Mourning Land that Leaves - The Margin

Reporting for this story was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism. 

On October 12, the remnants of Typhoon Halong—a tropical storm that originated in the Philippine Sea—hit western Alaska communities. The storm slammed the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta region the hardest, bringing 100 mile per hour winds and record flooding to the villages across the coast. Governor Mike Dunleavy has issued a disaster declaration. According to the National Weather Service, this storm may be the strongest one to impact western Alaska since Typhoon Merbok in 2022. Like Merbok, Halong is a storm fueled by climate change. Warmer waters in the Pacific Ocean increase the likelihood that tropical storms will migrate eastward, maintaining hurricane-force winds and heavy rainfall as they barrel towards the Bering and Chukchi regions. 

Forty-nine communities have reported damage from Halong, but two villages were hit especially hard: Kwigillingok and Kipnuk. The Margin mentions these communities in our story. In both villages, Halong has torn houses from their foundations, trapping families inside as homes float atop floodwaters. The Alaska State Emergency Operations Center estimates that dozens of homes, as well as critical infrastructure like the utility poles and runway in Kipnuk, have been destroyed. As of publishing, the Coast Guard and National Guard have rescued at least 51 residents of these villages, including 24 people from two Kwigillingok households. One woman from Kwigillingok has been found dead, and two other villagers remain unaccounted for. U.S. Coast Guard Commander Captain Christopher Culpepper compared Halong’s impact to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. “Several of these villages have been completely devastated, absolutely flooded, several feet deep,” he said. More than 1,000 residents across the Y-K Delta have been displaced from their homes. 

Community groups across western Alaska are collecting disaster relief funds through the Alaska Community Foundation.

On the anniversary of her mother’s death, 50-year-old Christina Waska wakes up in the Yup’ik village of Mertarvik. As the late October sunrise gently illuminates the tundra landscape, she retrieves food thawed from her family’s freezer—typically, herring, seal, or halibut gathered earlier in the season—and begins preparing a feast. Sometimes it takes until the evening for her to finish. “When it's all done, I invite the whole community of 300 to come and eat. Join us during the celebration of life,” Waska said.

Waska is hosting an annual village feast for ancestors. Common in predominantly Yup’ik communities along southwestern Alaska, the ceremony acknowledges the healing power of communal remembrance. Attendees who knew the deceased fondly reflect on their memories of them. The atmosphere is simultaneously celebratory and melancholic. 

Mertarvik is where Waska feels closest to her late mother, who was laid to rest there in 2021. Waska has returned nearly every fall since, but the homecomings are bittersweet. 

Waska grew up nine miles away in the village of Newtok. In 2007, as Newtok was rapidly losing land to permafrost thaw and erosion, the Waskas and other residents began a painstaking process to relocate. They planned to rebuild the entire village, from the school to the houses to the water and sewage system, at a new site called Mertarvik. National headlines in 2013 dubbed Newtok’s residents “America’s first climate refugees.”

The process, which formally began over 30 years ago in 1994 and cost $160 million, was a historic effort. The Newtok Tribal Council requested funding from a patchwork of state and federal governmental agencies to rebuild critical infrastructure in a harsh climate where construction can be prohibitively expensive. A 2020 report by the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium described the project as being complicated by a “vicious cycle of underinvestment,” which can significantly increase the cost and length of time it takes to complete the relocation.

Federal law does not consider “erosion” or “permafrost thaw” as disasters. Instead, the law describes these as gradual environmental changes, making many of these villages ineligible for Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) disaster funding. Currently, funding is ad hoc, with environmentally threatened villages competing against one another for limited state and federal funds. Grants are often ill-suited to address specific climate needs, and are administered by government groups that have little expertise in the environmental challenges of rural Alaska, according to the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium. 

