Over a century ago, Austin Swan’s father attended a relocation planning meeting for the village of Kivalina, a small community in the Alaskan Arctic Circle. Established on a sandy barrier island, Kivalina had an eroding coastline and needed to move further inland to protect the homes of a mostly Native community of Iñupiat residents.
“That was when the landmass was twice what it used to be. They were talking about relocation already,” said Swan, 77, the village’s mayor. The village is only about a mile long and a few hundred feet wide.
Indefensible from global warming
It is viewed as among the most indefensible places in the United States from the consequences of global warming. Remote, accessible only by plane and built entirely on a sandbar, Kivalina has long been a case study for scientists, politicians and civil engineers. All have tried to anticipate a climate disaster that could sweep away the few dozen structures belonging to about 300 local residents. But despite the attention it has drawn, almost nothing has changed.
On a July afternoon, Swan sat in the front room of one of the only structures successfully relocated in the 100 years since his father attended that meeting: the village school. It is about eight miles uphill and inland, on a site identified as safer from climate change than the sand spit where the current village is built.
The tentative plan is to move the entire village to the same plot of land, forming a town around the school. Bountiful berry bushes separate the new school – which the state allocated $43 million to build – from the village, which lacks widespread water and sewer systems. The road to the school cost an additional $53.1 million, according to the Northwest Arctic Borough planning department.
When a storm is bad, debris and waves can crash onto the town’s airplane runway. Melting permafrost turns fields into lumpy mush. Where puddles once did not form, standing water is now constant. The small community filed a lawsuit years ago, blaming Exxon Mobil Corp. and others for the climate dangers it faced. (The Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2013, effectively ending the legal battle.)
The town was supposed to be an early example of strategic retreat. The Army Corps of Engineers has long urged relocation, and President Barack Obama did a flyover of the remote village, promising a move. The Army Corps and local politicians estimate transferring the community of around 400 people could cost as much as $1 million per resident. But that is if they are able to secure the funds at all, an increasingly unlikely feat with a shrinking federal government.
3-day summit
Swan was among the lawmakers, law enforcement officers, Indigenous elders, tribal representatives and climate experts gathered at Kivalina’s relocated school last month for a three-day summit to discuss safety in the Northwest Arctic. Attendees slept inside the school on cots, and one police officer who once ran a restaurant cooked group meals with Costco staples.
The conference focused on three primary topics: the epidemic of murdered and missing Indigenous people, emergency preparedness and climate change. None has a singular solution, and all, more than anything, need funding that is increasingly hard to secure in a federal government defined by spending cuts.
To open the event, a local emergency manager explained how FEMA cuts could affect this rural Arctic community. “We need to pour more effort and diligence into our hazard mitigation planning process,” said Kelly Hamilton, the Northwest Arctic Borough official who helped organize the summit. Hamilton hoped ample preplanning for disasters could help communities facing imminent climate risk.
In an hourlong session meant to prepare the area for climate retreat, no firm way to pay for the retreat was proposed.
“I don’t know where the funding comes from,” said State Rep. Robyn Niayuq Burke, a newly elected Democrat who represents Kivalina and spoke on the panel. The area she represents is roughly the size of Germany, and she emphasized the diversity of opinions and interests among her constituents. “Even in the community that I grew up in, people don’t like to hear the term climate change. It is challenging in that way as well. Our state government is more reactive than proactive.”
The tightening timeframe to make changes was on the panelists’ minds, even if a plan to expedite relocation had yet to be formed.
“The frequency of the challenges of things like flooding, and coastal erosion and the time pressure that’s on a lot of our communities is so much more frequent now than it was 10, 15, 20, 50 years ago,” said Ashley Carrick, an Alaska state representative and Democrat who attended the panel alongside Burke.
Subsistence lifestyle
Before the mandated schooling of Native children, the Indigenous community primarily used the area as seasonal hunting and fishing grounds, moving as the weather dictated. Kivalina was not settled year-round, and the local community was not tied to a sand spit hampered by winter storms. For generations, the Native community maintained its subsistence lifestyle in relative peace. But when missionaries, whalers and the federal government arrived in Alaska in the 19th century, the original residents of the Arctic found their way of life was forced to change, with permanent, year-round settlements becoming the norm.
Communities often form around schools, and by placing a schoolhouse on a barrier island, homes and churches grew around it. No one asked the Native community if that was a good location for a school, said Colleen Swan, an elder in Kivalina and a member of the mayor’s family.
“They dropped it on this little spit out there – a sand spit. That’s how our village started. We didn’t make this decision – it was made by people who didn’t know any better. Maybe they did not regard the Native people as people they could consult with,” said Colleen Swan, who also served as a councilwoman. “All of the issues we face today, they’re all because we were not included in the discussion, in the planning and most importantly the decision making.”