Climate change is altering the land we live on, and Indigenous communities are on the frontline. In this episode, we bring you to Alaska, where rapid permafrost thaw is threatening the Native village of Nunapitchuk. Then, we head to Louisiana, where the Pointe-Au-Chien Indian Tribe is watching their land disappear underwater due to sea level rise. These threats are forcing these tribes to make the difficult decision: to stay and adapt, or to leave their ancestral home.
This episode was produced in collaboration with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
This episode was reported by Eva Tesfaye and KYUK News Director Sage Smiley. This episode was edited by Eve Abrams. Additional help from Carlyle Calhoun, Katie Basile, and Ryan Vasquez. The episode was fact-checked by Garrett Hazelwood. Sea Change's executive producer is Carlyle Calhoun. Our theme music is by Jon Batiste, and our sound designer is Emily Jankowski.
Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We are part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX.
Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Sea Change is also supported by the Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
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TRANSCRIPT
Mushy ground / boardwalk sounds
EVA: You’re listening to Sea Change, I’m Eva Tesfaye. Our world is changing, and coastal communities are on the frontlines - the very ground on which they built their homes is shape-shifting before their eyes.
MORRIS: Everywhere you look it's slanted. Everything cannot stay straight no more, and houses are occupied and they're slanting and they're touching the ground.
EVA: this isn’t Louisiana, or anywhere else on the Gulf Coast – where most Sea Change stories take place. It’s actually almost 4,000 miles away, in sub-Arctic Alaska. The man you just heard is Morris Alexie, speaking to Sage Smiley, who’s the news director for the public radio station in the area, KYUK. Hey Sage.
SAGE: Hey Eva.
EVA: So we banded together on this episode because we realized there's a lot of similarities between Louisiana and Alaska.
SAGE: Yes, I feel like they're almost like two sides of the same coin, you know? Granted it’s really cold up here and really hot down there, but both places have the beautiful wetlands, and the wildlife...
EVA: Yeah a big hunting scene, fishing, oil and gas production.
SAGE: And we also found out the climate threats facing Indigenous tribes really reflect each other, but are also so different and unique.
EVA: And these threats are forcing some tribes to make hard decisions about whether to stay or to leave.
SAGE: Many of us are making that decision as climate change worsens natural disasters. According to a recent (2022) report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 20 million people have been displaced by extreme weather events every year since 2008.
EVA: But the tribes we’re talking about today are entire communities making these drastic changes together. And many of them already have a history of being forced off of their land by colonial governments.
SAGE: So today on Sea Change, I'm going to bring you to the Alaska Native village of Nunapitchuk here in Alaska, where Morris Alexie lives.
EVA: And then I'm going to bring y'all back down to Louisiana to the Pointe-au-Chien Indian tribe.
SAGE: First, we head north. That’s coming up.
BREAK
Little wind whistling sounds, walking?
We’re a couple of miles outside the small Yup’ik village of Nunapitchuk, in a vast tundra. It’s around 420 miles west of Anchorage, accessible only by small plane, boat, or, when the rivers and lakes are frozen, by truck or snowmachine along the region’s ice highway.
Now, in summer time, Nunapitchuk looks like it sits at the edge of the sky. The land is so flat, and so thin, it almost seems like it floats. The region is a waterworld, a patchwork of ponds, lakes, streams, sloughs and rivers.
Boat sound?
But we’ve headed by boat to one of the highest points around, maybe 30 feet above sea level.
Boat shutting down
After winding along the Johnson River and through a lake full of water plants, we slow at the base of a low hill. Morris Alexie, who you heard from earlier, hops out of the skiff, sinking a few inches into the spongy tundra ground.
MORRIS: maybe… maybe I made a mistake of not using putting on my rubber boots
The muck soaks into the tops of his brown hiking boots. Morris labors across the wobbling ground.
MORRIS: I have been calling it the Alaskan quicksand.
