home, n. a refuge, a sanctuary; a place or region to which one naturally belongs or where one feels at ease.
In 1993, when Lisa Tom was in the ninth grade, she finally persuaded her parents to let her move out of their place in Anchorage and set up permanent residence in her grandmother’s house in rural Alaska.
Lisa was born in Anchorage. Her father, who is white, sometimes took her camping and fishing on the rocky, thick-treed Kenai Peninsula to the southwest. And every summer, her mother, who is Alaska Native, brought Lisa and her brothers (and sometimes Lisa’s dad) to their grandparents’ house—nearly five hundred miles west on the tundra in a Yup’ik village called Newtok. (Lisa’s parents didn’t marry until years later, when she was an adult, and her last name, Tom, belonged to her mother’s family, one of several English Christian names originally given to Yup’ik men by missionaries, then later taken up by entire families.)
Then she and her siblings would return in time for school to the dim concrete city with its sky pierced by white mountains. Anchorage is ringed by natural beauty, but economic inequality has made parts of the city bleak. The early 1990s was a period of economic rebound as Kmart and other big retail stores sprang up from the pavement and increasing numbers of summer cruise passengers found their way into the downtown shops full of trinkets. But a large number of houseless people have long been stranded in this city by trauma or health troubles or poverty, including some Alaska Natives displaced from land hundreds of miles around.
By contrast, Newtok looks more ephemeral, at least on the surface, like a makeshift fishing settlement. But its residents have roots in the region reaching back at least centuries and likely millennia. Just twenty miles from the Bering Sea, which separates Alaska from Russia, the few hundred people who live here on an outstretched plain of grass and dwarf birch and willow are almost all Yup’ik, one of Alaska’s eleven Indigenous cultural groups. Yup’ik is still the first language here, English the second. The village’s Yup’ik name, Niugtaq, refers to the rustling of grass. To Lisa, this place of grass and water felt far more like home than the city.
Lisa’s eyes change color—sometimes green or blue or hazel or gray—depending on the light reflected from her surroundings. A quiet person by nature, with a seeming tendency to contemplate each word before it passes her lips, she sometimes describes herself as stubborn (although that could also mean resolute, depending on the context). She begged her parents again and again to let her move to Newtok, and one day, they relented.
The 1980s and 1990s were a momentous time in Newtok’s development. Decades later, people would recall how the land was higher and drier then, full of hillocks and golden grasses, and even the weather was calmer, infrequently troubled by storms. Winters were colder then, the snow arriving in September, the ice on the rivers hardening by October. In winter, a person could ice-skate along a seemingly endless chain of ponds and creeks that fed into one another. In summer and fall, you could wander the tundra uninhibited, pick fat, ripe cranberries, blueberries, cloudberries (locally called “salmonberries”), and crowberries that could stain your fingers red and deep purple. And you could mostly live off the land by hunting and fishing and foraging for wild vegetables. Lisa’s grandmother made fermented fish eggs in the refrigerator and fermented salmon heads (a dish called “stinkheads”)* sometimes using coffee cans in the kitchen and sometimes via the traditional method, in a pit in the ground lined with grass. She cured seal oil the traditional way, in a sort of container sewn together from the animal’s body.† She taught Lisa how to hang herring to dry from braided stems of grass.
At the time, much in the village was relatively newly built. (“Everything was clean and not broken,” a resident would recall wistfully, many years later.) In the 1980s, Newtok had installed a new water treatment system—a big blue tank injected with chlorine and a brand-new roaring power plant (made up of a pair of oversized diesel generators). The residents had also laid down new wooden boardwalks that crisscrossed among the houses. Some people made use of materials provided by agencies that worked with the community to put up their own houses; some bought building supplies from Seattle, shipped by barge. Lisa’s mother’s cousin, Tom John, whom Lisa thought of as an uncle, built his house in 1994. Another uncle put up a new house a couple years later.
In light of all this, it was jarring when Lisa’s grandparents returned from a community meeting one night and told her the entire village was going to move.
A threat stood just on the horizon. To the south, lay the Ningliq River (sometimes also spelled Ninglick)—a powerful, sinuous arm of water with its fingers touching the Bering Sea—and it had always been a ravenous creature. In 1984, engineering consultants hired by the village, with funding from the state, noted that the warmth of the water and the force of the river were thawing the ice and breaking up the permafrost that bound the soil together, shearing off blocks of riverbank, devouring ponds and clusters of willows and leaving broken mats of grass and earth on the shore. Unchecked, the erosion would eventually pose an existential threat. “Relocating Newtok would likely be less expensive than trying to hold back the [Ningliq] River,” the engineers wrote. By 1994, the Newtok council had started planning a relocation and examined six possible sites—the most likely of which lay nine miles away, across the river at a place called Mertarvik (in Yup’ik meaning “place to get water”), a campsite of generations past, with a few old graves, large swaths of berry bushes, and a meadow frequented by musk oxen. Mertarvik lies on Nelson Island, more than thirty-five times the size of Manhattan but home to just three other small Yup’ik settlements. The land, formed by a volcano, was underlain with bedrock. It would not fall apart or erode.
Next year, we’re going to move to the new site, some of Lisa’s friends kept saying at school. But they were too young to understand what such an undertaking meant. Charlene Carl, another of her schoolmates, used to wander the village, staring at all the houses, buildings, boardwalks, fish racks, and little huts that served as traditional Yup’ik steam baths,‡ and wonder how it would be possible to whisk all this up and transport it to another place. The kids couldn’t know what an undertaking it would be to move an entire community.
Meanwhile, life in the village already felt more unsettled. In 1994, the village’s only school caught fire and burned down, an act of arson. (A new one was built a few years later.) In 1996, during a flood, the massive Ningliq River ate away the bank of the smaller Kayalivik River, also called the Newtok River, turning it into a slough. The Kayalivik River began to silt up, and bit by bit, it became more difficult to move boats in and out of the village. And the village land was then exposed to the unabated fury of the Ningliq, which slammed against it every time winds came from the south.
