By Elizabeth Dangerfield
Imagine for one moment that you live in a little village in one of the remotest places on the planet. You cannot reach it by road or by train. You can fly into the village if conditions are right and maybe reach it by boat, sled or snowmobile. The village is on the edge of a large riverine delta, near a great bay. Your community relies substantially on subsistence hunting. Food such as moose, musk ox, beluga, seal, salmon, emperor goose and salmon berries are stored in caches built into the frozen soil.
One day you are in your small house with your family as a remnant of a typhoon pounds the coast. The winds are howling, sometimes at a record 160 km/h. Outside is all water, so it seems as if you are living on the ocean. Your house is lifted off its foundations by the storm surge, and you and your family begin to float out to sea. It is terrifying but somehow you and your family manage to survive. Others are not so lucky.
The storm passes but everything has been tossed around or carried out to sea – houses, sheds, boardwalks, fuel tanks, boats, quad bikes, pumps. You and other villagers do your best to get everyone that survived to the school, the only building that is not flooded. But conditions are not good, nothing works – the toilets, the water supply, electricity, the heating. Much of the food is spoiled. It is miserable waiting for help to arrive. The village is so isolated it takes several days to start the evacuation of villager using helicopters. The storm surge travelled 100km inland in some places, inundating ponds and lakes with saltwater destroying sourcesof blackfish, pike and lush fish, and killing beavers, minks, muskrats and mice in the area.
Such a calamity actually occurred late on the night of 11th October 2025 in southwest Alaska, around the delta areas of the Kuskokwim River and Yukon River which empty into the Bering Sea. They were hit by the tail end of Typhoon Halong which generated high winds and storm surges that caused widespread and substantial damage and several deaths. STM Weather article Tropical Typhoon remnants hit Southwest Alaska Causing a Major Storm contains detailed images of the Halong Typhoon and damage to Alaskan villages in the area.
The Lower Kuskokwim School District (LKSD), Central Alaska
Source of map LKSD website
The Kuskokwim River is a large, braided river with a network of interconnected channels which iscommon in Alaska. More than a dozen Yup’ik villages in the Lower Kuskokwim School District were significantly affected. The Kipnuk and Kwiglingok villages were totally flooded and became uninhabitable. The villages of Tuntutuliak and Napakiak (55 miles up the river), were flooded and severely damaged.
Thousands of native Yup’ik people were displaced. Evacuation was slow and difficult. People were airlifted to the only town, Bethel, and some to Anchorage, over 600 km away.
Winter is approaching and the building season after that is limited. Getting building supplies and workers to these remote villages is verydifficult. It will take a long time to restore the affected villages if it is possible at all. Manyevacuees have no homes to return to. It is not just the material aspects of Yup’ik life that have been affected. The calamity will also have a dramatic effect the way of life of the Yup’ik people in the area.
This is a tragedy, especially as it may have been avoided as it has been largely driven by over-consumption, especially of fossil fuels, by generations of people living far away from the remote Yup’ik villages. Alaska is warming faster than any other state in America and up to three times the global average.
According to NOAA’s Arctic Report Card 2024 the last nine years were the nine warmest on record in the Arctic with record heatwaves in Alaska, record rain in summer, a drop in the extent of sea ice, a 65% decline in Alaskan Arctic tundra caribou populations, and the shortest snow season in 26 years.
A string of violent storms has lashed the southwest coast of Alaska recently. There is no doubt that storms there have become more intense and frequent as they are exacerbated by global warming. Typhoon Halong originated in the North Philippine Sea and was fuelled by hotter than average surface waters in the north Pacific Ocean.
Vast areas of Alaska, including the LKSD, are covered with spongy tundra forming treeless plains. Rocks, soil, and water in the tundra are usually frozen solid and called permafrost if they persist for more than two years. In summer, plants like mosses, grasses, and small shrubscan grow because the shallow top layer of soil thaws and bogs and lakes are formed. This supports the Arctic tundra biome which helps to sustain the Yup’ik people.
According to a report of NOAA the frozen Arctic tundra has been a huge carbon sink for millennia. Now the permafrost is melting allowing defrosted organic material to decompose releasing carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. The release of these greenhouse gases will increase global warming further causing more permafrost to melt adding toproblems faced by the Yup’ik people.
The accelerated melting of the permafrost due to global warming is already damaging villages. It has a large range of consequences including ruined stored food; subsidence of buildings; damage to roads, runways; disrupted water and electricity supplies; and lack of suitable areas to build on. Its impact on the availability of animal and plant life will affectsubsistence hunting. It will make maintaining Yup’ik traditions more difficult.
