In the Empire of Ice (10 page)

Despite persistent bouts of TB that have affected her spine, Esther’s eyes brighten as she says, “Summers, I always have to go fishing. I go alone. My camp is right next to where your father’s and mother’s was. I still get so excited I sleep real light the night before because I want to go so bad. I get up at four in the morning. That’s how you have to do it to get fish,” she says, with mischievous eyes flashing. “I get silvers. Every time. Lots of them!”

Subsistence hunting will always be part of Inuit culture; wild food is essential to the diet and represents a part of the thread, however many times broken, that binds Inuit people to place.

UNDER A QUARTER MOON with a not-very-bright sun throwing pink on snowy peaks, our plane to Shishmaref flies across an Arctic plain, leaving behind a single, pointed mountain with crenulated clouds crawling up both sides to converge at the top. Ahead, there is a cover of new snow and a lid of ice on the Bering Strait, where last week it was all open water.

Where the coast ends, there’s a frozen lagoon, and the village of Shishmaref is spread laterally along an arm of land—a barrier island called Sarichef. Afloat between ocean and island, the hooked moon appears to be the only thing holding the village in place.

“Our island is getting smaller,” a young man says when we arrive. By snowmobile to the house of Joe’s sister-in-law, we roar through sifting frost-fall between two rows of houses built so close together I wonder if we haven’t landed in a Japanese town rather than an Inupiat village. The house is neat but crowded with skins, sewing materials, and small beds for grandchildren. There’s a note on the kitchen table welcoming us.

We’re here in “Shish” to see the ways coastal erosion and global warming can damage a place. Earlier we’d met two young civil engineers coming to Shishmaref to “grow permafrost” using a special fabric, sand, and rocks in what is possibly a futile effort to mitigate tidal erosion as a result of the retreating ice pack. Every coastal village, town, and city in the world is now threatened by inevitable sea level rise, but these Arctic villages, as well as the small island nations in the South Pacific, are the first to feel its devastating effect.

We walk to the end of the island, where houses have fallen into the sea. Those still standing are tilted sideways. Waves crash over a wall piled high with broken shore ice. Winds off the Chukchi Sea routinely gust to 60 miles an hour, bringing in 14-foot-high waves. Every time, this tiny island loses between 10 and 38 feet of sand and earth. Now night has fallen, though technically it’s day. Wind-blasted snow hangs on the remaining buildings. The temperature has plummeted to minus 50.

Coastal erosion isn’t new. Earthquakes brought tsunamis. Big storm waves, like the one in 1914 that wiped out much of Wales, have shaped the Seward Peninsula. The shore at Gambell, on St. Lawrence Island, has been augmented, whereas Wales, Shishmaref, and Kivalina are losing ground. In 1899 Edward Nelson reported coastal erosion during his 1,200-mile-long dogsled journey along the west coast of Arctic Alaska, recounted in his epic
The Eskimo About Bering Strait
.

Now melting permafrost and rising sea level is the relentless signature of anthropogenic global warming. Most of Arctic Alaska is underlain by permafrost. Some 70 to 90 percent of its tundra will vanish within a hundred years. As a result, there are drunken forests—trees that are sinking and leaning sideways—and building and road slumps. What Nelson called Eskimo villages—a row of simply constructed houses, drying racks, kayaks and umiat, and little else—now consist of up-to-date runways, airports, weather stations, schools, gymnasiums, and modular houses, and the cost of moving such villages is astronomical. And if the permafrost goes out quickly, there will be no roadway sturdy enough to move anything.

“Where my mother’s house used to stand is now only sea,” says John, a handsome and sophisticated man who teaches traditional arts at the local school. “I came back here to live in ‘Shish’ after college. Had to learn to hunt all over again, the hard way. I didn’t know the currents and weather signs, but we had good, thick ice then, all the way past the Fourth of July.” He’s married now, with five children and one adopted child, and he hunts for his food while his wife sews traditional clothing.

He says that the bad storms in 1974 sent waves through the end of town all the way to the lagoon. Fifty feet of the island was lost. It seemed unusual. Now they lose 15 to 20 feet each season. High water comes with south winds, but now, no matter which way the wind blows, huge swells come in and crash onto shore. “We’ll have to move soon. The seawall is sinking. The cement blocks we’ve stacked up have disappeared. We don’t have good drinking water anymore. There are a lot of sewage overflows. Our houses are terrible. How can it cost millions of dollars to move a village when we live at the poverty level? Our house is a module with no insulation, vents that don’t work, no running water, and lots of mold.”