For years, the U.S. Government Accountability Office has urged the federal government to fund climate migration efforts more heavily, pointing out in 2019 that “most of the federal government’s efforts to reduce disaster risk are reactive and revolve around disaster recovery.” In 2020, the GAO examined the cases of Newtok and Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana, the first two communities in the country to relocate in the face of the climate crisis, and concluded that “unclear federal leadership” is a clear challenge for current climate migration models. The agency recommended that the federal government establish a clear strategy around relocation and a central agency to coordinate these efforts.

The lack of a federal plan for climate adaptation and inconsistent federal funding have led to challenges at the new village site of Mertarvik. Some of the houses, poorly-built and rapidly deteriorating in the subarctic climate, are plagued by rapid mold growth and icy-cold drafts. Meanwhile, the construction of new homes has slowed, leading to overcrowding.

Waska hoped that the additional infrastructure planned through the relocation to Mertarvik would allow her to raise her family in a village environment. She had moved to a big city before, opting for Anchorage in 2008 due to a lack of housing. In 2024, Waska moved in with relatives in Mertarvik so that her 16-year-old son could play village basketball. But, after again trying and failing to find suitable housing, Waska and her son made the difficult decision to return to Anchorage months later in 2025. Home to roughly 40 percent of Alaska’s entire population, Anchorage, the state’s largest city, is more than 1,000 times the size of Mertarvik.

The shortcomings of current climate-caused relocation models, which saddle small Tribal governments with the immense logistical challenges of community-wide moves, make it difficult for households like Waska’s to remain in villages. 

A Yup’ik adage goes:

The rapid temperature rise in subarctic regions has upended this tenet of traditional knowledge. Across rural western Alaska, the terrain is shifting. It’s sinking and collapsing due to permafrost thaw, retreating with rapid erosion, and being embattled by increasingly harsh storms. These climatic changes are destroying housing and infrastructure in villages across Alaska’s western coast. As public funding declines and federal programs fail to keep up with the rapid pace of climate change, people are pushed toward more extreme modes of adaptation. 

One way of adapting is to migrate. Out-migration often involves a multi-leg journey across hundreds of miles to urban settings that possess vastly different cultures and environments from those of small, remote communities. The Margin spoke with over a dozen people who had relocated from Native villages to Alaska’s major cities. Their stories covered a wide range of geographies and experiences. Some had moved recently, and others had been living in cities for decades. Nearly all identified how climate impacts are making it more difficult to remain on their traditional homelands.

These moves, large and small, bring mental health consequences. Former village residents reported a sense of loss around access to land-based practices, kinship networks, Native languages, and traditional knowledge systems. Reminiscence of home was tinged with feelings of what psychologists call ecological grief, which encompasses both the mourning of a land long lost and anxieties about anticipated changes to the environment. Time and time again, The Margin heard about how village life can be crucial for accessing subsistence lifeways, community ties, and cultural and linguistic practices—all key determinants of emotional well-being for Indigenous communities. 

A growing body of research is seeking to understand the many ways that human-caused environmental change disrupts people’s mental health. And much of this research focuses on Arctic and subarctic regions, such as western Alaska. In these locations, not only are temperatures rising at faster rates than those of more temperate climates, but people also rely more heavily upon land-based activities for culture and identity.

Vincent Paquin, a Montreal-based psychiatrist and researcher who has studied climate change’s impacts on the mental health of Indigenous communities in the Circumpolar North, says the loss of access to ancestral lands can bring a unique sense of loss for Alaska Native communities. “Ecological grief is different from the traditional notion of grief,” Paquin said. Changes to the environment and the resulting loss of species, meaningful landscapes, or traditional knowledge systems characterize this type of mourning. “It’s an ambiguous loss in the sense that it doesn't happen overnight, but gradually and almost insidiously.” 

Research on the Australian Wheatbelt and Canadian Inuit communities by Ashlee Cunsolo, the director of the Labrador Institute at Memorial University of Newfoundland, and Neville R. Ellis, a research fellow at the University of Western Australia, has demonstrated how witnessing changes to the land or weather can bring feelings of anger, frustration, and despair. When there is no specific disaster to blame, people may experience a lack of closure, and ecological grief can manifest as “living with both the presence and the absence of what was lost,” according to Cunsolo and Ellis.