Recently National Geographic reported that the melting of permafrost has resulted in various acids and minerals, including hazardous ones, leaching into Alaskan waterways, turning some rivers orange. This process can harm aquatic life, contaminate drinking water and disrupt ecosystems. Clearly, global warming is having a serious impact on remote areas of Alaska and action needs to be taken.
Native American environmental activist Dallas Goldtooth points out a larger injustice: that Indigenous communities, which have long warned of the climate crisis, continue to face its harshest impacts while being denied already-approved resources to prepare.
This isn’t just a story about this one weather event – it’s about neglect. It’s about how Indigenous communities – in particular, Alaska Natives – have been warning the world for decades that the climate crisis is real. The seas are rising and doing nothing threatens the future of everyone on this planet – but especially those on the front line, because it is they who are carrying the brunt of this crisis.
Conspicuous wealth is often behind over–consumption. As climate advocate Natalie Kyriacou comments: The flaunting of wealth and consumerism is so pervasive that it barely registers for many of us. And to be quite honest, it is very very difficult not to participate in this culture. She notes that the behaviour has catastrophic implications for the environment and millions of people around the world.
As reported by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, the world’s wealthiest 10% are responsible for two thirds of observed global warming since 1990. The top 1% of the wealthiest individuals globally contributed 26 times the global average to increases in 1-in-100-year heat extremes globally and 17 times more to Amazon droughts.The per capita carbon footprint in the United States in 2023 was 17.6 tons of equivalent per person, which is over twice the global average. After China, the United States of America produced the highest amount of CO2 emissions. According to Carl-Friedrich Schleussne et al, at IIASA if everyone had emitted like the bottom 50% of the global population, the world would have seen minimal additional warming since 1990.
It amazes me that people are so intent on making excessive amounts of money that they have to invent conspiracy theories and subscribe to extreme individualism to justify greed,exploitation, and indifference to the fact we are rapidly destroying the world.
Different cultures, beliefs, and experiences provide insights into ways of living and how we might do things better. The Yup’ik people of the LKSD are some of the most amazing people on Earth and we can learn a lot from them. For generation after generation Yup’ik people have walked softly in their very special environment.
The Yup’ik worldview is a holistic system of knowing that emphasizes the spiritual interconnectedness of all things. This perspective shapes their relationship with the environment and emphasises values such as humility, cooperation, and respect for elders and nature. Another key aspect is the practice of living in balance with the natural world.
Subsistence living is a challenging way of life and Yup’ik people work hard to obtain the necessities of life. Traditionally there is an emphasis on giving things away rather than keeping everything for yourself. Gift-giving plays an important part in times of celebration, feasting and thanksgiving. While it might bestow status it also strengthens community interconnectedness. In a hunting and gathering societies everyone has a role to play and must support each other. This is also true in other societies it is just that sometimes we refuse to recognise how interdependent we really are.
The long continuity of settlement in the harsh Arctic environment is a tribute to the resourcefulness, knowledge and skill of Yup’ik people. According to Yuungnaqpiallerput website, the extended Yukon Kuskokwim region has a population of more than 23,000 Yup’ik people living in 56 villages and in the town of Bethel which has a population of nearly 7,000 people. They are the most numerous single Alaska Native group.
The Central Yup’ik language, Yugtun, reflects significant aspects of the Yup’ik culture. Thelanguage is nuanced, and English may not be able to express the same meaning. For example, the word “I” is not emphasised in Yugtun because, for Yup’ik people, the community is of primary importance not the individual. Also, unlike English, people don’t speak of bad things when they speak in Yugtun. Furthermore, it is important for the Yup’ik living in such a challenging and remote places, to be able to communicate in non-verbal ways.
The Yugtun language is rich in grammatical terms, has a complicated, highly inflected structure which emphasises order and method. It is a polysynthetic language where words are compounded to form a single word to express a variety of complex ideas. True polysynthetic languages are rare and include the language of the Ainu in Japan, the Tiwi Islanders in Australia, the Greenlandic native languages, and the Iroquoian Mohawk language.
Yup’ik people are durable and resilient as shown by the experience of the Tuntutuiak village and school. The Yup’ik people value their culture, worldview, and language and their commitment remains strong despite challenges. They will attempt to rebuild their villages and make them more resilient to climate change, but this will take a long time and a lot ofresources. They also face the challenge that many young people are not fluent in Yugtun, and some only speak English. It is difficult to maintain a traditional way of life when the English-speaking culture is becoming so dominant.
