An Alaskan Town Is Losing Ground—and a Way of Life

For years, Kivalina has been cited—like the Maldives, in the Indian Ocean, or the island nation of Tuvalu, in the Pacific—as an example of the existential threat posed to low-lying islands by climate change. In the past two decades, stormwaters have overtopped Kivalina at least once, threatening lives and infrastructure. In 2003, the Government Accountability Office reviewed nine Alaskan villages and identified Kivalina as one of four in “imminent danger.” (Of those four, only one, Newtok, a Yupik village near the Bering Sea, has been able to move some of its residents.) A more recent report designated Kivalina as one of seventy-three Alaska Native villages threatened with destruction because of erosion, flooding, and permafrost degradation. On a visit to the state in 2015, President Barack Obama flew over Kivalina and posted a photograph of the island on social media from the air. “There aren’t many other places in America that have to deal with questions of relocation right now,” Obama wrote, “but there will be.” He described what was happening in the village as “America’s wake-up call.”

Seven years later, Kivalina’s move is still mostly in the future, even though the island continues to lose ground. Building housing is an expensive and laborious process in the remote Arctic, and no single federal agency is responsible for relocating communities facing environmental threats. After more than a decade of navigating government bureaucracies, tribal members successfully lobbied for the construction of a bridge from Kivalina to the mainland. Its completion, in 2021, created a vital evacuation route where once the only possibility of escape was by water or air. The bridge is part of an eight-mile road that zigzags across the tundra, which is covered in snow in winter and prone to flooding in spring and fall. It ends at the foot of a large hill, where a newly constructed school forms the heart of the future village. More years are likely to pass before homes are built there, even as engineers predicted, in 2013, that Kivalina will be fully under water by 2025. The new site is a desolate and rocky place, but, at an elevation of a hundred and twenty-five feet, it is a safe distance from Kivalina’s receding beach and eroding riverbanks. Until the community can move inland, residents live with the worry that the right storm at the right moment could wipe out everything. (...)

One afternoon, I set off to visit Janet Mitchell at her house, a wooden building in the center of the village. It was a brilliantly sunny day, with clear skies and temperatures in the mid-forties. The equinox had just passed; the snow that blankets the island for most of the year had not started falling, but the change of seasons was in the air. I walked past houses with snowmobiles parked haphazardly outside, and dogs chained to fenceposts. A family were putting away a harpoon, used to hunt beluga in the summer, and readying their boat for seining, the net fishing that happens in the fall. Another family rolled past on A.T.V.s. They were bundled up in parkas, with rifles strapped to their backs, heading inland to look for moose and caribou. (Before the bridge was built, people had to travel upriver by boat to hunt in the interior.)

The caribou, part of the Western Arctic herd, were late showing up this year, a much discussed subject in the village. The seining had also been delayed. In Kivalina, fish are traditionally left to age on the riverbanks for at least several days before being eaten or stored in freezers. (“The Western people call them stinky fish,” a villager explained to me, “but here we call them ambrosia.”) If the fish are caught too early in the season, before the frost, they spoil. The fall had been warm, and the thin layer of ice known in Inupiat as qinu, which used to begin forming over the lagoon in late August, had not yet appeared by the last week of September. The puddles in the road which froze overnight would melt by midmorning.

Mitchell, who has gray hair and a friendly demeanor, welcomed me into her living room. Dressed in a black T-shirt and sweats, she was seated on a couch beneath a large photograph of her grandfather Clinton Swan, a whaling captain, a member of the tribal council, and a minister in the Episcopal Church, from whom she had inherited the house. In the picture, the elderly Swan looks dapper in a red lumberjack shirt, suspenders, and nineteen-fifties-style glasses with black-topped rims; in his left hand, he holds a small whale’s tail carved out of walrus ivory. The Swans are one of several families who are active in village politics. (Captains of whaling crews, which are typically organized by family, are also integral to the community, even though a bowhead whale has not been caught in Kivalina in more than two decades.) Above the photograph, wolf and wolverine furs were draped over a clothesline—they belonged to Mitchell’s mother, who died in 2019. A computer and headphones lay on a coffee table, and on a shelf was a large pile of hard drives, evidence of Mitchell’s years of digital documentation, which include audio recordings with older relatives and video footage of major storms.