Newtok’s land eroded so rapidly over the last three decades that Waska’s family had to demolish her childhood home. Today, all that remains at the old village site are boarded-up gray buildings. While Mertarvik is less than 10 miles away from Waska’s hometown, the loss of Newtok remains. 

In 2009, two years into the relocation process, Waska gave birth to her youngest son. She named him Newtok after the village she still considers home. “I gave him a strong name. Something that I'll carry close to my heart for the rest of my life,” she said. “So even if it's gone, I'll always have Newtok.”

"It's the loneliest feeling in the world, out-migrating"

Although many of Alaska’s 229 federally recognized Native villages are rapidly losing land to permafrost thaw, erosion, and flooding, the majority do not have plans to relocate. Waska’s homeland, Newtok, remains a marked exception, especially as federal grant freezes and funding cuts under the Trump administration have stalled several climate mitigation projects. 

The 2020 Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium report described village out-migration as the “worst-case climate scenario,” one that becomes more likely as government funding wanes. Although resettlement is often proposed as a solution to climate threats in rural Alaska, the report emphasized how out-migration from Indigenous communities has been linked to a wide range of adverse outcomes, including greater encounters with racism and stigma, homelessness, and other social harms.

Without the funding in place to shore up village housing options, some researchers predicted widespread rural-to-urban resettlement as environmental threats to villages escalate—a prediction that hasn’t borne out in the data. There is evidence, however, that climate displacement is happening in some Alaska Native villages, often in response to acute disasters. In 2021, Kwigillingok, a Yup’ik community of around 370 people located on the northern shore of the Kuskokwim Bay, experienced severe tidal flooding. Kwigillingok had been sinking for years due to permafrost thaw, and its lower elevation occasionally allows the ocean to submerge nearly the entire village at high tide. The year after the flooding, 32 people left the village, with half of them leaving for Anchorage. 

Kwigillingok, like Newtok, is part of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in southwestern Alaska, and is represented by the Calista Corporation, one of the twelve Alaska Native corporations that the federal government distributed land to as part of the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. Today, the Calista Corporation represents the 56 permanent and seasonally occupied villages located in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. According to Curt Chamberlain, deputy general counsel for the Calista Corporation, the Middle Kuskokwim area of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta experienced a 30 percent out-migration from 2013 to 2023. In many cases, people follow a stepping-stone pattern of migration—moving first to a rural hub, such as Bethel, before settling in Anchorage, Fairbanks, or Juneau. 

In 2020, the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium urged the federal government to close the over $80 million gap in annual funding that they anticipate villages will need to face these climate threats over the next decade. This year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has canceled at least $280 million in funding for the state of Alaska. Many of these grants were slated for rural villages, including for environmental infrastructure projects such as the creation of erosion barriers to mitigate flooding from permafrost thaw. Earlier this year, the Alaska Native village of Kipnuk joined a coalition of Tribes, nonprofits, and local governments led by legal nonprofit Earthjustice to sue the Trump administration for the termination of $3 billion worth of Environmental and Climate Justice Grant programs.

Climate Risks Affecting Federally Recognized Native Villages

Permafrost, erosion, and flooding are climate risks that negatively impact federally recognized Native villages in Alaska. Toggle on each climate risk layer below to see its impact across Alaska, and hover over each federally recognized Native village to view its climate risk score by threat, provided by the Alaska's Statewide Threat Assessment Rankings.

And still, demographic data shows that Alaska's rural villages are displaying stable or even growing populations. Birth rates in recent years offset out-migration in many environmentally threatened villages, said Chamberlain. In 2024, demographer Guangqing Chi, associate professor of rural sociology and demography at Pennsylvania State University at the time, found that demographic trends fail to paint a unified picture of mass climate displacement in Alaska.

Understanding how environmental change influences migration can be a complex process. Chi and his colleagues found that since climate change can seem abstract compared to day-to-day stressors, people often don’t attribute drastic life changes to its impacts. Instead, they might identify pressing socioeconomic conditions, such as a lack of housing or high living costs, as reasons for moving. Environmental changes, however, can exacerbate many of these conditions. 