Like most people in Nunapitchuk, Morris is Alaska Native – Yup’ik – and speaks fluent Yugtun. In both English and Yugtun, the 56-year-old doesn’t rush his words. As he holds onto the nose of the boat, the ground moves like a water bed.
MORRIS: it's very spongy yes and that is exactly what is happening to our committee whole community’s land
Morris has lived in Nunapitchuk for his whole life. He’s lived many lives here – a tribal administrator, fuel spill cleanup worker, local Alaska Native corporation board member, teacher.
Those are past lives. Now, his life is dedicated to moving the entire town of Nunapitchuk.
Walking sound
We come to a stop at the top of the low hill, covered in scrubby lichens and other ground plants.
Standing at the crest of this rolling wave of empty land, it’s hard to imagine a town.
This is where Nunapitchuk will move. Has to move. But right now, there’s nothing here but a weather station, and a probe measuring the underground temperature. Morris says the data goes back to the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts.
MORRIS: they have to check if there there'd be a possible welling spot well freshwater spot we’d have to have freshwater
As he speaks, he turns around, looking at the open hilltop as if envisioning the pieces that need to fall into place.
MORRIS: … airport, a barge landing
Again, there’s nothing here. Every building, light pole, and walkway that will make up a town is yet to be built.
It’s a radical thing to consider – moving an entire town to the top of this barren hill.. But it may be the only option, because the ground under the current village of Nunapitchuk, a couple of miles away, is disappearing. Here in the sub-arctic, there’s one very specific problem that literally underpins most village infrastructure.
MORRIS: we had already found out through research and data that Nunap is sitting on permafrost.
For centuries, the ground under Nunapitchuk stayed frozen year-round – a phenomenon called permafrost. As the climate of Western Alaska changes, that ancient permafrost is thawing. It’s at the core of Nunapitchuk’s need to relocate.
Where there is a town right now, and has been a town since the late 1930s, you can’t safely walk on the ground. Instead, a spiderwebbing system of sidewalks and roads built of boards crisscross the tundra between houses and buildings.
GERTRUDE: our kids can’t really play anywhere.
Gertrude Lewis is a kindergarten teacher in Nunapitchuk. She says the thawing permafrost can make the town claustrophobic in the summers – you can’t leave the boardwalk.
GERTRUDE: [...] My grandson, he stepped off the boardwalk and he went knee deep. We had to pull him out, we lost his rubber boot
SAGE: when you were a kid could you play on the tundra everywhere?
GERTRUDE: Everywhere.
SAGE: And now you have to stay on the boardwalk.
GERTRUDE: Stay on the boardwalk.
There’s a word in the Yup’ik language to describe the feeling of living on thawing permafrost.
GERTRUDE: Angayiiq It’s like where you when you walk you feel like you're on jelly.
Angayiiq. The boardwalks in Nunap dip and curve as the ground thaws and unevenly degrades below them, like an old-fashioned wooden roller coaster. Many houses and electrical poles sit at angles ranging from jaunty to precarious. As the permafrost thaws, it also increases riverbank erosion, literally eating away land from underneath the village.
It’s not a process that can be reversed, and eventually reaches a point where there isn’t usable land any more. And many in Nunapitchuk see the village at that point now.
For village elders, relocating Nunapitchuk has been a topic of conversation since they were children. One of those elders is 83 year old Robert Nick. Sitting at his kitchen table, Robert tells me he became Nunapitchuk’s tribal administrator when he was 19 years old.
ROBERT: At the time, I had some friends who had been talking about moving to higher ground away from the wetlands that our village is on.
Robert says over his more than 80 years in Nunapitchuk, permafrost thaw has caused the already low-lying tundra to sink and pond, filling with water and breaking away into the river. Even the Yup’ik name of the village points to how precarious its location is.
ROBERT: Nunapitcauq: small piece of tundra.
Small piece of tundra. Robert has watched his town shrink from the air, flying in bush planes
ROBERT: sometimes I go up there high enough and wonder about the houses down there. They seemed to be on water.