Mitchell grew up in a sod house on the site of the house she now lives in, part of a multigenerational compound presided over by her great-grandmother Regina, who was born in 1870. In the summer, the family would move into tents on the beach, where it was much cooler. It is common in Inupiat families for grandparents to adopt a grandchild to help them around the house as they age. When Mitchell was eight or nine, her grandmother chose her to come live with her and her husband, just as today Mitchell’s grandson Aaron lives with Mitchell. Her youth was one of physical labor—chopping wood, lugging ice, and hanging the slabs of ugruk, or bearded seal, that her grandmother butchered. Mitchell’s family followed the subsistence food-gathering patterns of the seasons, and in the spring she would sometimes join her father’s whaling crew at their encampment on the ice, to hunt bowhead whales. Mitchell reminisced about the years when the arrival of qinu marked the time to dig whale out of underground caches, “the permafrost freezers, if you will,” she said. “That’s when they would pull out the maktak and distribute it to the whole village. They always waited for qinu.”

According to oral histories recorded in the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies, the region that Kivalina occupies today was known in the nineteenth century as Kivalliñiq, and the people who inhabited the area, the Kivalliñigmiut, were considered their own nation. Until the mid-nineteenth century, they had only minimal contact with Westerners. Then American whalers came to the region, decimating the bowhead and walrus populations and contributing to the spread of deadly epidemics. The Kivalliñigmiut nation was scattered by famine in the early eighteen-eighties, but for Mitchell’s great-grandmother’s generation the barrier island of Kivalina remained a summer base from which to hunt marine mammals: ugruk, walrus, and beluga whales. In late summer and fall, when the caribou arrived and fish migrated upriver, families would travel inland, setting up camp with winter supplies of meat and oil.

According to oral histories recorded in the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies, the region that Kivalina occupies today was known in the nineteenth century as Kivalliñiq, and the people who inhabited the area, the Kivalliñigmiut, were considered their own nation. Until the mid-nineteenth century, they had only minimal contact with Westerners. Then American whalers came to the region, decimating the bowhead and walrus populations and contributing to the spread of deadly epidemics. The Kivalliñigmiut nation was scattered by famine in the early eighteen-eighties, but for Mitchell’s great-grandmother’s generation the barrier island of Kivalina remained a summer base from which to hunt marine mammals: ugruk, walrus, and beluga whales. In late summer and fall, when the caribou arrived and fish migrated upriver, families would travel inland, setting up camp with winter supplies of meat and oil.

Kivalina remained a sparsely populated seasonal hunting ground until 1905, when the federal government constructed a school there. Like many Alaska Native villages situated on shorelines and riverbanks around the state, Kivalina was presumably chosen because of its accessibility by water. The government, in mandating the attendance of the region’s children, began a project of forced settlement in a place that was seen as precarious from the outset. Mitchell maintains a history of Kivalina on a Web site, which references the oldest known written request for relocation. A teacher named Clinton S. Replogle wrote an official report in 1911: Kivalina “is very beautifully situated when the weather is nice and calm, but when the wind blows from the south it raises the water in the ocean until it sometimes almost comes over the banks. . . . We believe that to move would be the wiser if not the safer plan.”

The subject of relocation was raised again many times during the next century. In 1963, the tribe voted on the issue, and a split vote resulted in the community’s staying on the island. It was in the nineteen-seventies that the village’s wooden houses replaced the sod ones. There were other changes, too. Snow machines (as snowmobiles are known in Alaska) replaced dogsled teams. Outboard motorboats and Hondas (regional shorthand for the four-wheel A.T.V.s that everyone in Kivalina uses to get around) replaced skin boats. Stove oil replaced driftwood for heat. An airstrip, completed in 1960, connected Kivalina by air to the rest of Alaska and beyond. Electrification arrived in 1971.

Today, Mitchell works as the shareholder-relations coördinator in Kivalina for the nana Regional Corporation, which is owned by Inupiat shareholders who live or have roots in Northwest Alaska. The corporation was formed after the passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, in 1971, which ceded some forty million acres of land in Alaska to Native-owned corporations (in exchange for their relinquishing claims over the rest) and offered Native Alaskans a stake in the sale of oil and mineral leases on their land. The act gave Native Alaskans greater self-determination, but it also linked their economic w ell-being to the commercial exploitation of their lands.

by Emily Witt, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Ash Adams for The New Yorker
[ed. I usually skip over disaster travelogues (as I imagine them) but Ms. Witt is an excellent writer and captures well the lives and lifestyles of many people in Alaska's remote villages - the conflicts between traditional cultures, history, modernization, and powerless frustration. See also: Climate change from A to Z - the stories we tell ourselves about the future (New Yorker).]