When Global Warming Kills Your God

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/06/when-global-warming-kills-your-god/372015/

“So there is a black fish swimming up the river, looking for a fish trap to swim into. Cycle of life, right?”

Grant Kashatok was telling me stories the traditional Yup’ik way—his fingers entwined with string, like a child playing cat’s cradle. As he spoke, he looped the string into different shapes: it became a hunter, a mountain, a boat, an oar. “And he came to a fish trap that was broken,” he said, “and some of the fish in it were dead. The black fish poked his head out of the river to see who it was that owned the trap, and he saw that the village was dirty, and that the dogs were not tied up, and the woman came out to throw out the scraps of a fish dinner and he watched the dogs fight over the bones. The fish did not want his bones fought over. So he carried on swimming up river.”

Kashatok is the principal of the only school in Newtok, Alaska—a town of 354 perched at the mouth of the Ninglick River, just a few miles from the Pacific Ocean. In 2009, it was one of 26 indigenous villages listed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as “priority action communities”: The ground beneath it is slipping into the sea at such a rate that the village may only have two more years before the first houses fall away.

Throughout the state, climate change is intensifying storm surges and thawing the permafrost—land that previously remained frozen throughout the year. Parts of highways are sinking. Trees around Fairbanks have slipped to such rakish angles that they have become known as drunken forests.

But it’s not hard to see why the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, a watershed the size of Britain, is especially vulnerable. Approaching from the air, it’s difficult to determine whether this region is a landmass with many lakes or a body of water with many islands. The Yup’ik never intended to live here year-round: They were a nomadic people forced into settlements by missionaries and the government. The villages where the Yup’ik now live year-round were once their summer fishing and hunting grounds.


Salmon dry in the sun in the indigenous Alaskan village of Chefornak.