Relocation of eroding Alaska Native village seen as a test case for other threatened communities

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.

“There is no blueprint on how to do this relocation,” said Carolyn George, one of those still living in Newtok. “We’re relocating the whole community to a whole different place, and we did not know how to do it. And it’s been taking too long — over 20 years, I think.” With a single local government, a single Tribal government and unified services like mail delivery, Newtok and Mertarvik technically make up a single community. But often it does not feel that way.Her five daughters and their father have moved to a new house in Mertarvik, but she remains in Newtok because of her job. That is a hardship, she said. “Being alone, I get anxiety, and I miss my girls, you know. Especially at night,” she said.The four classrooms are heated by a small generator.

There is still plenty of work to be done aside from construction, she said. And construction is seen as a process that will continue long after all residents are settled at Mertarvik, she added. 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.

She cited an example during the Arctic Encounter Symposium forum. “Every federal agency requires you to have some type of reporting and in most of the cases you have to apply for the federal funding online. If you don’t have stable internet, how do you do that?” she said.

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Relocation of eroding Alaska Native village seen as a test caseThe Newtok-to-Mertarvik transformation is the most advanced of several village relocation efforts prompted by climate change.
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Relocation of eroding Alaska Native village seen as a test case for other threatened communitiesThe Newtok-to-Mertarvik transformation, decades in the making, is the most advanced of what is expected to be several relocations prompted by climate change.
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