After coffee we make our way through a howling wind to the basement of the town hall, where Tony Weyiouanna has been holding court with the media. He has made Shishmaref global warming’s “poster child” town. Sitting at a large desk and wearing a baseball cap pulled down low, Tony is manning the phones with a salesman’s energy and demeanor and the urgent appeal of a priest. He founded the Erosion and Relocation Coalition, which has put Shishmaref in the news.

“I decided to take our erosion problems national, so I went to TV. We live in Third World conditions but get no attention. We wanted people to see what global warming was doing to us up here.” Last week he was on
Oprah
. Now ABC and CBS news crews want to come. “Fifty or sixty years ago it would have been easy to relocate. Rebuild the sod houses and cart the umiat and kayaks farther up the hill behind the lagoon. But Shishmaref’s relocation is going to cost $160 [million] to $180 million. We have to move the school, the clinic, the store, the houses, and the airport with a landing strip big enough for a private jet,” he tells us.

“So I’m on the phone all over the world trying to raise the dough,” he says, swiveling in his big black chair to answer the ringing phone.

An elder walks into the office and sits at his desk. His face is deeply lined, his hair whitened by rime ice. He takes off his bearded sealskin hat with earflaps and shakes snow on the floor. He listens as Tony’s voice rises as he tries to get a donation over the phone, then tells me that the website for the Erosion and Relocation Coalition accepts contributions via PayPal.

Inevitably, this being a small village, we hear gossip about the relocation plan. “They’re hoping to make ice roads to move the buildings. But now there’s an argument about the new site. One was chosen about five miles from here because there’s a channel in the river where a barge could come in. But the permafrost is melting so fast that the place might cave in, so another site was chosen, up Tim Creek. But not everyone wants to move there. I don’t think we’re going to relocate for a while. I’m going to a conference with people from another village, who are moving on their own. Maybe we’ll see how they do it grassroots style.”

The population in Shish is 560, with a median age of 24 years. “If they don’t move soon, what are the people going to do? Where will they stand? There won’t be any island left,” Joe says. But Tony talks about “cultural dexterity” and the still living concept of
nunaqatgiitch
—people related to each other through possession of the land. He assures us that despite the lack of funds and local disputes about where, exactly, to relocate, it will happen soon.

“Have we been brainwashed into thinking we have unsolvable problems?” Joe asks the older man who came into the office while we were talking and is looking out the window. He turns to Joe: “What have we done to ourselves?” he asks. “See how easy the ice moves? That’s like we used to be. Now we’re stuck. No longer hunters of sea mammals on the moving ice.”

Outside the wind has died down, but the cold will not relinquish its grip. We pass the graveyard at the highest point on the island, perhaps 50 feet above sea level, and the thaw ponds where people have being getting their drinking water. On the other side of the lagoon is a forested hill where the village might stand one day soon. How does it feel to leave one’s “island in the stream,” I keep wondering and remember the words of a Shishmaref woman named Hattie: “The Earth possessed us,” she said.

THERE ISN’T A SPECK of coast north or south of here that Harvey Pootoogooluk doesn’t know intimately—the old names and the forgotten ones and the places still used for seasonal fishing and hunting. “When young people use traditional knowledge, they shorten it. It’s not like it used to be, so they know less and less. And the weather has changed, and the way of life.” He has a bulging belly and a wonderfully expressive face. On a brighter note he adds, “But the capacity of the radio weather forecasters has gotten better. Our way was to look at conditions and the coming of the west wind or east wind. When the tops of the hills were covered with clouds, we were forewarned of a north wind. Clouds would billow up from the hills when a south wind was on the way. A north wind meant we didn’t dare go out. But a northeast wind opened the ice, so we could go way out and get bearded seal.”

Harvey’s wife stirs a pot of soup and puts white bread, peanut butter, jam, tea, coffee, and cookies on the already crowded kitchen table. Their adopted grandson, who is 16, comes in and goes straight to his room. He’s tall, lanky, and silent. “A good boy,” Harvey says. “Wants to stay here and be a carver.”

