Men and women on the basketball court, Stolen Sisters outside the lines

Klas Stolpe
Mar 23
3 min read

Gold Medal tournament aids organizations across many communities

Tlingit and Haida Village Public Safety Officer Dakota Strong and Juneau Lions Club Past President and Tournament Co-Chair Tim Wilson hold a Stolen Sisters blanket on Monday, March 23, 2026, during the 77th Gold Medal Basketball Tournament in the Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé George Houston Gymnasium. The blanket is part of a raffle. Other blankets will be given as gifts. (Klas Stolpe / Juneau Independent)

By Klas Stolpe

Juneau Independent

There is a small table 20 paces from the entrance to the George Houston Gymnasium. Every basketball fan who enters the 77th Annual Juneau Lions Club Gold Medal Basketball Tournament passes it.

Some stop as the vision of a young woman's face peers at them. Her eyes are hauntingly soulful. A red mask runs through her beauty and a red hand represents the silencing of Indigenous voices and victims. The woman signifies solidarity against violence targeting Indigenous women and highlights the rates of unsolved cases.

“The Indigenous people, thousands and thousands go missing over the years,” Hoonah’s Victor Carteeti said. “And it doesn’t even get a blip on national news. I am kind of shocked. I know it is probably going to come off as being a racist, but some people of a certain ethnicity, one goes missing and they lock the whole town, the whole country down. But like I said, not one mention of Indigenous women or men that have gone missing over the years doesn’t get recorded at all.”

The table is small, but the message, and the impactful blanket covering it, are large. Stolen Sisters.

Indigenous women face staggering rates of violence. According to the National Indigenous Women's Resource Center, Native women face murder rates more than 10 times the national average. Disappearances are linked to domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, historical trauma and jurisdictional and systemic failures.

“The Stolen Sisters blanket is a big raffle for the events in Native culture that are going on right now,” Juneau Lions Club treasurer Sandra Lujan said. “It is a sacred blanket. It is very important as we represent all the communities coming in and be aware of what is going on in their communities, too, we are all the same community at the same time. And this is a big tournament for our community and all of our villages around us. Everything that we do here in Gold Medal we give back to the community.”

The Gold Medal Tournament holds daily 50/50 raffles to support high school students and has an Alaska Airlines raffle. The commons outside the gymnasium is a gathering spot for vendors and community members to mingle, revisit past tournaments and share stories.

Just two days into the seven-day tournament, with crowds already exceeding attendance for this same time last year, it is the perfect place to visit a bold awareness blanket with a woman's face looking out. Is she looking for someone? Is she looking for someone to find her? Is she demanding justice? Now is a perfect time to talk about that.

In 2023, the Alaska Department of Public Safety along with the Anchorage Police Department released a first-of-its-kind Missing Indigenous Persons Report. It came on the heels of their work in 2021 with Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s focus on five policy areas impacting Alaskans including Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons (MMIP)

DPS updated the publicly available Alaska Missing Persons Clearinghouse to include the race and sex of each missing person listed in the Alaska Public Safety Information Network (APSIN).

• Contact Klas Stolpe at klas.stolpe@gmail.com.