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41 NARF Legal Rev. 1 (2016)

handle is hein.journals/narf41 and id is 1 raw text is: NARF Expands its Work to Protect and Advance the Indian Vote Back in 2006, NARF was asked to prepare a report on the impact of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in Alaska. This opened a new chapter in NARF's work. While NARF had litigated some VRA cases in the Dakotas in the 1980s, voting cases are highly technical and highly specialized and when certain litigators moved on, the work naturally slowed in this area. However, as NARF delved into this issue, it discovered that Alaska had been violating the VRA since the very day it passed in 1975. For more than 30 years, the needs of the indigenous language speakers in Alaska (Yup'ik, Inupiaq, and Gwich'in among others) had been ignored. All elections were all English, all the time despite a clear requirement in the VRA to translate all voting materials into Native languages. As a result, voter registration and turnout were low, and many of those who were voting would later tell us they did not really understand what they were voting for. This article looks back and examines the renais- sance in NARF's voting work, and shares its plans for the future. The first major voting case NARF brought during this renaissance was the Nick v. Bethel case. We have detailed this case in previous articles and so will not repeat the full case history here. Suffice it to say, this was the first salvo in an overhaul of Alaska's electoral system and NARF's first step. All Alaska photos by Jenni Monet. WINTERISPRING 2016 VOLUME 41, LO