. Even if I can’t see or hear, they come to me, and that makes my day happy and cheerful.”

ONC Senior Services will still deliver a meal to 50 seniors around Bethel Monday through Friday. And ONC will still drive seniors to the post office, bank, and grocery stores, but that route will happen once instead of three times a week. They’ll also continue helping elders with paperwork like paying bills and requesting prescription refills.

ONC’s long-term goal is to build a Senior Center of its own and give its elders a place to gather and eat throughout the week. As of now, there are no set plans for making that happen.

Nome Public Schools has a new option for saving the local preschool without having to tap into city coffers. At a school board meeting Monday night, Superintendent Shawn Arnold announced that despite budget cuts, the state will fund early childhood education for a select group of Alaska school districts.

Arnold said Nome Public Schools is eligible for the three-year grant worth $6 million. But the funding would also require the district to find a long-term solution — one that doesn’t rely on Pre-K money from the Alaska Department of Education.

“We’ll get it, but we also have to have plans with the state,” said Arnold. “Detailed plans answering: ‘How are we going to sustain it?’”

While the district works on its grant application, which is due July 1, Arnold said he’ll explore possibilities for more permanent funding. That might include developing a trust, seeking donations from corporations, or building partnerships with community organizations like Kawerak. If Nome does win the grant, the state will notify the district by mid-July.

Under new federal guidance, it will be easier for potential Alaska Native and Native American parents to adopt Native children in state custody.

The 360-page rule issued by the Bureau of Indian Affairs Wednesday aims to make interpretation of the Indian Child Welfare Act more consistent, regardless of the state, judge or social worker involved.

With the new BIA regulations, state courts across the country now must establish at the beginning whether the placement of a child is subject to the Indian Child Welfare Act, or ICWA. The new regulations also clarify the law’s placement preference and how states and tribes determine jurisdiction.

“This is going to be entirely helpful for us,” says Christy Lawton, director of Alaska’s Office of Children’s Services. “I think that these rules are providing a lot more clarity to areas of practice that have been somewhat gray and open for interpretation. I think It’s going to reduce, potentially, future litigation.”

The rules likely would have prevented litigation in the Tununak case by requiring ICWA eligibility to have been determined at the outset.

In 2015, the Alaska Supreme Court declined to reconsider a case in which a Native child dubbed “Baby Dawn” was permanently placed into a non-Native home. The child’s grandmother told the state that she wanted to adopt her. But the state argued that since the grandmother did not did not formally file paperwork, there was no ICWA placement preference to apply.

Matt Newman is an attorney with the Native American Rights Fund, which represented the grandmother in the case. Newman says there’s a pattern of Native children being moved to Anchorage or other urban centers. The thinking is that there are more services there to help a child and parent, improving chances of reunification.

But when that isn’t possible, Newman says the court often decides that the foster care family bond should not be broken. Those children do not return to their home villages.

“We saw these situations where time and time again children were being placed in Anchorage or Mat-Su or on the Railbelt road system under the premise that they would be returned or reunified with their communities and their families, only to have the opposite eventually happen,” Newman said. “Once you’re in Anchorage or you’re in the urban centers, you stay there.”

That scenario happens far less frequently, Newman says, since Valerie Nurr’araaluk Davidson, a Yup’ik woman with a background in health care and law, became commissioner of the Department of Health and Social Services. Her department oversees the Office of Children’s Services.

“I think our biggest opportunity is to leverage relationships with tribes and tribal organizations to really improve outcomes for Alaska Native and American Indian children in our communities,” Davidson said.

“When you can provide that care as close to home as possible, we know that we’re going to have better outcomes for children. Tribes are really in the best position to be able to provide that local care.”

In March 2015, under Davidson’s guidance, the state issued emergency regulations that essentially formalized any contact regarding the immediate placement of a child. That means if a grandmother calls the Office of Children’s Services and tells them that she wants to take care of her grandchild, that phone call is documented as a formal request to initiate adoption or foster care placement.

Legislators codified those emergency regulations last month in House Bill 200. Gov. Bill Walker made it a priority for the legislature. The Alaska Federation of Natives strongly advocated for the bill.

Nicole Borromeo is an executive vice president and general counsel at AFN.

“We’re encouraged by the Department of the Interior releasing these BIA guidelines and regulations, and we are looking forward to the state courts complying with the regulations because they’re no longer guidance, they are in fact federal regulations and they are binding,” Borromeo said.

In 1978, Congress adopted the Indian Child Welfare Act to remedy the high rate of removal of Native children from their homes.

According to a 1976 study by the Association on American Indian Affairs, before ICWA, it’s estimated that between 25 and 35 percent of indigenous children in the United States were being removed from their homes. In most cases, those children were placed in homes away from their culture and extended family.

While ICWA is intended to keep Native children in Native homes, the law has been criticized by both its supporters and detractors. Opponents, many of which are Christian adoption groups, say that non-Native families should have the same right to adopt Native children, and that preventing them from doing so is to the detriment of those in state custody. Supporters of ICWA have long spoken against how much power a judge has in interpreting the law, a problem which the new regulations aim to resolve.

The new federal regulations clarify what has been for decades a murky and often divisive law. Newman, the Native American Rights Fund attorney, noted that coincidentally the regulations were announced within two days of the anniversary of the state court declining to reconsider the Tununak case.