Over the last six years an Expert Yup’ik Group in the LKSD prepared a ground-breaking Yugtun assessment measure to help identify the extent of students’ understanding of Yup’ik culture, its worldview, and expertise in the Yugtun language, as well as non-verbal communication. The process of developing the assessment for levels K – 6 students and piloting the assessment for levels 7-12 students has helped to promote the importance of Yup’ik culture and language to young people. This process was nearly complete when Typhoon Halong devasted the area. Many schools are in disarray and funding to continue the project is uncertain.
My colleague, Dr Rosalie Grant, when working at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, provided expert support to the Expert Yup’ik Group on effective and valid assessment processes that would achieve the aims of the Expert Group. In cooperation with them, she conducted research, presented workshops and organised meetings at remote village schools. She says one of the best ways you can give the Yup’ik people a helping hand is to donate some money to one or more of the village schools, or their students, most affected by the calamity of Typhoon Halong at the official LKSD site. It would make such a difference for schools whose resources are so stretched and for students who have lost everything.
The Yup’ik are modest consumers, yet they are bearing the brunt of the disastrous long-term outcomes of the good fortune of wealthier people. It would be a great loss if the Yup’ik way of life, their profound worldview, their special language, and their efforts to preserve their culture, were diminished due to this calamity and the ones likely to follow on due to climate change.
Elizabeth Dangerfield
PS: If you wish to donate, where the donation form asks for zip code just put in your postcode. Thank you for supporting this worthy cause. Contact susan–herron@lksd.org if you have any problems.
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Thank you for sharing the experience and your understanding of the Yup’ik people.
I had read of a society where the more one gave to others the higher that person was regarded in that society, I don’t think it was the Yup’ik people, but it resonated with me as does the beliefs of the Yup’ik people that you shared.
Another custom one society used to bring peace, equity and harmony to its society that interested me was that everyone would rubbish the achievement of anyone who achieved something really good – the result being that no one took it personally as it was part of the culture and no one got a big head and thought that they were more important than the rest.
I’m splitting my donation up over all the different schools and students, it makes me feel like I’m only giving a piffling amount, sorry, but with so many it adds up.
This is terribly embarrassing, but I refuse to use Google pay as google exploited the genocide in Palestine, I don’t want to use Samsung, and the card option requires a zip code. So sorry Elizabeth.
Gonggongche, the source you’re thinking of could possibly be “The Wisdom of Kandiaronk — The Indigenous Critique, the Myth of Progress and the Birth of the Left” by David Graeber.
It’s the fascinating story of the Native Americans of the north-east side of the continent in the early 17th Century, and of Kandiaronk, a leader of one group whose eloquence and debating skills stunned the French.
Graeber’s work was part of a larger project as the preface explains.
Anthropologist David Graeber has been working for seven years, with archaeologist David Wengrow, on a work devoted to a history of inequality. A first excerpt from this work was published online in 2018. This excerpt showed that the usual narrative, according to which human inequality was the price to pay for developed societies and their comfort, is a lie…
Then came this conversation-stopper.
This second excerpt from the same work, still unpublished in French and English, deals with the influence of Native American societies on Enlightenment thinkers in the West. It appears that the founding texts of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and in particular Rousseau’s text on the origin of inequality among men, were strongly influenced by books which related the criticism of the American Indians vis-à-vis -towards Western society.
Among these American Indians, the figure of Kandiaronk stands out as that of a sort of Native American Socrates, a brilliant orator who fascinated the French elite and who perverted Western youth as his critiques of Western society and of the Christian religion spread within the aforementioned society.
The text shows that the Myth of Progress then appears as a conservative reaction against the diffusion of these ideas, in order to justify Western inequalities since according to this ideology, the inequality of men would be the price to pay for technical progress and the comfort it brings.
From the book — French assessments of the character of ‘savages’ tend to be very mixed. The native assessment of the French character was markedly less. Father Pierre Biard, for example, was a former theology professor assigned in 1608 to the evangelization of the Algonquophone Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia, who had been living for some time near a French fort. Biard did not think highly of the Mi’kmaq, but said the feeling was mutual.
They consider themselves better than the French because, they say, you are always fighting and arguing among yourselves, we live in peace. You are envious and you are constantly slandering each other; you are thieves and deceivers; you are greedy, and you are neither generous nor good; As for us, if we have a piece of bread, we share it with our neighbor.’ They say this and like things continually.
David Graeber’s finished work is “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity”
Fascinating stuff.
Gonggongche maybe check these out and let me know how you go, as I wont use anything google, just YouTube and I’m moving away from PayPal.