But no one in Newtok imagined that the actual move would take up the next twenty-five years of their lives. In that time, a warming climate, the loss of winter, and the disappearance of ice would all make the problem much worse, much more rapid than anyone imagined, and Newtok would become a harbinger of the dislocation thousands of others would experience, all across the North, all around the world.
The first person I ever met from Newtok was Lisa’s uncle, Tom John, who by 2015 was working as the administrator to the Newtok council.
I came to Alaska, like so many other observers, to talk to people who had firsthand experiences with the loss of permafrost. Nearly 85 percent of Alaska and about half of Canada and Russia sits atop a frozen layer of earth that is up to tens of thousands of years old and has, until recently, served as a kind of perennially frozen bedrock. Some parts of the Arctic are, according to a civil engineer at the University of Alaska Anchorage, like a “giant ice cube”—a bit of dirt suspended in a matrix of frozen water, as much as two-thirds ice by volume. But in an era of not-enough-winter and too-much-summer, such landscapes have been thawing and coming apart.
Scientists most often tell this story on the grand scale of the planet’s atmosphere. How the Earth breathes over millennia, sucking carbon in, metabolizing and storing it in the body of the planet, letting it out. Since the last ice age, the planet has kept a great deal of carbon stored in the frozen tissue of permafrost—a self-reinforcing pattern called a feedback loop. Locking carbon up this way keeps it out of the atmosphere, which keeps the Earth cooler, which allows the planet to form more ice and frozen ground.
But warm the planet up a little, and the feedback loop can spiral in the opposite direction. Heat permafrost up a little, and the bacteria within can awaken and begin their work, decomposing ancient carbon-based matter, metabolizing it, breathing back out hundreds of millions of tons of carbon in the form of methane and carbon dioxide. As carbon in the atmosphere raises the planet’s temperature, more of the permafrost thaws and wakes, and releases even more carbon. Permafrost can amplify what is occurring at the scale of the entire Earth. Moreover, arctic regions are warming three times faster than the rest of the planet, possibly because sea ice, which has a cooling effect and reflects sunlight back to the sky, has dwindled. An excess of heat in the Arctic can destabilize the global weather system—weakening the jet stream and causing freak cold snaps in the winter or triggering warmer, drier summers in places like the Mediterranean and California.
In other words, what happens on the remote edge of the tundra has global implications.
But at the smaller scale of a normal human life—a small city, a village, a house, a road—the loss of ice and permafrost is part of the fracturing of place and the loss of home. The land beneath everyone’s feet and the places people have known for generations as home are now sinking and falling apart. When frozen, permafrost supports the land from beneath. In cold months, what is called “shorefast ice”—a thick frozen platform extending from the shoreline—armors the coasts of northern latitudes against the pummeling of storms and high waves. But when ice becomes thinner, scarcer, or more unstable and permafrost thaws and warps, the land itself is vulnerable. Around the state of Alaska, chunks of the coastline have been collapsing into the sea during storm seasons. And the arctic and subarctic ground has been shifting and sinking. Buildings and houses slump and tilt at cockeyed angles. Buried pipes and sewer lines wrench and rupture.
Newtok has become part of an international emergency. The village is one of three Alaskan communities—along with Kivalina and Shishmaref on the coast of the Chukchi Sea—that have gained fame as home to America’s “first climate refugees,” among the first people who are being forced to relocate because of the impacts of climate change. As the North warms, a growing number of other communities find themselves at the mercy of powerful erosion and facing the possibility that they will have to head for more stable ground.
My first attempt to reach Newtok was in late September 2015, the edge of rain and mud season in southwest Alaska, and the furious northern weather had already foiled my plans twice. I had spent weeks setting up the trip and was supposed to meet Tom John in the village, along with an architect named Aaron Cooke. I had planned to watch a crew of Newtok builders assemble an unusual home: an energy-efficient demonstration house that would later be hauled to Mertarvik. Designed by a Fairbanks-based organization called the Cold Climate Housing Research Center, which researches new ways of constructing in northern latitudes, the house was both quick to assemble and vastly more energy efficient than the drafty houses that populated most of Newtok—made of a series of trusses like a bridge, with thickly insulated walls. It would be mounted on top of a metal foundation that looked like a cross between a bed frame and a toboggan, on smooth metal skids, so that if the ground became unstable underneath it, it could be towed across the snow and ice to a new location. The construction was supposed to be an event—in the process, a group of Newtok residents would learn how to put together and maintain such a house. But a week and a half before my trip, Cooke had called to say that the barge carrying his housing materials still hadn’t arrived in Newtok, and he wasn’t sure if he would be able to meet me there.
I decided to visit the village alone. But when I arrived in Bethel, a town that functioned as the region’s transportation hub, I learned nearly all of the propeller planes that served the region’s remote communities, including Newtok, were grounded. Small, low-flying planes often can’t use the same kinds of sophisticated instruments and guidance systems available to larger jets, and the cloud had gathered so densely, become so endless and impenetrable and watery, that the sky looked like an ocean. The airport terminal lobby, which was no larger than a ferry boat, seemed like it might actually be at sea. Beyond lay the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, or Y-K Delta, a mostly roadless expanse roughly the size of Oregon, with a population of twenty-seven thousand people§ clustered into dozens of tiny rural communities like Newtok, surrounded by a tangle of ponds and river channels twisting like dense cords through a fabric of tundra grass, willows, and dwarf shrubs. Between spring and fall, hundreds of millions of migrating birds pass through this place. By contrast, human movement here is far more constrained by the terrain and the lack of major infrastructure.
The terminal filled with the squeals of restless children and the drone of two television sets, one set to sports, one to cartoons, and the buzz of conversation, most of it in Yup’ik. I waited more than five hours, and at the end of the day, as I was about to take shelter in a hotel, I heard a ticket agent call Tom John’s name over the PA system. I pursued him through the airport and caught up with him—a wiry man of modest stature, wearing a sage-green cap low on his forehead and a gray winter jacket—as he was about to get into a taxi, just long enough to blurt out my name and offer an awkward handshake.
