Video
Adapting in the Arctic
Transcript
[00:00:18;46] JOE SWAN: (Wind blowing across the water) When they first say, “It's Global Warming, the permafrost is melting,” I said, “I won't believe you unless I see it with my own eyes.” Now I know it's global warming. Our cold storage is melting. It can't hardly freeze anything now. Permafrost is melting.
[00:00:47;00] LEE BALLOT, SR.: You boat around right now you can see exposed permafrost. Something you didn't see long time ago. It was all covered with vegetation. Now the willows are falling into the river, the trees are falling into the river.
[00:01:02;21] AMIL CARTER, SR.: Just like you go to Google Earth or to Gina, you know on the computer, and then you look at what the ground look like from the past and today you will even see more lakes and more puddles and less ground. That’ll show you that things are changing.
[00:01:22;42] ROSS SCHAEFFER, SR.: You know this warming weather, the grasses are growing taller and taller, growing everywhere now. Places that we had no grass along the coast where there is nothing but gravel, all has grass now so you have to cut it and burn it because when you have grass around you have a lot of flies coming in to lay eggs where we put away our black meat.
[00:01:43;12] SETH KANTNER: When they first came here and built the cash and the old igloo and stuff this was all tundra. You could look out and see caribou coming. And lately all these new trees showed up. Young spruce on the tundra. Out back there is still open tundra but it's filling in too. There's more grasses growing on sandbars that didn’t used to have it, there's sand bars that have tons of little willows growing on ‘em now. And I don't know what that all adds up to but it's definitely a big change.
[00:02:14;29] CLARENCE JACKSON: There's so many beavers that start coming down every year. And they start making dams on these sloughs and closing up the fishing areas where the people used to fish a long time ago.
[00:02:30;48] ROSS SCHAEFFER, SR.: This coast down here by Cape Krusenstern/Sisualik, the land is disappearing at a very rapid rate. I think in about 10 years, many of the houses are not going to be there, or they are going to have to move them further back because prevailing winds now are taking away what the west winds used to deposit.
[00:02:49;10] REGGIE JOULE: The issue has been here for a while, and that is the erosion and the changes to some of our communities because we no longer have the formation of ice in the fall and it's coming later and that makes some of our communities vulnerable to fall storms, vulnerable to flooding and pretty heavy erosion.
[00:03:12;31] JOE SWAN: Late October we usually get the slushy ice that save our community from erosion because the slushy ice is so heavy it slow down the waves. For the past few years there's nothing. That's why we have erosion in our community.
[00:03:33;57] LUCY NORDLUM: We have a camp 30 miles from here. There was a point that stuck out a good 150 feet or so, but now it's pretty much gone. My parents had a house right on the beach there and five years ago the ice went up and destroyed it. I think that's a good sign of the rising sea levels. The water’s getting higher so it's eating more into the bottom layer and then everything kind of falls over.
[00:03:58;17 ROSS SCHAEFFER, SR.: There are places down this coast that are eroding so much so that we can't even drive on the beach anymore. Five years ago we would drive on the tundra only a mile and a half. Now we have to drive on the tundra 3 1/2 miles because the beach is so eroded you can't go on the beach. Pronounced change, you know?
[00:04:19;30] RAYMOND LEE, JR.: And you could tell, right there along the banks where it's getting eaten away? It used to be a lot closer toward the grassy area over there when I was a lot younger.
[00:04:32;04] SETH KANTNER: The fish have definitely changed in the sense that they seem to be coming earlier and then they go weeks and weeks later into the end of the season. At least one of the years they extended the state season into September, which is obvious change if you went back 30 or 40 years. Certain years more algae, uh, which you know, green slime that clogs up your net. Coincided with, "Oh this strange blob, 15-mile blob off of Barrow," that turned out to be algae and the news reminding us of, you know, global climate change.
[00:05:07;37] ROBERT SCHAEFFER: What concerns me the most, we live off the ocean over in Kotzebue. Most of our food comes from out there. The salmon, the crab, all the different cods that we get out there, the halibut, all feed off one source and that's the plankton and the krill that are out there. Everything feeds off them. Because of ocean acidification, it will prevent hardening of shellfish species out in the ocean. So, that’s the scary part of it all. We will loose the animals and mammals that feed off different parts of that ocean.
[00:05:40;01] REGGIE JOULE: I was appointed to the National Task Force on climate change preparedness and resilience. Out of 26, I was one of two indigenous people who were asked to sit there amongst some governors and mayors. We have an administration who’s not afraid to bring up the issue of climate change, whether it's droughts, floods, or fires.