There’s Revolut (don’t think that works that well for us in Oz); Stripe;
https://www.rankred.com/paypal-competitors-alternatives/ then there’s the issues of your own banking provider and if there backends accommodate any of these!
Elizabeth’s essay is profound, appropriate, topical, disturbing, along with being a current example of dozens, hundreds, of similar instances globally of communities upturned and imperiled by the consequences wrought by global warming and the climatic impacts. There isn’t a single place on the planet escaping the wrath of intensified weather events, however they manifest.
Always, the poorer communities suffer the most, given they have the least capacity to recover after disastrous conditions impact their lives. These are the times, and these are the conditions.
In another thread, I’d referred to the 2024 documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, which largely focuses on the move toward independence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly called Congo, or Zaire, or Congo-Kinshasa, a place that suffered from the extraordinary cruelty exacted upon its people by the various iterations of Belgian intrusion… the Congo Free State (1877–1908) under the control of the Belgian king Leopold II, a monomaniacal psychopath of monumental proportions whose cruelty towards the indigenous inhabitants was for decades one of the most abhorrent examples of colonial overlording.
In 1908 the Belgian government, bowing to international pressure, took control from the mad king and maintained that position until 1960 when the Mouvement National Congolais, led by Patrice Lumumba, won the parliamentary elections, achieving independence on the 30th June of that year.
At the handover ceremony, attended by the Belgian king Baudouin along with a captain’s pick of Belgian political and bureaucratic luminaries, the following was observed:
The king, in his speech, said “The independence of the Congo crowned the work initiated by the genius of King Leopold II, undertaken by his undaunted courage, and carried on with perseverance by Belgium.”
Lumumba, in reply, said “To you who have fought for and won independence, I salute you in the name of the Congolese government. To you, all my friends, who fought without respite, a necessary fight to end the humiliating slavery that was imposed on us by force. I ask of you to make this June 30, 1960, an illustrious day you will keep engraved in your hearts forever. We have known mockery and insults. We have endured beatings morning, noon and night, because we were niggers.
Our raw materials were stolen through legal documents that benefited only those in power. The law was never equal when it came to whites or to blacks. How can we forget the executions? Or the prisons holding those who would not submit to the oppression? Congo’s independence is a decisive step to liberate all of Africa.”
To cite the obvious, Lumumba’s words went down like a lead balloon. Within 3 months, he was removed from office in a coup backed by the US and Belgium. In January 1961 he was assassinated.
Once again, the tired gameplay of the colonising powers exhibited its zero tolerance for dissent and threats towards its rapacious resource stripping of colonised countries.
The DRC today is awash with civil violence. Since 1996 over six million people have died. Millions more displaced.
These tragic figures are the legacy of Belgian colonialism, American insistence on resource control, along with the insidious consequences of attaching value to whatever mineral or other resources are available for exploitation and the battle for control of the extraction and supply thereof.
With due respect, and not to diminish, for all tragedy is exactly that, Elizabeth’s example of the Yup’ik people is small beer by comparison to the ongoing disaster in Central Africa.
I think it is to do with more than neglect. It has been studied neglect for fear of oligarchy.
After Gaza, I won’t beleive any politican again.
Gaza just illustrates. by example, how deceitful the global response to climate change and ecology in general has been for a long, long time- these days they even seem to lie for amusement, they are that cynical.
More about Kandiaronk, because he is so relevant to this article, and to today in general.
In debating with the French a favourite target was the French legal system.
He eviscerated the French system point by point, focusing particularly on judicial persecution, false testimony, torture, accusations of witchcraft and differential justice for the rich and the poor. But ultimately he comes back to his initial observation: the whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be useless if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly.
This apparatus consisted of money, property rights, and the resulting pursuit of material self-interest.
Kandiaronk : I have spent six years thinking about the state of European society and I still cannot think of a single one of your ways that is not inhumane, and I sincerely believe that this can only be because you stick to your distinctions of ‘mine’ and ‘yours’.
I affirm that what you call money is the devil of demons; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evils; the scourge of souls and the slaughter of the living.
Imagining that you can live in the land of money and preserve your soul is like imagining that you can preserve your life at the bottom of a lake.
Money is the father of luxury, of lasciviousness, of intrigues, of deception, of lies, of betrayal, of insincerity, of all the worst behavior in the world. Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill each other, friends are false, and all for money.
In light of all this, tell me that we Wendats are not right to refuse to touch, or even look at, money?
Graeber notes — “For 1703, this was captivating stuff.”
1703?
It’s captivating today.
For those with a heart.
Remember this from Kandiaronk — the whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if we did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly.