SHISHMAREF
A freshly skinned seal looks like an oversize beef tenderloin with a cute whiskered face stuck on one end. I know this because the first person I met after dropping off my bag in Shishmaref, Annie Weyiouanna, was scraping the fat from a spotted seal she had hunted that day with her husband. “I’ll feed this to my sled dogs,” she said, separating the greasy fat layer with her curved ulu knife. “The skin will make a hat and a couple of pairs of mittens.”
Weyiouanna is Shishmaref’s relocation coordinator. Two weeks had passed since the town’s historic vote to move to the mainland. The handwritten ballot results were still posted on the door of the city office building. Shishmaref has about six hundred residents and is the sole settlement on Sarichef Island, which is essentially a long sandbar, an elongated peanut two and a half miles long and less than a half mile wide at its narrow waist. The island sits five miles off the coast of the Seward Peninsula, about 120 miles north of Nome. The Arctic Circle is thirty miles north. As Alaska heats up, weather patterns that have been reliable as long as anyone in Shishmaref can remember—that is, bitterly cold—are becoming increasingly less predictable.
“The seasons have changed,” Annie told me. “We get an earlier spring. It’s taking longer for the ocean to freeze. Traditionally, it freezes in October. Last year it froze in January.”
Shishmaref was my final stop in Alaska, and probably the most traditional of all the villages I visited. Its residents are Inupiat, a subgroup of northern people once known as the Eskimos. (The term Eskimo is considered derogatory by some Natives and was eliminated from federal government use in 2016.) For thousands of years, the nomadic Kigiqtaamiut—the name translates as “people of the island”—have occupied the coastal areas surrounding Shishmaref. In response to the debauchery of the Nome gold rush, which was starting up as the Elder sailed by in 1899, missionaries led by Sheldon Jackson pushed for the Kigiqtaamiut to settle permanently in one spot so that a school, church, and post office could be built. Sarichef Island, with its year-round availability of food, was the obvious choice for a village. Annie Weyiouanna estimated that 90 percent of the town’s food still came from subsistence hunting and gathering: bearded seal, caribou, duck, moose, fish, walrus, greens, berries. “The ocean is our supermarket,” Annie said. “We can’t just get up and go to Walmart.”
The thinning ice that promises a potential boon for Nome’s economy and global shipping companies dooms Shishmaref to near-certain disaster. The ice is too dangerous to hunt on; Esau Sinnok, the UAF college student from Shishmaref I’d met in Anchorage, told me that an uncle had drowned after falling through late-spring ice that should have been frozen. In autumn, violent storms blow in from the Chukchi Sea. The protective buffer of ice that once solidified along the seashore in October no longer keeps the most powerful waves at a safe distance. Rising temperatures have thawed the permafrost beneath the island. Since the 1970s, the fall storms have increased in frequency and intensity, eating away at the loose sand and taking houses with it.
After a summer spent weighing Alaska’s past against its present, Shishmaref offered an opportunity to end my travels with a glimpse of the state’s likely future. If the town’s recent history was any indication, I probably wouldn’t get another chance.
I slept in a classroom at the Shishmaref School. Inspirational signs on the walls encouraged HARD WORK and RESPECT FOR OTHERS, along with HUNTER SUCCESS and RESPONSIBILITY TO TRIBE. The school is one of only three buildings in the village with treated running water, along with the washeteria (for laundry and showers) and the medical clinic. Thick hoses ran on the ground, connecting the three. The morning drop-off routine was pretty similar to the one in my New York suburb, except all the vehicles parked out front were sport quads with knobby tires to churn through the soft sand.
To most of the world, polar bears are mascots of climate change. In Shishmaref, I was informed by a gaggle of curious second and third graders who assembled around the stranger they encountered in the hallway before school began, all bears are dangerous nuisances, regardless of color.
“My dad had to chase away a polar bear with his snow machine,” said one boy.
“A brown bear can kill a white bear,” said another, to dubious reactions from his companions.
