one major storm that we never had,’ Robert Iyatunguk concluded quietly. ‘I’d hate to be here when it hits, but my kids are here, and I’m going to stay here with my kids and my wife’s family and their brothers and sisters for as long as it takes.’
I spent that evening with Clifford Weyiouanna, a fifty-eight-year-old Shishmaref elder, who sat polishing his gun as we spoke. Several snowmachines were parked outside his house, one with a sled on which were stacked three large blocks of ice – clear as glass, and cut from a coastal river to serve as drinking water. Children were playing on the snowdrifts – some piled as high as the houses themselves – and Clifford’s grandchildren ran in and out of the house, banging the door behind them.
‘It’s no good getting old without kids around,’ Clifford chuckled indulgently as one of them whizzed past. He brought out an ‘Eskimo shotgun’ (a bone harpoon which had been used to hunt ducks) and his most prized possession, an intricately-beaded woven belt, so ancient that no one remembered who had made it.
Having lived in the community all his life (bar four years at high school and two in the military ‘hellhole’ of Fort Benning, Georgia, and then Saigon, which he didn’t like to talk about), Clifford Weyiouanna was an authority on the local environment. It was true, he told me, that the permafrost underlying the village was melting, and this was speeding up the erosion. But another factor was just as important – the gradual disappearance of the sea ice.
The sea ice used to lock up the shore for six months of every year, he explained, and so for half the year the eroding power of the waves was banished. Storms could rage all they wanted, but the sandy cliffs would stand. Now that had begun to change.
‘The currents have changed, the ice conditions have changed, and the freeze-up of the Chukchi Sea out here has really changed too. We used to freeze up in the last part of October. This year we didn’t freeze up until Christmas time.’
‘So, how different is it when you’re actually out on the ice?’
‘It’s not as stable. We used to get icebergs from the north many years ago – turquoise blue icebergs – not any more, it’s all young ice now. Thin stuff, only about a foot thick. Right now, the ice on that ocean out there should be, under normal conditions, four foot thick.’
And the animal behaviour was changing too. ‘I think they’re migrating a lot earlier than they used to because of the warming of the ocean. They migrate north in the spring to stay in the cooler waters. That’s the polar bears, the walrus, the spotted seal, the bearded seal, the belugas and the bowhead whales.’ He leaned forward to emphasise the point: ‘Last summer we covered thousands of miles by boat trying to get walrus – there was nothing, except for one boat which found one walrus.’
And then there were the strange new fish. ‘I used to have one in my shed. I was going to give it to a biologist to take a look because it’s not a local fish. The warming of the temperature is bringing some uncommon fish species into the ocean.’
We talked long after midnight. Outside the sun was only just setting, and the kids were as noisy and energetic as ever. No one bothered to order them around: traditional teaching methods are subtle, and Eskimo children are expected to find things out for themselves.
Shishmaref would go on, both Clifford and Robert assured me. If not here, then someplace else further up the coast. But whatever happened, the community would stay together. People here looked after each other – just as the first seal of the hunting season would always be given to an elder. It was the traditional way.
HUSLIA
All over the Alaskan interior people in remote villages are reporting sudden changes, all related to the state’s warming climate: weird animal behaviour, unexpected weather, changing landscape and dying forests. Around Huslia, a small Athabaskan Indian village three hundred kilometres west of Fairbanks, entire lakes have disappeared.
These disappearing lakes sounded a bit too dramatic, and I wasn’t sure I believed it – until I visited the village and saw it happening for myself.
The plane was only an eight-seater, and I was directly behind the pilot. The dials spun as he heaved back the joy-stick, the small craft gaining speed and then bouncing into the air from a side runway at Fairbanks Airport. Soon we were flying over thick forests, which encircled huge ox-bow lakes formed by old river courses. As we cruised at only 900 metres, thin ice clouds scattered the bright sunlight into an ever-present rainbow on the left, whilst on the right, small mountains rose above the treeline, looking almost impossibly smooth under their thick coating of snow.
Huslia was over two hours away, first visible as just a little grey airstrip and a few dozen cabins as we glided in over the forests. As a Native village, Huslia has its own Tribal Council, and one of the officials was waiting to meet us. We loaded our bags onto a sled and rode down into the village on the back of her snowmachine, drawing to a halt outside a log cabin with a large freezer outside the front door and lots of toys scattered around it in the snow.
Cesa Sam appeared at the door. She was dressed only in a T-shirt and shorts, despite the cold weather. Inside, I could see why – the house was boiling, and we all rapidly stripped off our coats and gloves. Cesa was in her early thirties, large and cheerful, and continually pestered by several hyperactive children.
‘Oh, a lot of people can tell you about the weather,’ she said, when we were all drinking hot chocolate around the table. ‘There’s only been one cold winter since ‘94 here. It’s so much warmer, and that’s a big change.’
I went for a walk around the village that evening. It was bordered on one side by a wide frozen river, with steep banks leading down to the ice edge. Lots of snowmachine tracks led along the river, which was clearly the equivalent of a main road in winter. But the spring break-up was just beginning, and dark patches in the snow indicated where water was seeping through from the thawing ice underneath.
Everyone from the very young to the very old seemed to get about by snowmachine, and the saw-like buzzing of motors made a constant background noise. There were fewer kids around than normal: I later found out to my surprise that most of the school seniors had gone on a trip to Mexico. Demolishing my assumptions about Indian villages, modernity was everywhere – televisions flickered inside most of the houses, and on a makeshift basketball court two wiry teenagers were sliding about on the ice, taking turns shooting the ball. Like other kids I’d seen elsewhere in the United States, they wore baggy jeans and sneakers, and moved with a disinterested, thoroughly urban cool.
As in Shishmaref, subsistence food is still vital. At a ‘pot-latch’ communal meal later in the evening, hunks of caribou shared space with jelly, ice cream and crisps on paper plates. The elders played bingo several nights a week, sitting attentively at classroom desks in the community centre. The Huslia village store was packed with dried soups, big plastic bottles of coke, biscuits and even some fresh vegetables like onions and carrots, a new shipment of which had come in on our plane. But in the summer the whole community moved out to ‘fish camps’ to catch salmon, and the traditional diet again predominated. Cesa’s own house, where we stayed in an upstairs boxroom, doubled as the village video store, and was well patronised by residents seeking repeat viewings of Eddie Murphy films and Titanic.
Although village life looked relaxed enough, the relationship between modernity and traditional lifestyles is never easy – in Huslia as in other Native villages across Alaska and the United States generally. The Koyukon Indian language – part of the Athabaskan language group, that includes the Apache and Navajo as far south as Arizona and California – is dying. Old people still speak it to each other, but the middle generation were beaten by their white