Still he recognized me again the next morning and offered a Styrofoam cup filled with coffee from the free pot that brewed at the back of the terminal. “It’ll give you energy,” he said gently.
Later, as we passed the time, I asked him about the move and the erosion. Parts of the Y-K Delta have always been inherently dynamic and erodible. But climate change has been worsening and speeding up the problem. The erosion was now serious, Tom John told me. “Probably less than a hundred feet until housing is lost,” he said.
But when would they relocate? “People have been asking me how soon. If I had a crystal ball in front of me I would tell you,” Tom John said, a ripple of irritation passing through his voice. “But I would say within a year.”
This would later prove to be overly optimistic.
I sat with Tom, his son-in-law, and some of his neighbors in a row of hard, plastic seats for what felt like hours or weeks or some strange state of suspended time, but was actually two days, and caught a glimpse of what it meant to inhabit two worlds—stretched taut between the demands of mainstream America, a culture that relied on speed and planning and infrastructure and growth, and this part of Alaska. Still the United States, but also a place apart, defined by a different set of rhythms of land and weather. You might have plans in the Y-K Delta, but they would always have to bend to the demands of this intransigent landscape.
Tom John had been caught in this airport once before, he told me (though others had tales of being stuck here frequently, sometimes for a week or more). But he had once broken down in a snow machine on his way to Bethel and spent the night in a shelter made of grass. “When it got dark at evening time I got a little paranoia, when I see something, a dark shape, like a ghost,” he recalled. “I was thinking of the Hairy Man,” he said, and he and his friends, sitting nearby, chuckled. Tom John had a throaty laugh, like “heh heh heh.”
“What is the Hairy Man?” I asked.
“Bigfoot,” said his son-in-law gleefully.
A few hours later, two days after my arrival in Bethel, the ticket agent finally announced that passengers would depart for Newtok. With Tom John and his friends and neighbors, I clambered into a little bush plane, and the pilot launched us up toward the ceiling of cloud and over the speckled brown tundra.
We landed in Newtok in a light rain, and on arrival, everything wore a shade of gray or brown, the land, the river, the weather-washed houses, but with a faint golden hue escaping beneath the clouds at the horizon, as if we’d landed on a space between night and day, sky and land. It all took the color of my exhaustion and my unfamiliarity with the place and reflected it back to me. But I could imagine, if this were my home, how hard it might be to leave, knowing the return journey could always be this fraught.
Why would it take more than two decades to move four hundred or so people just nine miles? And what might this say about the kinds of fortitude any community may need to summon in order to prepare for a life on an unruly planet? The answers lay in the complexities of both the landscape and in the mismatch between it and the demands of twentieth-and twenty-first-century life.
For years, some of the changes around Newtok were like watching someone age, a gradual accretion of differences, the threads of gray creeping into a person’s hair, a dimple furrowing deeper into the skin to become a well-worn line. The muddying of the land, the shrinking of winter, the worsening of rain.
The edges of the land frayed, as ragged as old fabric. One Newtok resident remembers, around 2000, walking down to the Ningliq erosion line with her friends and siblings. She was about six years old then. There was higher land. I used to pick berries around there. There were rocks and sand. And the land was already breaking. Big chunks of land were breaking. We used to climb around them and hang out around there and play. Between 1954 and 2003, the average rate of erosion in Newtok was 68 linear feet per year, or more than half a mile in five decades, although in some dramatically stormy years, as much as 113 linear feet of earth collapsed.
In 2003, the U.S. Congress passed a law that would allow Newtok to trade its twelve thousand acres of unraveling land for eleven thousand acres of much more solid ground owned by the federal government. Mertarvik, the new village site—and nearly all of the land surrounding Newtok—was part of the nineteen-million-acre Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge. But even after the land trade was sanctioned, it would not be easy to assemble a new community there. Mertarvik still had no roads or on-site power source or infrastructure of any kind.
Meanwhile worse storms had begun to arrive in Newtok, and the situation grew more urgent. In the fall of 2005, such a storm surrounded the village on all sides with rushing water and turned Newtok temporarily into an island. It also ripped apart the village’s barge landing, making it difficult for the community to receive fuel and supplies from the outside world. The following spring another storm battered the village. Both tempests swamped the drinking water supply, spread raw sewage around the community, and destroyed food storage sheds. People worried that an even bigger deluge could inundate the whole place, and the only high ground would be the airplane landing strip, a wind-whipped shelterless gravel road, according to a report later compiled by the Army Corps of Engineers. The only place that could provide the “barest shelter” in an emergency was forty miles away by boat. The Corps estimated that the village could last just ten to fifteen years longer before erosion claimed the heart of the place—if it could survive the storms.
But Newtok’s prospects began to improve after community leaders reached out to a planner named Sally Russell Cox, who worked for the state of Alaska. At the time, there was no agency at any level of government with authority over or experience with moving an entire community threatened by climate change. And certain bureaucratic requirements made it difficult to secure funding for a new settlement. For instance, in Alaska, one must have children in residence to receive money to build a school. But given past experiences with boarding schools, parents with kids didn’t want to move to Mertarvik until a school was actually available—creating a chicken-and-egg problem.
Cox helped Newtok find solutions to such challenges by gathering allies among state and federal bureaucrats and prominent Alaskan organizations. In 2006, the Newtok citizens and their allies formed an unusually tight collaboration called the Newtok Planning Group to try to help the village.
Around that same time, the Newtok council and administrators decided to put up three houses at the new site in the same manner that those in the village were built—with a few hands and some modest construction tools. Through a BIA grant, they acquired three housing kits—simple wooden frames and materials with assembly instructions. But when the barge carrying the kits tried to reach Newtok, a storm again swelled in the skies, and the ship dropped them instead in another village, where the materials sat in the rain.