“There were seven brown bears here, because a dead orca washed up on the beach and they smelled it,” said a third. A walrus carcass had landed ashore the day before, which promised more unwelcome visitors as it ripened.
William Jones is Shishmaref’s policeman, a job he’s had since 1980 and clearly enjoys. (The town also has a village public safety officer, or VPSO, a jack-of-all-trades functionary, trained by the state, whose job portfolio includes law enforcement, fire protection, and emergency medical services.) Jones was a little more ambivalent about the new civic duties that had been thrust upon him shortly before I arrived. “I was appointed acting mayor last week,” he told me when we shook hands in the city offices, on the second floor of the town hall. The previous mayor had resigned suddenly. Jones had been selected by the council as a temporary replacement.
Jones had a goatee and wore a T-shirt and jeans. If he possessed a firearm or handcuffs, I did not see them in the several hours we spent together. His eyes were puffy from lack of sleep. He’d been awakened at 3:00 A.M. when some folks who’d snuck a few bottles of cut-rate R&R whisky onto the dry island got a little out of hand. (Jones, who said that he could usually sense within a few hours when someone had smuggled liquor into Shishmaref, did have a single-occupancy jail cell at his disposal; on busy nights like New Year’s Eve, the better-behaved drunks were allowed to sit with him in his office.) We filled two Styrofoam cups from the Mr. Coffee machine and went into the conference room next door. Its walls were plastered with maps showing where erosion had taken place and where it would likely take place soon.
“We’ve lost quite a bit of land,” Jones said, scanning the maps. “The beach is eroding on the west side. There used to be houses over here.” One storm in 2013 carved off fifty feet of beach, including a chunk of the main road. The Army Corps of Engineers has built a series of seawalls, each more formidable than the last, but none has been completely effective at neutralizing the effects of the waves.
Another map showed two possible mainland locations to which Shishmaref could be moved. Contrary to breathless international media reports, the Shishmaref diaspora was not exactly imminent. Both potential sites for a new town were deep in the bush on the mainland. If and when it rose from the tundra—“They haven’t even built a road yet,” Jones noted—Shishmaref II would be an Arctic Brasilia. The cost of the move would likely be in the tens of millions of dollars, approximately none of which had yet been arranged. The state of Alaska had an office to deal with such potential moves, and a dozen communities threatened by climate change were considering relocating. The August vote wasn’t even the first such referendum in Shishmaref. The first one had been held in 1975, and residents had already voted, in 2002, to relocate.
“Were you surprised by the results?” I asked Jones, who’d voted to stay.
“I was pissed off,” Jones said. “We voted forty years ago and we’re still here. Talk, talk, talk, talk. We’re gonna be talking for another forty years. This island is home. They should just get a barge and move the sand around to protect it.”
Shishmaref didn’t look like a town holding a going-out-of-business sale. A new liquid-fuel tank farm was being planned, and housing for teachers (almost all of whom are non-Native) was under construction. The island’s main road had just been tarmacked for the first time a few weeks earlier. Jones walked me over to the latest and greatest seawall, a wide strip of large rocks piled neatly along the waterline.
“There used to be sand dunes here, all along the coast,” Jones said. “People used to sit and enjoy the water.” Waves splashed onto the rocks, and onto the dead walrus. Jones said walrus meat is a delicacy but that you have to bury it for a while so it can ferment properly. “It’s oily, but it’s delicious,” he said. “It tingles when you eat it.” He had already admitted to a fondness for teasing reporters who parachuted in to collect a few sound bites from Alaska’s newly famous climate refugees—he’d recently told a radio host from Los Angeles that he lived in a two-story igloo and was unfamiliar with the word “electricity”—but insisted that walrus was the real culinary deal. Ideally, it was followed up with a bowl of Eskimo ice cream, a dairy-free treat whose key ingredients are local berries and seal oil.