Living on water, because there’s no solid land.
So why was the village built on land that, even decades ago, everyone knew wasn’t stable?
Robert says it was the school building that really established Nunapitchuk as a community.
ROBERT: when the school was built they were forced to come here.
In 1936, the Bureau of Indian Affairs built a school in Nunapitchuk, not long after Alaska territorial officials made school compulsory. Its light blue buildings take up a slice of land from the center of town to the river, right by Robert’s house.
It’s also a spot on the winding Johnson River where cumbersome shipping barges could offload supplies. So those two factors – the school and the barges – forced the Yup’ik people to settle there, on very soggy ground.
MORRIS: So it was not planned. It was not wanted. It was not agreed upon.
Before that, most Yup’ik people moved with the seasons and the changing texture of the ground, from winter sod houses to summer fish camps. So now, tied to a school and inflexible buildings, people in Nunap have had to make do as the ground degrades – wreaking havoc on the village’s infrastructure.
JAMES: It really impacted our house. We have a lot of cracks on the floor, in the walls
That’s Morris’s uncle, James Berlin Sr. He’s invited us over for dryfish – strips of dried salmon – and akutaq – a Yup’ik ice cream made from berries, some kind of fat, and occasionally sugar or mild flesh of white fish. We sit around the kitchen and James points to a large crack, duct-taped in some places, that runs across the middle of the living room and through the ceiling, from the settling of the house.
JAMES: Our porches falling apart from the building
Phone rings
James Berlin Sr. is mayor of Nunapitchuk, so he gets a lot of calls.
JAMES: Hello… talking in Yup’ik
But being mayor doesn’t insulate him from the problems caused by living on thawing ground. His duct-taped house is not unusual. Crumbling infrastructure is the norm, and visible everywhere you look: Many doors don’t shut properly as houses settle into the ground. Floors tilt at an angle. The corners of buildings rot as they come into contact with the soft ground. The public safety building hangs over the river, as the bank erodes from underneath it. A section of town is blocked off, a handful of houses abandoned, where the permafrost thaw got especially bad.
A few years ago, while Morris was serving as tribal administrator, he got a call from a woman in the community, distraught because her house had fallen and filled with water. He says this was a turning point.
MORRIS: Our very first house that went under had 10 children, two parents and they all are moved out because of nowhere to house. And then after that other families like another eight in a family. They move out because of nowhere to house.
That’s exactly what Morris wants to keep from happening.
MORRIS: I've watched outmigrations, whole families
Gertrude Lewis, the woman who taught me the Yup’ik word for walking on jelly – also worries relocating might drive the community apart, like it did for her relatives in Kasigluk, a community which partly moved to more stable ground.
GERTRUDE: to me seem like once they start moving, they lose that closeness.
SAGE: even if they just moved a couple miles away.
GERTRUDE: I know. I know. They're my family. But you know, it's like, we don't get together and do things like we used to.
Gertrude says it’s not that she’s against relocation. She knows the permafrost is damaged.
But the logistics of life in a new place, further from the river, give her pause. First of all, how would she even get there?
GERTRUDE: You have to have a four wheeler, well some people don't have four wheelers to do all that walking. Or even boats. Some people don't have boats.
People in Nunap still do travel miles along the rivers and across tundra to access berry picking, moose hunting, and summer and winter fishing spots. It’s a huge part of why they want to stay as close as they can to the current village site — Because maintaining connection to the land means maintaining connection to culture and Yup’ik tradition. James Berlin Senior, Nunap’s mayor, says one main way he feels this connection is through food.
JAMES: We still live by season by season but I have to get ready for the availability of those wild foods that we get that are only available at a certain time
It’s a bit early in the season, but I head out with a few of James’s children and grandchildren to see what berries we can find. He’d love to make more akutaq, that Yup’ik dessert made from berries and some kind of fat.
Here, on the tundra, the sky opens up even wider, and swarms of slow mosquitoes gather around the hoods we cinch around our faces.