By this time, Lisa Tom had fallen in love and left her grandmother’s place for the home of her sweetheart—Jeff Charles, who also grew up in Newtok, a man who has sturdy hands and a terse manner of speaking but a near-constant smile. He had built his house more than ten years previously, saving every paycheck to buy the materials. My honey was in his early twenties when he built it by himself, she recalls. He just used nonelectric saws and stuff. By the time they got together, Lisa had two small children from a previous relationship—Jimmy, named after her Yup’ik grandfather, and Ashley. And after she and Jeff moved in together, they built an addition to the house so they could all share it as a family—until it eventually became a cozy two-bedroom with an oil heater at the back and a common living room and kitchen. They also learned that they would add a third child to the household; Lisa was pregnant.
Still, in the summer of 2006, Jeff took a job, with eight other men, to assemble the then-dampened houses at the new village site across the river. During the construction season, he had to leave Lisa and the kids, camp in a tent at Mertarvik, subsist on instant noodles, and work ten- or twelve-hour shifts. By 2007, the houses were done. But few houses from the Lower 48 are designed to handle the conditions of the Alaskan tundra—the unstable, icy ground, the frost heave, the hundred-mile-per-hour winds, the bitter cold of winter, the damp springs and autumns. After prolonged exposure to the elements, the materials inside these first houses molded, the foundations eventually sagged, and no one moved into them.
The community was barely any closer to claiming its new home than before.
In the winter of 2006, Lisa and Jeff married, and she became Lisa Charles. They knew they would remain in Newtok—in their handmade blue and gray house with the fish rack and the steam bath beside it—for a while still.
In the language that bears its name, the word Yup’ik means “real people.”
The closest word to the English home listed in the Yup’ik Eskimo Dictionary, published by the University of Alaska Fairbanks, is kinguneq. Accordingly it also means point of origin; area behind; time past. In this definition, home is about both time and place.
But in Newtok, people often use a different phrase, utercugtua nunamtenun cupegtua: the first word means “I want to go home,” and the entire phrase expresses both a desire to return and a longing for the land. It refers to a kind of homesickness that can be either mild or full-blown despair. There is another common phrase that describes people’s feelings about the land, Man’a nunakaput, “this is our land.” “It means that we came from the tundra,” a former Newtok resident explained to me. “The land is like a person we have to respect. That’s who we are, real people from the land.”
On the day after my arrival in Newtok, Bernice John, Tom John’s wife, offered to take me upriver where I could see the village’s point of origin, its area behind, and its time past.
I had spent the night in the school, on a camp mattress on the floor of a stuffy, one-room library. There are no hotels in Newtok, and most village houses are too crowded to take in a stranger. Sunday morning had been eerily quiet as I wandered between the rain-washed houses. Even the dogs seemed to be hunkering indoors. But Bernice found me in the middle of the village on one of the boardwalks, as if she had known exactly when I would be there.
“Are you looking for somebody?” she shouted. Where Tom was watchful, Bernice was bright, with a chirrup in her voice like a sparrow’s and arched eyebrows that sometimes gave her a quizzical look. She strode toward me in blue sweatpants tucked into tall purple muck boots, a grin on her face, her eyes encircled with delicate black wire-rimmed glasses, her hair in a long bob with bangs threaded with silver and brown.
“My husband is going to go check a blackfish trap,” she said. “Wanna come and see?” It didn’t entirely seem like a question. Quite obviously, I would follow her.
We traipsed along the boardwalks, the ground beneath so inundated that the wood made a sloshing sound with every step. I waited as we made a long stop at her house—a one-room dwelling occupied by the couple and several children and grandchildren (eleven residents altogether). From her kitchen, Bernice retrieved several pieces of her homemade fry bread in a Ziploc bag and gave them to me to take for the journey. Then the march back to the edge of the Kayalivik River, the smaller stream that ran along the east side of the village, where Tom had docked their aluminum skiff.
Tom ushered me onto the boat, and Bernice and their nine-year-old grandson stepped in after me. Our footsteps clomped like drumbeats against the aluminum hull. Bernice gestured for me to take shelter from the damp wind in a makeshift cabin built out of wood with a plastic tarp draped over it. I nestled in beside coats, buckets, a mug, a cracker box, a camp lantern, a metal coffeepot, and a frying pan. “We sleep in the boat when we travel out into the wilderness,” Tom explained.
Gulls wailed overhead as Tom shoved a long pole into the mud and nudged the boat into the gray-blue water. Slowly, he said, “When we get to the old village site, I’ll show you where these people came from.” I understood that by “these people,” Tom meant the Yup’ik founders of Newtok. Then he yanked the starter rope until the motor sputtered and then roared like a jackhammer.
Until a few decades ago, the people of the Y-K Delta maintained a seminomadic lifestyle, migrating between seasonal locations. Beginning each April, they were on the move, camping at the coast to hunt or journeying up the rivers in search of fish. Around freeze-up, they settled back into winter homes. Their feelings of home belonged not to any one of these places but to all of them. And they could relocate more easily as the seasons and the tundra required. Until as recently as the 1950s and 1960s, the architecture of the region was entirely local, nimble, functional, and well suited to this landscape of ice, water, and tundra. People lived in earthen dwellings, also known as sod houses, lined with driftwood and woven-grass mats. According to those who are old enough to remember them, sod houses were comfortable and efficient, kept warm with wood-burning stoves and bright with seal oil lamps. Many say the old sod houses were better and warmer than the flimsy wood-frame constructions people built in more recent decades. In generations past, with such simple dwellings, it was far easier for a community to pick up and leave when necessary.
But from the middle of the twentieth century, it was near impossible for the Yup’ik to continue their seminomadic traditions while also complying with government policies and participating in the larger American economy. And fixing to one place in such a dynamic region would require, in some cases, reengineering the landscape and building something more permanent than a sod dwelling or a camp.
Yup’ik people started to camp at Newtok in the late 1940s. The location was chosen haphazardly—it was the farthest point upriver that a barge was willing to travel. The law stipulated that Alaskan children must receive a formal education, and families didn’t want their young kids shipped off to distant boarding schools. With access to supplies from commercial ships, the Newtok community could have a local school and keep its children close.