In real estate terms, everyone in Shishmaref has a house that is either “beachfront” or “walk to beach.” Where other Alaska towns might have a cannery and a marina filled with trawlers, Sarichef Island’s mainland-facing side was filled with small wooden boats and drying racks where meat and fish could cure in the salt air. A few times, I asked someone what the protocol was during particularly dangerous storms, expecting to hear about evacuation plans and helicopters, but everyone said the same thing: When it gets bad, they make sure everyone’s boats and meat racks are secure, and then they hunker down. In an emergency situation, residents took shelter at the school or the church.
Jones suggested we have a look around the island and visit some of his neighbors. He drove his four-wheel ATV and I sat on the back, clinging to the rear rack. The day was cold and drizzly. On the ocean side of the island, you could see the top few inches of yellow bulldozers and other retired heavy equipment that had been buried in the sand as bulwarks against the waves. The wind shifted direction and we were hit with a foul blast. Because homes in Shishmaref lack flush toilets, household waste is collected and deposited into a cesspool, which, Jones had insisted with a smirk, was an essential part of the tour.
“Is that stink the cesspool?” I shouted over my shoulder.
“Nope, walrus. Smells a little like that when you eat it, too.”
If the number of doors we knocked on or entered unannounced is any indication of Jones’s investigative methods, I doubt there are many unsolved crimes in Shishmaref. I met Esau’s grandfather Shelton Kokeok, whose house was perched at the edge of a sand bluff. He’d already lost one home to erosion. “I’m always looking out that window and watching that beach in bad weather,” he said. Howard Weyiouanna—every other person I met in Shishmaref had the last name Weyiouanna—reminisced about the long-gone sand hills that children would sled down on sealskins in winter.
Clifford Weyiouanna served us his famous sourdough pancakes and talked about how he’d taught himself to fly a plane and had spent seventeen years as an unlicensed bush pilot. “I found seven people alive and two dead on search-and-rescue missions,” he said. “The ones I found alive always said they wanted a cup of coffee or a cigarette.” Clifford had a fondness for both. Like Jones, he thought the relocation vote had been a waste of time but admitted he likely wouldn’t be around to see how things turned out. “This move will happen more slowly than the Second Coming of Jesus Christ,” he said.
Our last stop was at the small house of Ardith and Johnny Weyiouanna. We sat at the kitchen table as Ardith cleaned mossberries she’d gathered that morning. “I came here in 1958 by dogsled,” she said. “No one spoke English except me and my brothers and sisters. Everyone spoke Inupiaq. We used to have Eskimo dancing every week, to celebrate a hunter catching a polar bear. The last time one of these young men killed a polar bear, I suggested we bring the dancing back one time, but there were too many things going on. Like bingo.”
Ardith had voted to move. “It’s hard to leave the place you’ve lived all your life. But you have to sacrifice for younger people.” She offered me a mossberry, which looked like a tiny blueberry but was more bitter than I expected. I grimaced. “I guess this means you won’t be staying for Eskimo ice cream,” she said.
Several people in Shishmaref told me that according to oral tradition, Shishmaref is a “floating island,” with water running underneath. I asked Ardith what she thought the story meant.
“The elders a long time ago used to say, ‘Shishmaref built up from the sea and one day it will return to the sea,’” she said. “I think that means we’re doomed.”
Jones and I went back to his small house to wait for my plane to Nome. I bought him a pack of Marlboros at the general store as a thank-you gift. He gave me a mastodon tooth he’d found on the beach. Clifford Weyiouanna, the sourdough man, met us at the airport in his pickup truck, one of two full-size vehicles I saw in Shishmaref. He had a twenty-pound box of fish he’d asked me to deliver to his sister in Nome. Jones unwrapped his Marlboros and offered one to Clifford.
“There used to be sand dunes all along that side and this side, some as tall as a two-story building,” Clifford said. “Big beach out here where you could land a plane.” He took a deep drag of his cigarette and flicked the butt. “Gone, all gone.”