James Berlin’s daughter Sandra bends at the waist, gathering fat orange salmonberries into her bucket as we talk about relocation.
SANDRA: I think it'll be great for the people. That’s what I think.
SAGE: Why?
SANDRA: more happier with the land. More Connection. The more space everybody has the more it will be better.
SAGE: And there's a lack of space right now.
SANDRA: The land is getting smaller.
And really, that is why Morris is so committed to fighting for Nunapitchuk’s relocation, even with the uphill climb ahead. To give all the people here the space they need to live and practice their culture.
BEAT.
I’m back in the village, in Morris’s office. It’s tucked in the corner of a city building. The walls are plywood, and covered with printed aerial photos of the town, of the land it’s lost, and of the site a couple of miles away where it will move. Morris sits at a folding table, in a folding chair.
MORRIS: when I first started three years ago, it was kind of like the word relocation was kind of hush hush at first, hush hush because they were afraid of the funding to be cut off, but nowadays, you can freely say “relocate” but still apply for grants.
You see, while Morris is planning this massive relocation, the current town of Nunap has to keep functioning. And remember: it’s crumbling. Funding for new infrastructure projects in Nunapitchuk can feel at odds with the push to relocate the town – but they’re all vital.
SAGE: How much money does Nunapitchuk already have for this project? MORRIS: (laughs) Nothing, nothing nothing right now
Morris is saying he has zero dollars for relocation. And zero government assistance.
MORRIS:there is no set process. And every every agency that we contact they say they nobody's [...] specializing in relocation yet
There are other communities in the region that have relocated – on a much longer time scale. The village of Newtok, northwest of Nunapitchuk, has slowly moved to a new site 9 miles away called Mertarvik. It’s taken almost 30 years. Others are retreating to a site they can already access by road.
MORRIS: This relocation is kind of a new page to everyone, every top agency out there even the government of ours, the US government it is something they they cannot outright do right away I guess.
As much as Nunapitchuk is alone in planning and carrying out its relocation, it’s not alone in circumstance.
Five years ago, the federal government accountability office found that unclear federal leadership is the key challenge to climate migration. And last year, a statewide tribal health provider, the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, released an even more blistering report. There are almost 150 communities in the state that are in a similar boat to Nunapitchuk. Their villages are threatened by some combination of permafrost thaw, flooding or erosion. Some need to move, others need to retreat or undertake massive climate mitigation projects. And the lack of a coherent federal system puts the onus on these communities to invent workarounds before infrastructure totally fails.
SAGE: Do you feel like the government agencies owe Nunapitchuk?
MORRIS: Oh yeah. Oh yeah, we were still nomadic people like, like nomadic where we went from like 75 miles away each fall and spring
Morris says government officials are the reason Nunap exists where it does. They bear responsibility to help his sinking community.
But even if that help arrives, Morris’s uncle and Nunap’s mayor, James Berlin Sr. – doesn’t expect he’ll see the village relocate. He doesn’t see how the community can overcome the logistical barriers they face.
BEAT
JAMES BERLIN SR: I wish I could see it when people relocate, but it won’t be in my time. (Laughs) the next generation will have that opportunity to enjoy it.
That’s what’s happening in Alaska. After the break, Eva takes us back down to Louisiana.
--------------------------BREAK—----------------------
*Marina ambi*
Back here in Louisiana, it’s a windy, drizzly day when Cherie Matherne drives us to the edge of the water. Cherie is a member of the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe. She parks her truck in a gravel lot. Pelicans sit on rocks lining the shore. There are just a couple of other trucks and two people fishing.
*Car door closes*
When we get out and look out at the water. Cherie starts to explain where we are, but cuts herself off. There are sleek grey dolphins swimming around, putting on a little show for us.
CHERIE: here, this is where…oh wow, there's three of them.
EVA: Whoa, yeah.
CHERIE: They're beautiful.
