NATIVES' BATTLE TO STAY OUT OF PRISON...

Anchorage Daily News (AK){PUBLICATION2}

December 3, 1995

Section: Metro Edition:

Final Page: D1

NATIVES' BATTLE TO STAY OUT OF PRISON BEGINS WITH A PERSONAL PLEDGEMike DooganAnchorage Daily News Staff

Greg Nothstine spoke of his life plainly, of the fear and the hurt and the shame of growing up among drinkers. Of his anger and rebellion and trouble with the law. "I knew my rights before I was 13 years old," he said. His audience, two dozen men, watched him with eyes that had seen these things firsthand.

But Nothstine's story is not theirs. His life turned out different. He stood up front talking, wearing a short, white kuspuk trimmed in red, black, and yellow. They sat in folding chairs listening, wearing prison blues. When the Thursday morning meeting ended, Nothstine walked out of Cook Inlet Pre-Trial Facility. They didn't.

In high school, Nothstine discovered athletics, excelling at traditional Native games like the high kick and the stick pull. Five years ago, he chose sobriety. Today, he is the chairman of the Alaska Federation of Natives Sobriety Movement.

The members of his audience discovered crime and prison. There are lots of Natives in prison.
"In looking at information from the State of Alaska," says an issue paper on justice and corrections just released by the Alaska Natives Commission, "the Commission found that as of April 1993, Alaska Natives made up just over 32 percent of the state's incarcerated population, despite the fact that Alaska Natives represent 16 percent of the overall population and only 13.5 percent of the prison-age population in the state."

Most of these people are in prison because they drank and did something violent. Nothstine is traveling around to all of the state's prisons to offer Native inmates the chance to take a sobriety pledge.

"A person is only as good as their word," he said. "But your word is only as good as your name. We're taking names." So far, he said, his group has collected 7,000 names, some of them from the state's 1,000 or so Native inmates. A clipboard was passed around. Most of his listeners added theirs. When their time came, a half-dozen inmates took the talking stick in turn. Their words were sometimes lost in the high corners of the prison gym, sometimes drowned by the amplified thunder of garbled announcements. But two things came through loud and clear: Alcohol and white man.

"When I was a kid, I started drinking," one inmate began, saying later, "The slow death is a genie, a genie inside of a bottle."

"The white man says if you do something good, we will reward you," said another, then tells of all the programs he's been through in his 10 years in jail. All this cooperation, he says, has gone unrewarded:

"I want to go home. I want to be with my family." "The white man says, 'You can't do that. You can't go home.' " "I say, why?" "The white man says, 'Well, the parole board won't let you. You can't go home.' "

These and other complaints set off Jerry Ward, a Native who is the prison system's rural affairs coordinator. "This isn't fair. . . . We have no Native judges. No Native parole officers . . . This is a bad system. It's not going to be fair to Alaska Natives. The only way it will be fair to you is don't get into it."

The meeting ended with Nothstine leading a prayer, everyone in a circle holding hands, heads bowed. "The obstacles do seem many," Nothstine said. "Give us the eyes to see the patterns and the path."

Afterward, Ward repeats what he's told the inmates. Eight of 10 Natives who get out of prison end up back inside. What the ones who don't have in common are sober, drug-free lives.

Does Nothstine think many of his audience will reach that destination? "The battle of whether the resolutions [i.e., sobriety pledge] are followed," he said, "will take place in the consciences of those who signed the pledge."

Mike Doogan's opinion column appear[ed] in the Daily News each Tuesday, Friday and Sunday. You can hear more of Mike Doogan on the Daily Newsline. Call 277-1500 and enter code 2205.