In the boat, the Johns and I zoomed up the river. Tall, tawny grasses and shrubby, waist-high yellow-leaved willows stretched from the banks to the horizon as far as the eye could see. The water was glassy and the river bloated from swallowing both rain and tundra soil. I crept out of the cabin and toward the stern to talk with Bernice, who pointed at a muddy bank ripped open by the river. “See where it’s eroded?” she shouted above the motor. “It only stops when we’re frozen.”
As the frozen season has shortened and the thawed season lengthened, the landscape has become ever more unsteady, and this instability is threatening everything about the pulse of life here on the tundra. Among other things, ice and snow are substitutes for infrastructure in a region this cold. In a cold climate, frozen ground can be as hard and sturdy as pavement. A river covered in thick ice can function as a highway for snow machines. But as climate change raises the winter temperature even a few degrees at the edges of the season, frozen ground turns to mud; ice cracks and thins and no longer supports as much weight. When a person falls through broken ice into water, they can quickly go into shock, develop hypothermia, and drown. In some instances, Y-K residents have plunged through the ice to their deaths.
From the stern of the Johns’ boat, we could see Nelson Island—containing the new village site at Mertarvik—in a shroud of low clouds, its rocky ridgeline faint and blue in the haze. But we headed the opposite way, toward the place behind, where the people of Newtok came from—the winter village they left only one or two generations ago. It bore the same name as the river: Old Kayalivik. Bernice’s family came from the old village. “I never got to experience it myself,” she said.
We arrived in about twenty minutes, and Tom slowed the motor, which cut out and began to beep. “The grassy area,” he said, gesturing for me to look beyond the bank to our left.
Across the flatlands, a few tilted wooden crosses and fences marked old graves—the influence of missionaries. The land rolled up around them into a set of knolls. These were the remnants of sod houses, since reclaimed by grass. They were so crumbled and overgrown that they were barely visible from the boat, which was just offshore.
The old village site was some distance from the riverbank, and I was wearing only calf-high rubber boots. Tom John was eager to reach his fish traps and didn’t seem to want us to go ashore. Instead, he jerked the starter rope, and the motor rattled into action again. “If we were living their lifestyle,” Bernice shouted again, “we wouldn’t be living in this situation.”
The river became smaller and smaller as we proceeded up the channel. When we arrived at the site of the blackfish traps, Bernice dropped a heavy metal anchor into the water, and all of us trundled out of the boat and onto the riverbank. The tundra here was grassy and springy under our feet, and a small creek meandered across it. Tom John wore long gray waders attached to his shoulders by suspenders, so he could wade in and check his traps, each of which was comprised of a wire cylinder about three feet long, with a wire cone mounted on the front, set into the creek channel to force the fish to swim in. Once they passed through the cone into the cylinder, the fish couldn’t exit from the cone’s funnel-like opening. Tom’s traps had lured several fish, and he gathered them, slender and dark and wriggling, in a white plastic bucket. Tom and Bernice’s grandson waved the bucket in front of me and exclaimed, “Fishy!” (Found only in Alaska and Siberia, blackfish are about eight inches long and often slow-moving but rugged. They can breathe air when necessary—surviving in the tundra mosses during a dry period—and live for months under ice. Like the people here, they are used to coping with whatever the elements dish out.)
To prepare the fish, you boil them, Bernice explained. “It’s one of our delicacies.” I could see the whole family’s looks of satisfaction, the same I would feel if I had picked a bowl of ripe tomatoes from my garden, a sense of having tended the land and reaped something in return.
After the fish were secured, we boarded the boat again and turned back toward Newtok. The sky had blurred into gray once more, and drizzle dampened our clothes. Bernice sat with me in the back of the boat and mused about the experience of living in Newtok. She seemed to want me to understand.
“You won’t find highways out here. Nothing paved,” she said. “To me, it’s a simple life.” She paused. “I like simple, unlike city life.”
Nearly everyone in Newtok grew up hearing a kind of saying or prediction, though the details varied depending on the teller. “The world is changing following its people,” says the Yup’ik adage. According to Mary John, Tom John’s mother, this meant weather would change when people ceased to follow nature’s laws, and the snow would stop falling. She had heard it when she was young and remembered it still in her late seventies. Others believed the prediction was about people’s moral behavior, their inability to get along, or their poor actions toward one another. Whatever the case, it was widely regarded as an ominous prediction, foreknowledge of climate change well before any scientists began talking about such a thing publicly.
And the implication seemed to be that a reconsideration was necessary—a willingness to reckon with the land and contemplate the values of the past.
Just after the first Mertarvik houses were complete, however imperfectly, the story of Newtok began to attract the attention of the rest of the world. In 2007, the New York Times named the people here “among the first climate refugees in the United States.” Reuters also published a story describing how climate change was thawing and eroding coastal Alaska and endangering Newtok and other villages.
In the years that followed, a trickle and then a stream of curious reporters began to visit the remote village, and the community gained a kind of fame. The village was suddenly more than an isolated settlement on the tundra. By naming Newtok villagers as among the first, such stories seemed to hint that they were also not the last. Newtok was a symbol, and its residents were the harbingers of a much larger crisis, in which anyone might experience such dislocation, a prospect frightening even to those of us who imagined we were more mobile and detached from the world. “We’re United States citizens. We’re the taxpayers. We have military that serve in the Iraq war,” Stanley Tom, then Newtok’s administrator, told NPR poignantly in July 2008. “So we’re part of United States. If we’re being wiped out, you know, who’s going to replace us?”
The attention helped the people of Newtok gather more support. But various hurdles still made it difficult to create a viable new village site at Mertarvik. For one thing, building on the remote Alaska tundra is quite different from doing the same task in, say, rural Indiana. Among other things, there are simply some aspects of mainstream society and infrastructure that you can no longer take for granted once you head into remote country in northern latitudes. In a temperate city, there are readily available sewer and water systems erected, maintained, and financed by a municipal or county government. Build a house, and you connect its plumbing to something that already exists. And there’s the extensive power grid that the U.S. government rolled out over a period of about six decades until the 1950s, stringing power lines from urban areas to the farthest-flung rural farmsteads. Few people in the Lower 48 now have to think hard about the nearest power source when setting up a home, unless they choose deliberately to live off the grid, which is a tiny fraction of American households. Or consider even the most basic form of infrastructure—a road. None of these fundamentals come premade in a new village site in the far reaches of the Y-K Delta. And infrastructure has a longer gestation time than most people imagine. (A Los Angeles bureaucrat once told me that it takes at least twenty or thirty years to plan out and put together any major infrastructure, even with all the resources of a major city.)