EVA: They're really active. Like, I've never seen so many dolphins in my life.
CHERIE: They're definitely feeding.
Seeing incredible creatures like this on a daily basis is one reason Cherie loves living here.
Her tribal land in southeast Louisiana. It’s pretty far down the boot of state, where — if you’re looking at a map — the green mostly turns to blue.
CHERIE: Whenever some people pull up our location on a map, they're like, Oh, wow.
They're in the water. When you zoom in, then you'll see like little spigots of land.
*Marina ambi** We’re standing at the Pointe-aux-chenes marina where the bayou running through the tribe intersects with a canal. Cherie says saltwater and freshwater converge here. It creates a current that attracts fish and shrimp, which in turn attracts the dolphins and other marine life.
CHERIE: my husband is a crab fisherman, so he has caught sharks in his cage. He has caught stingrays. turtles, but yeah, so we have just this very diverse, ecosystem and that's all due to, the many, the many changes.
Changes to the ecosystem brought on by climate change. We just heard how in Alaska, climate change is causing permafrost to thaw. Here in Louisiana, changes to our climate bring sea level rise, coastal erosion and saltwater intrusion. The place where salt and freshwater converged used to happen farther south
Cherie points out telephone poles sticking out of the water– where land used to be, where her tribe used to live.
CHERIE: If you look towards that way, you'll see a string of line of telephone poles, uh, electricity poles.
EVA: Oh yeah.
CHERIE: That all used to be land. and people had houses down there.
EVA: Oh wow, yeah.
CHERIE: And then now it's just all open water.
In fact, the whole neighborhood is surrounded by water that didn’t used to be there.
BRENDA: you could go look at the back door and that used to be all land.
I’m sitting on tribal elder Brenda Ann Billiot’s couch about 5 mins away from the marina. She’s lived in Pointe-au-Chien for over 50 years. And she points at her backyard
BRENDA: You could go look at the back there. All you see is water.
This land is precarious. On top of saltwater intrusion and land loss, Brenda says she’s also noticed the hurricanes are getting worse. Brenda’s house is brand new because her old house was completely destroyed during Hurricane Ida in 2021
BRENDA: The whole back end was gone. Mm-hmm. And then the ceiling, all you had was insulation all over broken glass and everything.
And whenever a bad storm like that happens, the tribe often gets asked, why don’t you just move? But for Brenda, moving isn’t an option. Her heart is in Pointe-au-Chien.
BRENDA: it's quiet and everybody's family around here and we just love being here. No matter what. The hurricanes come, we come back and rebuild then. We just love it here. (laughs)
Unlike Nunapitchuk which is working to relocate, Brenda and her tribe have decided to stay – or at least try to – despite the fact that their land is disappearing. This strategy is called adapting in place. In other words, make changes to the way they live where they live.
Cherie says the tribe never considered relocation.
CHERIE: Everyone agreed that they have no need to want to move away. They will continue to live down here and do what they have to do to continue to live down here.
Part of the reason for that is their livelihoods depend on a close relationship to the water. It’s hard to overstate just how important fishing is to the Pointe-au-chien tribe. Earl Billiot, Brenda’s husband, is still crabbing in his 70s. He’s a man of few words, but a lot of jokes. For example, Earl didn’t go to college, but when I ask him…
EVA: How long have you been a fisherman?
EARL: All my life since I got out of college right here (Laughter)
Earl actually got kicked out of school because he missed classes to go shrimping. He’s been a fisherman ever since. All the boats, docks,and processing facilities he relies on are here in Pointe-au-chien
But fishing is more than work, it’s continuing a generations long way of living. And for Earl and his tribe to keep doing this, they need to adapt to the changing environment.
To understand Pointe-au-chien’s decision to adapt in place, we first have to talk about another tribal community, only a ten minute drive from the Pointe-aux-Chenes marina.
One that suffered from all the same problems as Pointe-au-Chien – land loss, saltwater intrusion, ever-more severe storms – but one that made a VERY different decision.
