Yupik Villages at the Edge: Climate, Coast, and the Communities Nobody Is Funding to Move

The village of Newtok, on the Ninglick River in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, has been eroding into the river for decades. The permafrost beneath the village is thawing. The riverbank is collapsing. In some years, Newtok loses twenty or more feet of land to erosion. The school, the water system, the homes, and the infrastructure of a community of several hundred people are sinking into a river that is claiming the ground beneath them.

Newtok voted to relocate in two thousand three. The community identified a new site, nine miles to the south, and named it Mertarvik. Moving an Arctic village, with its fuel tanks, its water system, its homes, and its community buildings, requires coordination among multiple federal agencies, the state of Alaska, and tribal governments, each with its own funding streams, timelines, and bureaucratic requirements. As of the early two thousand twenties, some families had moved to Mertarvik. The full relocation was still in process.

Newtok is not alone. The villages of Shishmaref, on a barrier island in the Bering Sea, and Kivalina, on a barrier island in the Chukchi Sea, face the same problem. Each has voted to relocate. Each is navigating the same fragmented funding landscape.

The communities involved are Yupik and Inupiat, Indigenous peoples who did not build their villages in vulnerable locations carelessly. They built where their ancestors built, because the coast had been stable for the length of cultural memory. The permafrost that held the coast in place has been thawing since the mid-twentieth century.

The federal government has not created a systematic program to fund Arctic coastal relocation. Individual villages have been left to piece together funding from a dozen different agencies. The documentation of this situation is dispersed across agency records, tribal governance documents, and the reporting of Indian Country Today. The villages themselves are the primary source of what it costs to be displaced from a homeland by a process you did not cause.