Those seeking to preserve Alaska Native village life worry that, without sufficient housing to withstand the environmental changes already underway, it will become increasingly difficult for people to remain in villages. “The Y-K [Delta] region is actually the one region in the whole state that's actually still growing, despite the housing shortage,” said Peter Evon, the executive director of the Association of Village Council Presidents Regional Housing Authority (AVCP-RHA), the regional housing authority in the area. “We know people want to stay here. But unfortunately, because of these climate impacts, the shortage is getting worse.”

Chamberlain understands firsthand the importance of preserving people’s right to stay in their villages. When he returns to the village where he was born, the sight of the Aniak River through the plane window brings a swell of emotions. “I get choked up on that river because that's where my tie to the land is,” Chamberlain said. “It’s a very central part of who I am as a person,” Chamberlain recalled memories of boating and fishing on the Aniak River in the summers. With subzero temperatures, his family traveled atop its thick river ice, part of a network of ice roads that averaged 200 miles, providing safe passage to waterside villages up and down the Kuskokwim River. “That river's a part of me,” Chamberlain said, tears in his eyes. “It fed and provided for every aspect of my life and my culture.”  

Psychologists at the University of Victoria in Canada define attachment to place as the cognitive-emotional bond that forms between people and their essential settings. This bond provides a range of psychological benefits, including feelings of comfort, safety, freedom, and joy. Place attachment is also commemorative—places become tangible symbols of past events, indispensable for remembering and reimagining them. Present-day villages are not only hubs for the preservation of traditional practices, but also for the emergence of new permutations of Native Alaskan culture.

Now, without infrastructure investment, Chamberlain expects out-migration to increase as community instability rises due to climate change. Having grown up in a predominantly Yup’ik community of around 430 people, he remembers arriving in Anchorage as an earth-shattering transition. “When you grow up within Yup’ik culture, it's very different from Western culture,” he said. “And as you move out, you tend to find yourself displaced and isolated.” Chamberlain compares the move to leaving for another country, describing how foreign it felt to live in urban areas, where cultural ties faded and traditional belief systems retracted. 

“Every time I'm outside of my region, there's an immense feeling of separation and loneliness,” Chamberlain said. “Like a big part of who you are as a central being is being starved.” He continued, “It's the loneliest feeling in the world, out-migrating.”

‘I can't even imagine not going home’ 

Fall is Debbie Demientieff’s favorite season in Holy Cross, a village of 140 people located on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. In early September, the shrubby willows on the village’s rolling hills transform into glowing golden brush. Moose roam the tundra, feeding on the spread of these stocky plants. The powerful rush of the Yukon River blankets the landscape in a sheet of calm. Before climate disruptions, the river brought abundant chinook salmon runs that fed the entire community.

Demientieff, a 63-year-old Deg Xinag Athabascan woman, was raised in Holy Cross but left the village for Anchorage in 2010. “I really didn't wanna leave because I love living by the seasons,” she said, referring to a rural lifestyle that revolves around seasonal food gathering. 

Although her job keeps her in Anchorage, Demientieff and her husband return home every year for their family’s moose hunt. “When August 1st hits, this big clock starts ticking, and it's time to get ready to go home,” she said. For a few weeks every fall, Demientieff moves back and forth between Holy Cross and a subsistence camp located roughly an hour from the village by boat, depending on ideal weather conditions for food gathering. 

Subsistence camps are seasonal settlements that Alaska Native communities use to harvest wild foods. Perhaps the most well-known are the fish camps that dot the riverbanks of southwest Alaska. For generations, people flocked to these sites during summertime, catching, processing, and preserving salmon under the midnight sun. Camps are the legacy of nomadic lifestyles. Hundreds of years ago, they formed part of a vast network of hunting and fishing routes that crisscrossed the region. People often set up camps a few miles from kin and from larger settlements that would become modern-day villages. Today’s camps are the result of the steady preservation of land-based knowledge throughout several generations. 

