Amidst rising drug and alcohol problems, the Togiak Traditional Council has banned a Dillingham man from the village.

Traditional Council President Jimmy Coopchiak said the council has decided the man is no longer welcome in town because of the vices he brings with him.

"I think we need to do this, to protect our future children, and our elders, because they're vulnerable. It's been getting worse, and we're saying enough is enough," Coopchiak said.

The tribe has decided not to publicly release the man's name. Because the allegations of drug and alcohol importation leveled against him are not based on state criminal complaints or filed in open court, they are also withheld here.

This is the second time in a year that the Togiak tribe has banished an individual from the village. Last fall, local air carriers were informed that the first of them, a 23-year-old from Dillingham, was no longer welcome in Togiak. In April, letters went out that his 26-year-old brother had been banned as well.

Local airlines confirmed that the tribe had asked them not to allow either of these brothers passage to the village.

Banishments from tribal lands in Alaska are not necessarily common, but are not unheard of. The procedure appears to be of renewed interest as communities wrestle the epidemic of heroin and meth use.

"It's rare, but we are exercising our sovereign authority as a federally-recognized tribe," said Togiak tribal Court Clerk Helen Gregorio.

Gregorio said banishment begins with a petition to the tribal council, which then meets with the court's three-judge panel. Once the banishment order has been signed, the tribe says its police force will arrest the men if they set foot on their tribal lands.

The first man was banished for life, the most recent banished for the next 10 years.

Coopchiak and other officials in Togiak, a dry village, have said that the amount of hard drugs and alcohol coming in has spiked dramatically in the past two years. They blame that in part on direct cargo flights from Anchorage, and a lack of enforcement. They've said they have also asked the state and federal governments for help, hoping for funding and expanded jurisdiction for their tribal police and court.

Coopchiak said the council is taking more petitioned cases under consideration right now, involving actual tribal members who live in Togiak.

"If it's a tribal member, we have the authority to revoke their membership in our tribal membership," he said.

Dave Bendinger can be reached at dave@kdlg.org.