Harvey’s wife lays out a series of pills on the plastic tablecloth and a glass of water. He swallows the pills obediently and returns to his stories as the young boy sweeps by and runs out of the house. “Our method of propelling a boat? Oars. Now the young kids use motors, but the cost of gas is prohibitive, so they just don’t go out hunting as much. Because of gas, because of machines, they got to have a job. Wintertime they use snowmobiles. They cost a lot. But they are using them for nonproductive purposes too. Just play around. Too much of that. I caution young people not to use them except for hunting.

“Old days we used sealskin pants all the time, and mukluks. Used gunnysack squares folded around the foot for socks. I never go to school. I go third grade. My dad came from Wales. He herded reindeer. My uncle got the reindeer from Siberia and brought them over on a barge. My parents, both of them, they died in that flu. Pretty hard to live. No one to take care of us. That’s why I lived with some old people. They took me because their son died.

“We used to hunt ugruk with dogsleds. I had seven dogs. Didn’t see the thin ice one day and the dogs turned, but too late. My lead dog spread his front legs and tried to save me. I grabbed the sled, but it was going straight down. I got hold of the back and got out of the water. A hunter saw me and came and gave me his warm clothes.”

He rubs his belly under his white T-shirt, smiling a strange crooked smile. The house is a sweltering 80 degrees, as if to make up for falling through the ice. Rummaging through a shoebox, Harvey pulls out a small driftwood carving. It’s a tiny mask carved with slit eyes, big cheeks, and a crooked smile just like his. “Did you make it?” I ask. He says yes.

When I ask if I can take a photograph, he holds the mask to his chest and looks into the camera: a face below a face, both the same. Man and mask. Which is which? He hands it to me with a smile.

Inuk made masks that represented the north wind, storms, walruses, seals, and all kinds of seabirds whose inua—soul—showed through. They could represent the spirit helpers of hunters or shamans. The masks had lives of their own.

In a culture where all borders are permeable, the masks went beyond representation: They became the powerful spirits they represented, and in turn, those wearing them took on the qualities of the mask. Masks held human and spirit worlds in one face. Some masks were so powerful they adhered to the dancer’s face with no strings. Such masks were alive and were treated as such. They weren’t decoration or entertainment. As power-filled beings, they were concealed from view before a dance and destroyed immediately after.

One woman, wearing a seal mask in a dance, was said by the viewers to become a seal. When she pushed the mask back on her head, the soul of the seal showed itself. She sank down through the floor as they were watching, as if into the sea, then rose up again, not a human at all but a seal. Looking at Harvey’s mask, carved from a piece of yellowish driftwood, I wonder if it represents some aspect of the man I’m unable to see.

Afternoon. The wind picks up as the temperature drops and darkness descends. Streetlamps line the village lanes. A gauzy light shines through blowing snow. Back at the house of the art teacher, John, we eat traditional seal and rice soup and talk about the ways in which these places are inhabited by animal spirits.

“Some bears are special,” he says. “If a polar bear doesn’t stop and look at you when you approach, you can tell that bear what to do. I did that once. I told the bear to come back from the shore toward me and he did. I shot at him but missed completely. He didn’t leave. I shot again and got him. He was my first polar bear. He just gave himself to me.”

He tells us about Little People, dwarfs that can be found in Arctic legends around the circumpolar North. “Last spring a pilot said he saw a whole group of Little People. And last summer one of the ladies at the hospital went out to gather stinkweed to heal an open wound. Where she picked it, she saw tiny human footprints. There are still things here that no one knows.”

We go back a last time to see Harvey. The night is clear and stars arch over our heads like ocean spray. Out at sea, where the pack ice should be, we see layered clouds, a front moving toward land. Bering Air called to say there’s a plane coming in half an hour, and it might be the last plane for a while because of the storm. We peel out of our winter clothing and ask Harvey about the weather in Shishmaref and the changing climate.

“Long time ago,” he begins, “there were periods of clear and calm weather. Now you have to wait for days like that. We always ate caribou and ptarmigan. Now, too much pizza and people playing with their money. Playing bingo and even worse, pulling those pull-tabs. Gambling no good. Five times a week here. Too much!