When she’s not hunting big game, Demientieff fishes and goes berry-picking. All year, Demientieff looks forward to the delicate, salty-sweet caviar she harvests from broad or humpback whitefish. These small freshwater species have long served as an essential subsistence food base for communities like Demientieff’s along the Yukon River. On a mountain near camp, crowberries are abundant. They are subtly-sweet, tundra blackberries with black pearly exteriors that burst in the mouth with a juicy pop and are perfect for pie. 

Demientieff also uses the fruit for another one of her favorite treats. She whips the crowberries with moose tallow, sugar, and poached whitefish—flaky and cod-like—until the mixture reaches the consistency of cake frosting. This traditional dessert is shared amongst several Native Alaskan communities across the state. It is called akutaq by Yup’ik communities, nonaałdlode by Athabascan communities, akutuq by Iñupiaq communities. Demientieff simply calls it “fish ice cream.”

Traditional foods bring back memories. The taste of moose can recall the hours spent preparing its meat. The ceremonial harvesting process, which typically requires at least two people, is carried out with painstaking care to honor the animal and ensure no part goes to waste. Full-grown bull moose in prime condition can provide roughly 500 pounds of meat, feeding a family for an entire year. In remote regions of Alaska, where access to groceries is limited, putting away subsistence foods during the fall is critical for surviving harsh winters.

Food does not just mean physical satiety, however. Food supports the unique, extended family and kinship relations that underpin village life. According to a 2020 survey of Alaska Native adults conducted by researchers at Yale School of Medicine and the University of Alaska, Anchorage, land-based activities form the foundation for ways of relating to loved ones. Extended kinship relationships are established and reinforced through the harvesting of fish and wildlife. Alaska Native Elders describe “food sharing as not only a way to demonstrate relatedness, but a way to create relatives.” In the 2020 survey, people also described a spirit of interdependence in villages that is lacking in cities. Villages can be places where people access social networks that protect them from emotional harm. 

For Alaska Native communities, being at camp is a crucial cultural tradition. It’s a time of year when relatives congregate to pass on knowledge about their land and history to future generations. Moose meat is central to Athabascan culture. Families like Demientieff’s have passed down knowledge of moose processing for hundreds of years. Demientieff’s subsistence camp is owned by her husband’s family. Her mother-in-law, who is in her nineties, was the key figure at camp for many years. When one of Demientieff’s granddaughters was a toddler, Demientieff brought her to camp to expose her to traditional ways of living.

“It's all connected to family,” she said. “We're not there just to get food to put away in the freezer.” Demientieff brings moose meat back to Anchorage to share with her father, a 96-year-old Athabascan Elder who lives near her in the city. “I learned a lot [about] putting away food from him,” she said. “Throughout [my] childhood years and teenage years, that’s how they provided for us.”  

It’s getting harder to preserve life at camp. As the fall of 2022 arrived, so did Typhoon Merbok. Fueled by warmer waters in the Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea, the storm slammed the western coast of Alaska, ushering in hurricane-force winds that covered the Yukon River in roiling waves. Merbok damaged countless hunting and fishing camps across the west Alaska coast, at times sweeping away the valuable drying racks and smokehouses needed to preserve food for the winter. More extreme storms like Merbok, once abnormal for the region, are expected to increase as ocean temperatures continue to rise.

Demientieff was at her family’s subsistence camp in Holy Cross during the typhoon. “I've never seen the Yukon River look like an ocean before,” she said. “The waves were just rolling in constantly.” Flooding from the storm swallowed several feet of shoreline: “We lost a lot of land from where [our camp] used to be.

As a result of the flood damage, Demientieff’s family tore down one of their cabins, which had been at the campsite for over 50 years. That hasn’t stopped her or her family from returning. 

The remoteness of Holy Cross means that Demientieff typically takes small regional aircraft from Anchorage that can cost over $1,000 in round-trip airfare. When flights were grounded, during the coronavirus pandemic, Demientieff and her husband launched a boat from a bridge 135 miles north of Fairbanks. They sailed for several days on the rough waters of the Yukon River to get to camp. 

Access to her village is core to Demientieff’s identity. “I can't even imagine not going home in September,” she said. “That whole relationship with the animals and the environment and where we live [...] that really uplifts us as people.”

"My ancestors were here before me" 

Chefornak is a Yup’ik community of around 500 people in southwestern Alaska. Chefornak is nestled between the Bering Sea and the Kinia River, both of which are eroding rapidly with storm surges and sea level rise. Volcanic eruptions from a now-dormant volcano a few miles south shaped the village’s terrain, creating boulders of hardened lava separated by icy silt and mud. With rising temperatures, these frozen layers have melted, softening the ground and creating uneven dips and valleys. Its unique geography makes it vulnerable to a variety of climate risks. According to a 2019 report by the Denali Commission, the independent federal agency responsible for providing infrastructure support for rural Alaska communities, Chefornak ranks in the top 25 of the state’s environmentally threatened communities

These environmental changes are destroying Jessica Kaagyugaq Lewis-Nicori’s childhood home. “My mom's house is falling into the land because permafrost is thawing and a new creek is forming right by her house,” she said. “The wood is going to deteriorate soon, and then it’s gonna actually fall.” The house’s foundation is in constant contact with water, leading to serious mold issues. This creates an unsafe, allergy-inducing environment for Lewis-Nicori’s four children, who range in age from several months old to 12 years old. Lewis-Nicori’s experience highlights how ecological grief can be anticipatory: an underlying sense of anxiety about an impending loss to your home and land. 

“The world is changing, and the Chefornak I grew up with, it’s never gonna be the same,” she said. “There used to be a creek where there’s no creek anymore, and the land that was [...] solid is now mushy.” 

Chefornak is facing a climate-induced housing crisis. In 2021, rapid permafrost collapse caused a four to six-foot sinkhole to open up under a home, forcing the family that lived there to evacuate. The slow-moving nature of erosion and the difficulty in documenting its impacts make it challenging to secure funding under the Stafford Act, the law governing FEMA’s emergency response program. Although Chefornak has received a total of $7.6 million from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) Branch of Tribal Community Resilience from 2021 until the present, the AVCP-RHA, the regional housing authority for the Y-K Delta region, estimates that the village needs $37.1 million to address its housing needs in full. The remoteness and extreme climate of rural western Alaska make building new homes extremely expensive. Building materials must be barged in during a narrow window between May and October, and construction season is confined to a few short months in the summer. The estimated cost of building a single home in Chefornak is over $750,000.

The transition to city life has been hard on her mental health. “I tend to get depressed. And I won't tell anyone,” Lewis-Nicori said. She associates Chefornak with feelings of comfort, safety, and acceptance. There, she found it easy to lean on others for emotional support. “It’s so small and you know who your family is,” she said. “If I have a problem, I can go to an auntie [...] a cousin or an uncle or whoever.” Her sense of community in Anchorage pales in comparison.

Part of the difference lies in how people communicate. Lewis-Nicori grew up speaking Yugtun, the Central Alaskan Yupʼik language. In Chefornak, she was surrounded by it—its guttural tones, abundant suffixes, and tendency to emerge through rounded and pursed lips. She speaks Yugtun with all her children. In the city, however, preserving the language feels more difficult. One day, her two-year-old son returned from daycare in Fairbanks, refusing to speak Yugtun. “Mom, nobody talks like that,” he complained. “We’re not in ‘Chefornak world’ anymore!” 

“My language is slowly dying. We can see it,” she said. She recounted a visual metaphor from her uncle, who passed away earlier this year: “We see that it's falling, so we're catching it right before it falls and breaks.” A review paper published earlier this year by researchers at the University of British Columbia found that speaking Indigenous languages is associated with a wide range of positive health outcomes, including feelings of resilience and healing, as well as overall psychological well-being. 