Isle de Jean Charles. Cherie sometimes calls it “the Island.”
CHERIE: The Isle de Jean Charles tribe is, is one of our sister tribes. Like my grandfather is from the island, my grandmother's from Pointe au chien, so they have a lot of intermarital between the different families. and we support them. We all go through the similar issues
But there is one crucial difference. Cherie’s community, Pointe-au-chien, is mostly inside the levee system. While Isle de Jean Charles is outside of it.
The army corps of engineers chose to leave it out to cut costs – a decision which left the people there much more vulnerable to storms.
People from a few different tribes lived on Isle de Jean Charles. And in 2016, one of them – the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation =-- submitted a proposal to the federal government to fund its relocation after years of research and planning. And they got the money … sort of.
CHERIE: the plan originally was hijacked
Hijacked because even though the federal government funded the tribe's relocation, the TRIBE didn't get the money directly. You see, the federal government gave the relocation money to the state. And the state took over the process.
The tribe says the state pushed their leadership out of the planning and destroyed their vision for resettlement.
The relocation site, about 40 miles inland north of Isle de Jean Charles, is called the New Isle. And many tribal members who moved there, face issues with their new houses: rain leaking through roofs, defective plumbing, and faulty air conditioning. Problems that sound a lot like what the people in Nunapitchuk experienced, only these buildings are new.
Erica Billiot– No relation to Brenda Ann Biliot who you met earlier – is one of the New Isle residents. Erica Billiot told me she, her sisters and her mother are all having these problems.
BILLIOT: she has cracks on the side of her walls. We have cracks on the side of all walls. It rains through the doors. Um, one of my sisters, her roof, it rains in where the stove's at. I guess because it's not sealed or whatever. But yeah, walls are crooked. Floors are crooked
Seeing these issues, a lot of Isle de Jean Charles residents chose not to move to the relocation site, so the community scattered. Exactly what the tribe was hoping to avoid.
In 2023, the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation filed a complaint with the federal government against the state of Louisiana. They say the poor conditions at the New Isle are a result of the state taking over – pushing the tribe out of the decision-making. And infringing on their sovereignty.
What happened to Isle de Jean Charles is infamous among the tribes in coastal Louisiana. And for Cherie it’s a reminder to her of how a tribe’s decision-making can easily be stolen.
CHERIE: help from the federal and the state government, it's very iffy. You know, you don't know if you're gonna get help. You don't know if you're gonna have things done that are supported in the best interest for the tribe.
And this particularly matters to Cherie because she is Pointe-au-chien’s Cultural Heritage & Resiliency Coordinator.
Which means It’s her job to figure out how to adapt in place. And she’s very careful about who the tribe partners with – only choosing organizations that center the residents’ ideas.
So what does adapting in place look like for Pointe-au-Chien?
First: they need to assess what they still have and what they might lose.
The tribe partners with Louisiana Sea Grant. – a research program created by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA.
Their scientists are working with Pointe-au-chien elders and fishermen to map the most important areas to the tribe – the ones most crucial to protect. So that the tribe can direct its limited resources to these areas, like their historic mounds for example, earthen structures built by the tribe’s ancestors.
CHERIE: we have several mounds, but we also have several cemeteries also down here. we find it very important to, to protect those, just to not lose those culturally significant places.
To protect those significant places, they have to slow down land loss. The second way of adapting in place. The tribe worked with the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana – to build reefs from bags of recycled oyster shells. The reefs slow down waves and reduce erosion.
Finally, the third way the tribe is adapting in place is by fortifying resident’s homes. After storm damage from Hurricane Ida, Pointe-au-chien is rebuilding to stricter building codes than the state requires.
One of those homes is Brenda Ann Billiot’s – the one where I sat on the couch looking at the water in her yard.
Brenda moved into her beautiful new home this year. It’s 13 feet in the air
BRENDA: this house is very strong, you know, it could take oh, oh, 150 miles per hour of our winds or more.
