Shishmaref -a Victim of Global Warming
Shishmaref, a barrier island village of about 600 on the northern Seward Peninsula, is losing land to the Bering Sea because warmer temperatures have reduced the length of time the village is protected by shorefast ice.
With thinner sea ice arriving later and leaving earlier in the year, coastal communities are experiencing more intensified storms with larger waves than they have ever experienced. This threat is being compounded by the loss of permafrost which has kept river banks from eroding too quickly. The waves are larger because there is no sea ice to diminish their intensity, slamming against the west and northern shores of Alaska, causing severe storm driven coastal erosion. It has become so serious that several coastal villages are now actively trying to figure out where to move entire communities.
Natives have traditionally located their communities near water bodies for access to wild foods; so here is an example of the age-old Alaska native wisdom that “everything is connected”
Permafrost is melting all over Alaska as a result of rising temperatures, causing land underneath many villages to subside and softening the soil on riverbanks like the mighty Yukon River. Mountain snow and ice melt rapidly, causing a short period when water levels in the rivers rise and move rapidly. The high, fast flowing water serves to wash away an unprecedented amount of riverbanks in villages.
The vast amount of soil taken into the river causes riverbeds to rise as eroded soil accumulates on the bottom. River depths decrease to the point where many areas are so shallow that more and more salmon that are caught in subsistence fishing have lesions, cuts, and scrapes as they struggle to get through very shallow parts of the river.The low levels that remain for the rest of the summer mean the water is warmer than in the past, causing further stress to the fish during the breeding season. It may come to the stage that salmon numbers will dramatically decrease within the foreseeable future. This in turn will affect the food available for bears, land otters, eagles and people.
Less salmon carcasses taken inland and left near the rivers will decrease the fertility of land, water, and vegetation. Most “mainlanders” do not understand that we are talking about millions and millions of salmon taken by wildlife every year in Alaska, so the loss of salmon will have significant ecological impacts to land, water, wildlife and vegetation.Climate chain reaction
We are Shishmaref, we are Inupiaq Natives. Subsistence is our way of life, we are hunters and we are gatherers. Prior to this, Tribal members moved within our traditional lands for the subsistence harvest using Shishmaref as a winter camp for the past 4,000 years. Our ancestors followed the seasons, moving from the rivers and streams, to the coast, and then on to the coastal islands. This tradition is still followed today.
Our subsistence lifestyle takes us to our camps in numerous locations along the mainland and coastal islands. Today, we travel by snow machine over the ice and by boat when the ice is no longer safe. Our primary subsistence foods include: bearded seal, walrus, fish (salmon, white fish, trout, and herring) moose, musk-oxen, caribou, ducks, geese, ptarmigan, berries (salmon berries, blackberries, blueberries, and cranberries), and assorted greens just to name a few. Who and what we are is based on where we live and the way we live.
We have been here for countless generations. We value our way of life, we value the environment as it sustains us; it provides for our very existence. The no action option for Shishmaref is the annihilation of our community. We are a community tied together by family, common goals, values, and traditions. We are different from our neighbors.
The community of Shishmaref has a long and proud history. We are unique, and need to be valued as a national treasure by the people of the United States. We deserve the attention and help of the American people and the federal government. Since the decision of our community to relocate onto the mainland our community has been deprived of improvements to our basic infrastructure service needs and we must be allowed the improvements to these services as other communities have in other parts of Alaska. The State and federal government must not disregard our cries for assistance to improve our everyday needs.
Support to the Shishmaref Erosion and Relocation Coalition and Shishmaref IRA – August 2006
The documentary film “The Last Days of Shishmaref” offers perhaps as close and detailed a look at the lives of the Inupiaq Eskimo of northwest Alaska as has been recorded in 35mm color film.
It’s difficult to watch the 88-minute documentary (as a packed house did at the Anchorage International Film Festival on Sunday) without sympathy for the villagers of the Chukchi Sea coastal community and their desire to relocate the entire population of 600 people a few dozen miles inland, where a new village would be constructed.
They want to move because Shishmaref, a settlement in a cluster of wood-frame houses and other buildings standing on a sandy barrier island five miles from the mainland, is literally being washed out to sea a few feet every year.
Director Jan Louter of the Netherlands told the audience following Sunday’s screening that the villagers “have been called the first victims of global warming” and described them as too poor to protect themselves from the impending doom, a point his film makes exceedingly well.
