The “Newtok Mothers” assembled as a panel at the Arctic Encounter Symposium on April 11, 2024, discuss the progress and challenges as village residents move from the eroding and thawing old site to a new village site called Mertarvik. Photographs showing deteriorating conditions in Newtok are displayed on a screen as the women speak at the event, held at Anchorage’s Dena’ina Civic and Convention Center.
George, who works at the Newtok school, was one of the self-described “Newtok mothers” who made comments at a panel discussion at the recent Arctic Encounter Symposium in Anchorage. The river waters, once at least a mile away, have edged closer and closer, and the village, once sitting high on the landscape, continues to sink as that permafrost thaws, she said., but that followed many years of debate and study that led to the decision to relocate.
Among the challenges is a timing mismatch. Waska and new Tribal administrator Calvin Tom started their jobs only recently, too late for them to place summer barge orders, and as a consequence, no building materials are expected to be barged in 2024 and no new houses will be built this summer in Mertarvik, Waska said.
Napakiak, a Yup’ik village perched on a section of eroding land along the Kuskokwim River that is being quickly eaten away in large chunks, has also made progress. The community is now engaged in a partial relocation, a strategy known as “from vulnerable sites to safer ground upland, and there is state money available for a new school to replace the erosion-threatened building.
High water laps at the Kivalina shoreline in 2012. The Inupiat community on the Chukchi Sea coast is battered by erosion, storm surges and other effects of climate change. A relocation plan is in the works.
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