In fact, the day before I visited Brenda, the tribe celebrated her newly rebuilt house in a ceremony.
But rebuilding isn’t always possible because home and flood insurance has skyrocketed to unaffordable prices over the last few years.
So many people have sold their houses to people not in the tribe, who turned them into weekend fishing camps.
Bernice Poland is Brenda’s sister-in-law, She says the weekend camps speak to what a desirable place Pointe-au-chien still is to live. She uses the phrase, “sportsman’s paradise” – Louisiana’s tagline. It’s on our license plates.
BERNICE: They didn't think it was worth anything for them, //And now that, It's kind of like a sportsman paradise - the fishing's good and everything, and now they kind of want to come over here.
It’s a kind of gentrification. And it’s another way the tribe’s land and the community is shrinking.
Bernice says most of the young people in the tribe have already moved away.
BERNICE: Like none of my children here live here. I have one in Texas, three in Shreveport and, uh, two in Arkansas.
So adapting in place is turning out to be more like a slow migration. And that’s not a new problem for the tribe.
Cherie says their ancestors and elders already migrated due to land loss - during the 70s.
– to here, where Pointe-au-Chien is now.
CHERIE: several miles further south, that was their main location, over the years of land loss and coastal erosion, they continue to move a little bit further north. And this is the area that they settled to.
Visiting Pointe-au-Chien made me realize that relocation and adaptation are not that different. Both are a reaction to losing the land and the people on it. Both are strategies to try to keep the community together in the face of climate change.
OUTRO
SAGE: It seems like in both Nunapitchuk and Pointe-au-chien there’s so much overlap between relocating and adapting in place. Like in Nunap, Morris Alexie is trying to get them to relocate, but the community also has to adapt in place, in a way, getting grants for infrastructure right where they are.
EVA: Yeah, and like I said in Pointe-au-chien, they’re doing their best to stay but people end up slowly moving further away from the coast anyway.
SAGE: And ultimately, I think that’s because these tribes are dealing with an underlying problem that they didn’t create and can’t combat on their own – climate change. Indigenous communities have been forcibly relocated and compelled to make do where they are, even as the environment becomes more variable and literally destroys the land they’re still doing their best to stay on.
EVA: And ideally, the tribes wouldn’t have to make these tough decisions. Ideally we’d stop warming the planet and destroying their land.
SAGE: And that makes it even more stark that the tribes barely have any assistance to make these moves or adaptations
EVA: Yeah and in Pointe-au-chien it can be hard to get reliable assistance for rebuilding so people can stay. Cherie once told me rebuilding homes after Ida felt like a merry-go-round. Often things would just fall through.
SAGE: I find myself coming back to the hope Morris and the other folks in Nunap I spoke to have for relocation. Despite these huge barriers and what amounts basically to the refusal of the state or federal governments to consider their culpability in the crisis, Nunap is trying to remain a community in the face of climate change. It’s driving what they do.
EVA: And in Pointe-au-chien, they’re determined to keep this community here, even though all the circumstances keep pushing them away. And as climate change brings more and more uncertainty, Indigenous people all over the world on the frontlines will have to keep reckoning with this question of how to maintain their livelihoods, their culture and their communities.
SAGE: Totally.
EVA: Thank you, Sage, for reporting this story with me!
SAGE: Quyanaqvaa Thank you so much!
CREDITS
Thanks for listening to Sea Change! This episode was hosted and reported by me, Eva Tesfaye, and Sage Smiley. This episode was edited by Eve Abrams with additional editing support from Carlyle Calhoun, Katie Basile, Garrett Hazelwood, and Ryan Vasquez. This episode was fact-checked by Garrett Hazelwood. Our managing producer is Carlyle Calhoun, our sound designer is Emily Jankowski, and our theme music is by Jon Batiste.
This story was co-published and supported by the journalism non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. It’s also supported by the Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
We’ll be back in two weeks.