In 2008, the community requested help from the Department of Defense through a program called Innovative Readiness Training, or IRT, in which military personnel practice skills similar to those required when building a base in hostile territory while “providing incidental benefit to communities”—a kind of service learning for soldiers. In 2009, military personnel swooped into Mertarvik in Black Hawk helicopters. The conditions were difficult, even for the army. Snow fell in July. Equipment sank into the tundra. Concrete blocks drowned in mud. Pieces of the road, made of a sturdy mat-like material called Dura-Base, washed out in the high tide. A barge ran aground. But over multiple construction seasons, the IRT crew assembled a working set of roads, blasted a rock quarry into the bluff, and built a barge landing.
In 2011, the community and the Newtok Planning Group outlined a formal vision for Mertarvik. The plan was full of hopes, both simple and ambitious. It envisioned a greenhouse, a big school, a new store, and wind turbines that would spin out clean energy when the wind rushed through. The plan also harked back to the traditions of the past. It referred to four phases of relocation: uplluteng, or getting ready; upagluteng, or pioneering, a word that also evoked the process of moving with the seasons; nass’paluteng, meaning “transition”; and piciurlluni, meaning “we made it.”
The community had already spent a long time getting ready. So in 2011 and 2012, Newtok made a second attempt to build at Mertarvik, this time with a new set of houses funded by the Association of Village Council Presidents. Once again, Lisa’s husband, Jeff Charles, was asked to help as a crew supervisor. The houses would have a slightly better design this time: the walls would be made of something called “structural insulated panels,” preassembled in a factory with insulation sandwiched between the wood. The crews sited the houses away from the water, upslope, with a wide view of the river. But the work was much the same as before, hand tools and portable generators, dinners of instant ramen, long days under the Alaskan midnight sun.
Two of the houses were nearly done at the end of the first season, and in 2012, Lisa and the kids joined Jeff for part of the summer, camping out in a mostly finished house, from which they could watch seals swimming across the water on a clear day. At the time, she worked as a cook at the Newtok school and had the summer off. She had just given birth to her sixth child, Jeffery Jr., and she could only travel back and forth if the water was calm. I wouldn’t want to bring him on a bumpy ride, because you know like shaken baby syndrome, she remembered years later. There was no electricity. The kids slept together on the floor of the living room, because they were too scared to be separate from their parents, even in an adjacent room. Lisa’s mother came to visit. She would babysit, and I’d get to go fishing, Lisa recalled, pole fishing for salmon in a small stream nearby. And there were ample varieties of berries to pick. And it felt like the move was finally, really happening, Lisa thought. She was eager to start a new life in Mertarvik, without the threat of erosion. From the window of the house where they stayed, you could see everywhere. We’ve seen musk oxen before from the kitchen window of that house. You could see them going up the hill and around. But the family couldn’t stay. Lisa had to return to her job on the other side of the water. It would be expensive living off portable generators with family and bills to pay, loans, that kind of stuff. They needed to go back to Newtok.
A group of elders agreed to travel seasonally back and forth to take care of the new houses. The community called them “the pioneers.” But still, no one lived there year-round.
By this time, tensions and stress levels had risen in the community. Stanley Tom had achieved a national reputation. (One article in the Guardian called him “the most powerful man in Newtok.”) But some members of the village grew impatient with him and the others who had presided over the council for many years. They began to clamor for new elections.
The community rift ballooned into a legal dispute. After a new council (which called itself the Newtok Village Council) won repeated elections in 2012, the old council (called the Newtok Traditional Council) refused to yield their offices, their records, or their bank accounts. The state began auditing the old council’s spending and found discrepancies and other evidence of problems. Some village residents refused to acknowledge the new council; others felt the old council hadn’t been managing the relocation properly.
Work stalled on the houses and on a new Mertarvik Evacuation Center, intended both to serve as a gathering space and to house the community in an emergency. The latter remained less than half finished, a skeleton frame with no walls, and the former had incomplete wiring. And underneath this newer set of houses, the land settled, and the foundations sagged.
In early 2013, Lisa Charles found herself in an unexpected position. She had served on the old village council years before (between 2006 and 2008) but was never involved in anything related to the council dispute. A levelheaded, mild-mannered person, she was a good choice for community leadership. So, although she was shouldering the demands of raising six kids and working, she was also asked to be part of the new village council, which would eventually include Lisa’s father-in-law, Paul Charles, and Bernice John.
Meanwhile, storms continued to snarl and gnash at the edge of Newtok. A particularly monstrous one arrived in November 2013. Some roofing material flew off some houses. There was one home that built a wooden cover on the top of their roof that got blown off. It was pretty heavy, Lisa remembered. I think we lost a lot of land that day.
In May 2014, a legal ruling from the U.S. Department of the Interior settled the village council dispute, affirming the results of the 2012 votes. But by the time I visited Newtok in 2015, the rift between the two parties remained. The old council refused to speak with me, even though I walked to the houses of some of its members and knocked on their doors.
But Lisa Charles heard that I was visiting Newtok—the lone reporter who had been stranded in a storm. She dropped in on me in the evening in the school library as I rummaged through the belongings and instant camp meals I had strewn about the room, and asked if I needed anything. She had a generous spirit, and perhaps she took some kind of pity on me, because the day after my boat trip, she invited me to lunch at her house, a couple minutes’ walk north of the Johns’ house on the boardwalks.