For many Alaska Natives, villages are places of strength, places of power rooted in traditional ways of being. Lewis-Nicori’s family also holds recent memories of violent campaigns of assimilation.

Alaska Native communities are distinct from Indigenous groups in the contiguous U.S., in part due to later periods of American colonization. Even in Alaska, the remote location and absence of resources that settlers deemed profitable, like bowhead whales, sea otters, and gold, meant that the predominantly Yup’ik communities in the southwestern part of the state remained relatively protected from the boom-and-bust colonization cycles that plagued other Native Alaska communities. 

“Western contact for my region was two generations ago,” Lewis-Nicori explained. Her grandparents were nomadic until a 1929 federal schooling mandate led to forced sedentarization. “They had to settle because their kids had to go to school or else they'd go to jail,” she said. “My mom got taken, and she went to boarding school.” 

These Alaska schools formed part of a nationwide campaign of violent assimilation that lasted over a hundred years, with origins in the Indian Civilization Act Fund of 1819, through which the federal government partnered with missionaries and church officials to establish schools to aid in the “civilization process” of Indigenous communities. Boarding schools sought to erase Indigenous culture through force. They took children as young as five from villages, referring to them by government numbers, and disciplined them for their language and cultural practices.

Yet, the boarding school system’s lasting harm wasn’t acknowledged by the federal government until recently. In 2021, the U.S. Department of the Interior began the first federal investigation into the “loss of human life and lasting consequences of the Federal Indian boarding school system.” The report they released in July 2024 found that nearly 1,000 children, likely an undercount, died as a result of the rampant abuse at boarding schools. The findings prompted President Joe Biden to issue a formal national apology to the descendants of boarding school survivors in late 2024. In Alaska, some of the state’s 26 boarding schools remained open until the 1970s

Decades after the boarding school system, many people are seeking to remain in villages. There, they look after cultural practices, nurturing kinship networks and harvesting wild foods at subsistence camps. Language revitalization efforts are underway, especially in southwest Alaska’s coastal and lower Kuskokwim regions, where the Yup’ik language is spoken by roughly 10,000 people, representing the most commonly spoken Indigenous language in the state. Elders pass on land-based oral histories and establish themselves as advocates and culture bearers.

For centuries, the land in southwest Alaska was knowable to the predominantly Yup’ik communities that lived there. They passed down land-based knowledge through generations, with Yup’ik oral histories documenting how the topography formed and changed over time. This traditional wisdom made changes to the terrain more predictable. According to Yup’ik Elders, adapting to harsh weather is ingrained in their bones. In centuries past, anticipating the behavior of weather, broadly defined by the Yup’ik word ella to include changing seasons, temporary atmospheric conditions, and the natural ecosystem, structured the activities of day-to-day life. 

Chefornak will always be Lewis-Nicori’s home. It’s a place that grounds her in her lineage. It’s where she remembers her great-grandmother, who, until the day she stopped walking, left early in the morning and returned late in the evening with salmonberries to sustain them through winter. It’s where her grandparents traversed the length of the Urrsukvaaq, the Kinia River, seasonally to access hunting and fishing grounds. “In Chefornak, I always remember, my ancestors were here before me,” she said. “If we actually had a house, we would still be there.”

For now, Lewis-Nicori lives in the city, where she demonstrates a quiet defiance in remembering these histories. Like the rural-to-urban migrants that came before her, Lewis-Nicori extends aspects of village life into urban centers. Lewis-Nicori attends yuraq, or a weekly dance practice for Yup’ik and Cup’ik peoples at Anchorage’s Alaska Native Medical Center. She translates her wisdom about medicinal flora and fauna to the wetlands surrounding Anchorage. 

“I'm not from this region, but I see the same medicines that we have on the coast here,” she said. This knowledge is precious. “We don't have generational wealth,” Lewis-Nicori said. “Our generational wealth is our knowledge and our culture and our traditions.”

“I like still being Yup’ik in the city,” she said. “It feels like I'm taking a stand.”

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