[00:06:02;17] SIIKAURAQ WHITING: Our elders knew when to go hunting, they knew when not to, they knew the ice conditions. It has not only become more unpredictable, but it's become very different at certain times of year, so that local traditional knowledge, it's an uncertainly now.
[00:06:18;31] ISAAC KILIOUUK, SR.: I lose my Honda one time, my brand new Honda, on thin ice ‘cause our ice is getting thin. You can't just go out. You gotta know where the solid ice is.
[00:06:39;13] REGGIE JOULE: There wasn't much of a discussion on the Arctic in the 80's and early 90's. Suddenly, climate change became noticed and science was paying attention and being able to get into the media that our ice was melting faster than what they had anticipated. That they had built some models and it was going to melt this much by this time, and “Holy Toledo!” It melted twice that in a condensed period of time.
[00:07:15;28] FRED SMITH: The makeup of the ice has changed. You don't have the real, large, good ice. Which makes it harder to hunt successfully where that ice that you are going out to look for is thinner ice.
[00:07:30;52] LUCY NORDLUM: Yesterday we were all outside trying to put away caribou that my sister got. We were having to work in the rain because the weather has warmed up. I like to hang it for a few days so it tenderizes a little. We have it hanging out right now in a tarp, but we can't keep it out as long as we'd like to just because it's not cooling off.
[00:07:58;38] SETH KANTNER: One thing that can happen with meat is it gets sour and that happens when it's wet. And so, if it's at this temperature or near freezing and it's wet like this it's not gonna go sour. What I'm hoping for would be cool weather and if we got a day where there was a breeze or something I could get a crust on it. When I was a kid we would get our meat as late as possible and then hope that the temperature stayed chilly enough that our meat would keep. In the last 20 years, we've had more and more of these falls where it would get kind of chilly but then get warm again (Footsteps in snow).
[00:08:42;56] ROBERT KIRK: Hanging fish with the eggs still in the fish, I've had to throw out maybe 50 salmon because they've molded. As we get warmer temperatures longer into the fall, it's actually starting to spoil the fish as appose to aging it.
[00:08:58;21] AMIL CARTER, SR.: We usually go around the 15th of September for white fish, ‘cause by the end of September, it should be freezing. I have a cold storage where we dig under the ground. Because it's too warm out, I had to buy a brand new freezer and put my gunny sacks in there, my fish, and it cost me a little over $1200 for this freezer.
[00:09:22;41] SUNII JACKSON: We start to see notice of muskox coming into our area and the migration of the caribou trails has changed really fast. Last fall, it was very hard to get caribou and we didn't have much caribou meat this winter. (Bull moose swimming in water).
[00:09:47;01] CLARENCE JACKSON: There wasn't any moose around our area. Early 40's, they start coming. Now, there are so many around today. Our world is changing.
[00:10:02;20] LEE BALLOT, SR.: Maybe ten years back we were hitting 50, 60 below weather winter time. It might do that now a days for one day. That's it. It's climate change. What are we gonna do if this continues?
[00:10:22;37] REGGIE JOULE: Let the questions that are asked be researched. What is the forecast for climate change looking out 50 to 100 years down the line? And what are the potential models of how this could all happen?
[00:10:40;50] FRED SMITH: Alaska Natives have always adapted to what's going on in the environment that they live in, to be able to survive. A certain level of that is accepting being adaptable.
[00:10:51;26] REGGIE JOULE: Living here is not easy. We are plagued with the challenge of adaptation. I'm optimistic about our future because we would be here if we didn't have the ability to adapt and be resilient.
CREDITS — In order of appearance in film:
Joe Swan Kivalina, Alaska
Lee Ballot, Sr. Noorvik, Alaska
Amil Carter, Sr. Buckland, Alaska
Ross Schaeffer, Sr. Kotzebue, Alaska
Seth Kantner Kotzebue, Alaska
Clarence Jackson Noorvik, Alaska
Reggie Joule, NW Arctic Borough Mayor Kotzebue, Alaska
Lucy Nordlum Kotzebue, Alaska
Raymond Lee, Jr. Buckland, Alaska
Robert Schaeffer Kotzebue, Alaska
Siikauraq Whiting, Lead founder of the NW Arctic Borough Subsistence Mapping Project Kotzebue, Alaska
Isaac Kiliouuk, Sr. Point Hope, Alaska
Fred Smith, Assistant to the NW Arctic Borough Mayor Kotzebue, Alaska
Robert Kirk Noatak, Alaska
Sunii Jackson Selawik, Alaska
Description
Climate change brings new challenges to subsistence living
Duration
12 minutes, 17 seconds
Credit
Sarah Betcher
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