The house was blue and rectangular, with a satellite dish jutting out one side and a roughly hewn entryway on the other, stacked with boots. Someone, presumably the kids, had taken the liberty of labeling the front door with blue and purple markers in an uneven scrawl: “Welcome to Lisa’s House. Lisa’s House Real.” Then to the left of these notices, in more marker ink, a list of all the household members, including kids, parents, and dogs.
Inside, the house was full of lively, comfortable clutter. Family photos hung all over the walls and were papered across the refrigerator door. Cooking implements sprawled across the counters. A shiny stand mixer sat on top of the oil stove that heated the house. Two teakettles stood on the kitchen range, and a crowded spice rack hung on the wall above. Clotheslines were strung across the ceiling, from which hung hats, coats, and gloves, some store-bought, some handmade of furs from animals hunted locally.
It was a house striving for modernity in some of the most inconvenient circumstances. By the door stood an enormous plastic trash bin that was used to hold not garbage but water, hauled from the school. No one in Newtok had plumbing or running water. Lisa’s son had just left to retrieve more water a few minutes before I arrived. Meanwhile, her house was full of appliances made for a space with working pipes. The sink had a spout but no water came from it; Jeff had drilled a drain so that they could run the dishwater out of the back of the house. Their new washing machine was jammed into a tight space behind the woodstove. It was automatic and, when connected to pipes, designed to sense how much detergent and water was required by each load, but Lisa said they had to dump some in by hand from the tank whenever they heard the device trying to start up. “I heard we’re going to have running water in Mertarvik, and I hope it’s true,” she said wistfully.
The television was hooked to satellite service. But internet and other telecommunications were glacially slow, and cell reception, which had come to the village less than ten years previously, was spotty. (Lisa had bought the first cell phone in the village in 2007.) But her two smallest children, Jodi, then age five, and Jeffery Jr., three, were mostly ignoring the cartoons running in the background and amusing themselves quietly. Jodi had her hands in a Play-Doh jar. Jeffery seemed to be laughing at his own private jokes.
Lisa and her cousin, Brittany Tom, a nineteen-year-old who was babysitting for her, were seated at a small oak table with white chairs. I had come toward the end of their meal, and the two had mostly finished eating. But Lisa had laid out various plastic bags full of fish she and Jeff had caught and dried themselves, and she offered them to me. “These are dried halibut,” she said, gesturing to some pieces of white meat that looked like jerky. “There’s dried salmon or herring.” Skeptically, I took a piece of dark pink salmon and bit into the chewy meat. But the flavor was rich and deliciously fishy and bittersweet with smoke. Beside the fish was a jar of seal oil, and Lisa encouraged me to dip the meat in the oil. But this was a stranger and more pungent flavor.
I took a sniff and suddenly realized what I had been smelling all over the village, in the houses and the school gym and the stores and drifting into the air. It was seal-hunting season. Hunters were going out every day to catch the animals and returning to cut and cure and process the meat. And the odor of rendered seal oil hung over the entire place.
The hunting of seals in this part of the world has often been misunderstood by outsiders. “The White Seal,” one of the stories in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, is set on the island of St. Paul, three hundred miles southwest of Newtok, and portrays seal hunters greedy for fur pelts. An animated version of the story, filmed in 1975, aired often on television through the 1980s and 1990s, depicting lumpish hunters with dark, clownish faces wearing pale parkas and carrying clubs wielded on seal pups. The story and the movie left in my childhood imagination the idea of cruel people persecuting intelligent, sad-eyed animals. But the people of St. Paul, the Unangan, were forced to carry out commercial hunts by Russians and later by the U.S. government. The Yup’ik seal hunt has always been a subsistence practice—undertaken with deep reverence for the land and sea. When someone successfully hunts their first seal, they often give the meat away to an elder, and the family sometimes organizes a celebration. Newtok also hosts annual dances and invites villages from the region; at these events, families often celebrate hunting and fishing accomplishments. In some traditional stories, such as those recorded by Alaskan anthropologist Ann Fienup-Riordan, seals have their own societies and villages, as humans do, and the hunt is a reciprocal relationship, in which seals offer themselves only to those who treat both the natural and the human world with respect.
I took a taste of the seal oil and inadvertently made a face, and Lisa giggled. “It’s something you have to grow up with to like. When I was a kid I was crazy about seal oil.” I turned back to the fish and the stacks of big crackers also known as “pilot bread,” popular in rural Alaska. “When you can’t get fresh bread, those are a big help,” Lisa explained.
Lisa held up a bag of wild tundra root vegetables to show me. Known as “mouse food,” people in the village harvest them from the caches of mice and voles. Each root was like a tiny parsnip but the width of a fine paintbrush handle. Brittany exclaimed, “Those are good in seal soup.”
Brittany Tom now lived with an uncle and several other relatives in Lisa’s old house, their late grandmother’s house, which had since become the closest dwelling in the village to the erosion line of the Ningliq River. “Do you know when they’re gonna move grandma’s house?” Brittany asked Lisa. “Maybe spring or winter. We gotta wait for the FEMA update,” Lisa said. FEMA was assessing the condition of Newtok’s housing stock. Lisa’s grandma’s house was old and spare and covered with chipped red paint. But the family was still waiting to hear if FEMA would allow them to save that house or the one we were sitting in and haul them across the river.
After a half hour of watching me eat her fish, Lisa left for work, and Brittany and I lingered at the table. Brittany was a petite person, casually wearing multicolored leggings and one red and one blue sock tucked inside sandals, with a soft, soprano voice and an obvious enthusiasm for storytelling. “I graduated in 2014, last year, and I was supposed to go to college. But then my grandma wanted me to help to take care of her. And she ended up passing away in April,” she explained. She planned to apply for the spring semester. “I can’t wait,” she said with enthusiasm.
But she still worried for her community. “Did you see how close the water is toward the houses over there? When I was younger, I remember the land being able to stretch way far out.”
She pulled out her cell phone and began showing me photographs as the television murmured in the background and Jodi banged the bottom of the Play-Doh container loudly on the kitchen table. There were images of traditional dancing, with dance fans made of feathers, fur, wood, and grass. Then another of someone harvesting a seal.
