EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Thirty-six percent of criminal cases in Alaska are flagged as domestic violence (DV), and cases are increasing annually. Additionally, more than half of adult women in Alaska have experienced intimate partner violence (IPV) and/or sexual assault at least once in their lifetime. Clearly, DV is a pervasive public health issue in Alaska, even though DV is recognized as a crime and legal mechanisms are in place to address them. Therefore, this study aimed to comprehensively understand DV in Alaska in the context of the overall judicial response to DV. Confidential interviews were conducted with victim advocates, Battering Intervention Program (BIP) providers, probation officers, law enforcement, judges, and attorneys (prosecutor and defense) from the six Alaska regions (i.e., Southeast, Southcentral, Southwest, Western, Arctic, and Interior). Three research questions guided the study: 1. What is the current state of DV in Alaska from the perspectives of the stakeholders who enforce or work within DV statutes, including court-mandated battering intervention programs? 2. What are the strengths and barriers of the legal system specific to addressing DV perpetration? 3. What are the unmet needs of the stakeholders that are important to consider in improving the response to DV perpetration? Seven themes and related sub-themes emerged. Each section ends with a summary and achievable recommendations. The findings are summarized into the following broad takeaway points: 1. Some important issues that the stakeholders in Alaska have continuously identified over the past decade have not been addressed. We compared the findings from this report to results from prior reports. Problems identified by stakeholders dating back to 2011 (and dating back further) persist today. 2. Stakeholders have varied perceptions and beliefs about those who are impacted by DV. Such variations contribute to differences in stakeholder descriptions of how DV should be addressed. 3. Stakeholders are not requesting softened justice or a reduction in DV criminality but a system that is responsive to how DV is occurring in their local context. Stakeholders emphasized the need to provide a variety of options to hold DV offenders accountable in ways that align with DV typology, co-occurring risk factors, and victim needs. 4. It is unclear whether certain issues are caused by knowledge gaps or service gaps. If knowledge gaps are causing certain issues, information should be disseminated, and confusion should be dispelled. If service gaps are causing the issues, services should be made available. 5. The state lacks a unified ideology that guides the overall response to DV crimes. Each state entity may have a strong sense of purpose, but their DV-related operations are disparate as they are not guided by a state-defined goal. Such goals would help inform how DV crimes should be addressed, how those impacted by DV should be treated by the stakeholders, and how DV dynamics should be understood. A unified ideology would subsequently specify what a successful outcome means to Alaska and the measures that should be utilized for evaluating success and efficacy.

Non-Natives living in isolated village settings in Alaska have traditionally been Ignored in anthropological investigations. These non-Natives are the subject of this thesis. It is a preliminary treatment of the adjustments they must make as newcomers to a cultural environment that is at first unfamiliar to them. As a result of these adjustments ,• the newcomers develop a different approach to life, one which includes a blend of elements from both their own culture and that in which they find themselves as strangers. The thesis also briefly discusses these non-Natives as change agents in the modification of the life patterns of the Native people among whom they live. Finally, the thesis suggests tentative guidelines for the recruitment of bush personnel in Alaska.

The research component of the Alaska Sexual Assault Kit Initiative (AK-SAKI) was designed to guide the Alaska Department of Public Safety (DPS) and their agency partners in making recommendations to improve sexual assault investigations, prosecutions, and victim-survivor engagement and support processes. Using qualitative interview data from key stakeholders including victim-survivors, quantitative survey responses from victim-survivors, and agency records from DPS and the Alaska Department of Law, three questions are answered in this report: 1. What are key stakeholders’ experiences with sexual assault investigations, prosecutions, and victim-survivor engagement and support, and how do those experiences compare to their perceptions of just outcomes? 2. How common are the experiences and just outcomes identified by key stakeholders? 3. What factors shape the likelihood of achieving those just outcomes?

We combine a glacier outburst flood model with a glacier flow model to investigate decadal to centennial variations in outburst floods originating from ice-dammed marginal basins. Marginal basins can form due to the retreat and detachment of tributary glaciers, a process that often results in remnant ice being left behind. The remnant ice, which can act like an ice shelf or break apart into a pack of icebergs, limits a basin’s water storage capacity but also exerts pressure on the underlying water and promotes drainage. We find that during glacier retreat there is a strong, nearly linear relationship between flood water volume and peak discharge for individual basins, despite large changes in glacier and remnant ice volumes that are expected to impact flood hydrographs. Consequently, peak discharge increases over time as long as there is remnant ice remaining in a basin, and peak discharge begins to decrease once a basin becomes ice-free. Thus, similar size outburst floods can occur at very different stages of glacier retreat. We also find that the temporal variability in outburst flood magnitude depends on how the floods initiate. Basins that connect to the subglacial hydrological system only after reaching flotation depth yield greater long-term variability in outburst floods than basins that are continuously connected to the subglacial hydrological system (and therefore release floods that initiate before reaching flotation depth). Our results highlight the importance of improving our understanding of both changes in basin geometry and outburst flood initiation mechanisms in order to better assess outburst flood hazards and their impacts on landscape and ecosystem evolution.

Understanding the dynamic response of glaciers to climate change is vital for assessing water resources and hazards, and subglacial hydrology is a key player in glacier systems. Traditional observations of subglacial hydrology are spatially and temporally limited, but recent seismic deployments on and around glaciers show the potential for comprehensive observation of glacial hydrologic systems. We present results from a high-density seismic deployment spanning the surface of Lemon Creek Glacier, Alaska. Our study coincided with a marginal lake drainage event, which served as a natural experiment for seismic detection of changes in subglacial hydrology. We observed glaciohydraulic tremor across the surface of the glacier that was generated by the subglacial hydrologic system. During the lake drainage, the relative changes in seismic tremor power and water flux are consistent with pressurization of the subglacial system of only the upper part of the glacier. This event was not accompanied by a significant increase in glacier velocity; either some threshold necessary for rapid basal motion was not attained, or, plausibly, the geometry of Lemon Creek Glacier inhibited speedup. This pressurization event would have likely gone undetected without seismic observations, demonstrating the power of cryoseismology in testing assumptions about and mapping the spatial extent of subglacial pressurization.