Then an image of Brittany’s daughter, who had been born when Brittany was sixteen. She had let the father’s parents adopt her. “Even though it was hard for me, I didn’t want to take her away from what made her happy,” she mused. The daughter lived in another village, called Chevak. But Brittany had a hard time imagining her own life anywhere other than in Newtok. “I tried to move away for a bit, but I didn’t last. I ended up coming up back here,” she said.
And yet, her whole life, she had known Newtok would move. “I thought it was going to happen right away, but here I am graduated and everything, and they’ve only built a few houses.”
Growing up, she had heard elders talk about how the climate was changing and how this would create hardship for people. “It makes me sad,” she said. “Like the kids who wouldn’t be able to grow up where we grew up, and wondering how they’re going to end up, like how their lives are going to be changed.”
On the day that I left Newtok, the weather was beginning to turn. Frost settled on the surface of the boardwalks, rendering them extra slippery. I spotted a little boy making a game of running toward the boardwalks and sliding across the icy surface. My own boot slipped off the boardwalk and splashed into the muck beside it. But the morning was otherwise auspicious. Early sunlight crept into the horizon and tinged all the buildings rose gold. The sky turned a fresh, pale blue, and I walked the village, photographing everything. The shack of a post office, not much larger than the average backyard storage shed, tilted at a strange angle by the settling ground beneath it. The ghost of the old school that had burned in Lisa’s youth—looking like a rotted-out corpse, with partially boarded-up windows and pocked and frayed walls. I could document the damage, and also the beauty. The boats moored at the edge of the river. The golden grass glinting with puddles of light. The clotheslines hung with laundry and drying racks loaded with cuts of wild fish. Birds piped overhead, and I could see that it was quietly lovely here. I could see how, if you knew the place, if you were a real person of this land, you would worry for it and how it was withering away, the way you would for the body of an ailing friend.
Lisa Charles gave me a parting gift of a tiny hand-sewn ornament, boot-shaped, soft, sewn from beaver fur and calfskin—along with some coffee poured into a Styrofoam cup. Tom John, whom I found in a small building beside the school that served as a community office, simply shook my hand. “See you in the future,” he said, as if the future were a destination on the landscape that we might both arrive in.
One of the last photos I took, before departing the village on another tiny propeller plane, was of an empty building pad made of Dura-Base, the same material that had been used to forge Mertarvik’s first roads. Neither the barge—the one with materials for the new energy-efficient house—nor the Fairbanks architect who was supposed to meet me here originally had arrived.
Weeks after I left Newtok, I learned the barge had first caught fire and then later been blocked by storms and sailed on to Nome, three hundred miles north along the coast. As usual, the tundra and the Alaskan weather were not going to cooperate with human designs.
Later that fall, again with help from Sally Russell Cox and other Alaskan officials, the community entered a design competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The application envisioned green design—with energy-efficient houses specifically suited for the tundra. The $60 million grant would have allowed most of the community to move quickly. But in January the following year, their request was rejected.
In the summer of 2016, Aaron Cooke, the Fairbanks architect who never met up with me in Newtok, made it to Mertarvik, along with the materials for the new house. He brought his dog and a skeleton crew, camped out in an unheated shed built by the military, and hired workers from the community to assemble the house over the next seven weeks. (The crew also had to dig their own outhouse.) In the end, it was a good house: so efficiently insulated that it would use less than half of the heating fuel required by an average rural Alaskan home. It was wired to accommodate solar panels or wind power, should those ever arrive in Mertarvik. This house, unlike its predecessors, would neither sink nor grow mold. Still it stood empty; it would be hard for anyone to live here full-time without the basic trappings of community and working infrastructure.
Three more years would pass before I would return. As I followed Newtok’s story remotely, I began to wonder if the community could survive. Storms reached farther into the land, often smacking against the houses. Sometimes the wind was so strong people could feel it roaring beneath their floors and watch it warp the windows, so that it looked like the glass was breathing. And afterward, each time, more land had vanished.
In late 2016, the Newtok council asked President Obama to officially declare that the village was suffering from a major federal disaster, “due to a combination of periodic flooding, persistent erosion, and permafrost degradation”—in other words, the disaster of climate change. The declaration would have helped make more money available for Newtok to move. Romy Cadiente, who had been hired by the village council a few years previously to work full-time on the relocation effort, spoke to a public radio reporter: “We just need to get out of there,” he said. But the policy was usually for discrete events—like hurricanes—and had never yet been applied to a slow-moving, multiyear, inexorable crisis. In January 2017, in the last days of the Obama administration, the White House denied the request.
But the worst tragedy for the community was not any rejection by outsiders. On a Sunday morning in late March 2017, Tom John set out from Newtok on an Arctic Cat snow machine. The sky was clear. The sun would have reflected off the glaring white tundra, and in black pants and a black coat, he would have cut a dark image on the land, like a silhouette. He left to hunt seals, as many generations of Yup’ik men have done every season. He was the last hunter in the village who still pursued the animals by kayak, the traditional way, as his father had taught him. This time, he pulled a brand-new red-and-yellow fiberglass kayak (though he owned and had always previously used a handmade wood and canvas one, the kind you might see in a museum).
But Tom John didn’t return that evening. The next day, the village summoned the Coast Guard and asked for help. By Tuesday, he had still not appeared. The search team found his snow machine and some of his gear at the edge of the ice, eighteen miles west of the village.
For weeks, a group of fifteen volunteers from regional search-and-rescue teams looked for him, towing hooks and dipping poles into the bottom of the Bering Sea and scanning the depths with sonar.
No one could determine exactly what happened. (While some hazards, like unstable ice, become worse as the seasons grow unsteady, the Y-K Delta wilderness has always held inherent dangers even for the most seasoned backcountry traveler—volatile weather, difficult terrain, vast spaces where help is unreachable.)
Tom John was never found.
This was not, however, the end of Newtok’s story, simply a grievous reminder of the precariousness of the place and the fragility of the lives held there on the broken land.