The threat of frequent coastal flooding has not been lost on community leaders.  Some of the most severe surges are documented in the City of Golovin's relocation plan, a work-in-progress funded by a state grant.  But Mayor of Golovin, Charlie Brown, says it's really more of an expansion project. The idea isn’t to move the entire community, he said, but to build a new subdivision for some of its 150 residents – Elders like Bobby Amarok who knows he needs to live somewhere that's safer and on higher ground.

Golovin’s planning effort and restrategizing over the years is emblematic in how Native villages are responding to frontline challenges where sea level rise is happening faster in the Arctic more than anywhere else, and where the impacts are demographically lopsided.  Of all the communities faced with chronic erosion, flooding, or rapidly melting permafrost, the majority are Alaska Native villages. 

According to the Denali Commission, the independent federal agency for Alaska economic affairs, it found a total of 73 federally-recognized tribes out of 229 that face climate impacts at rates exceeding any other Alaska community.  It means these villages are more threatened than the rest in losing critical infrastructure, ancestral subsistence lands, or even human life.  

But these coastal communities, like Golovin, a traditional Iñupiat village, have largely struggled to find relief.  For all the hundreds of millions of dollars in government spending devoted to helping address the effects of a warming planet, the GAO has found few, if any, success stories.   And it’s not a new problem.  Since 2009, when auditors first called attention to at least  31 imminently threatened villages in Alaska, they have repeatedly urged Congress to pass policies to help streamline the process, making it easier to deliver solutions to the most environmentally vulnerable.  So far, lawmakers have been slow to act.

Alaska's senior U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski and newly-elected Representative Mary Peltola arrived in Golovin the day after National Guard servicemen and women hauled away a freezer that had floated onto the school's playground – the stockpile of moose meat, dried trout, and bags of blueberries were a sorry loss.

Both politicians were in Washington D.C. when the typhoon struck. For Rep. Peltola, a Yup'ik daughter raised on subsistence fishing, top of mind was the toll the storm had taken on Native food caches. Hunted, gathered, and stored across the seasons, the harvests were now lost mere weeks ahead of winter.

"There's been talk of the importance of replacing freezers," Peltola said at a recent town hall style meeting in Nome with Murkowski and FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell. "But we know that doesn't replace salmon, and halibut," she said with a sense of assurance. "We're working on it."

For the first time, Alaska Natives have one of their own in Peltola to advocate for needs that Congress has long overlooked or gotten wrong. But her range of influence has yet to be realized. She has only until January to complete the term left vacant by the late Congressman Don Young. And she is running for the next full term. How voters feel Peltola has weathered this latest storm could help secure her seat.

Whether anyone balks over her recent support for the Willow project, an oil and gas deal loathed by environmentalists, is anyone's guess. In Republican-leaning Alaska, it could actually help seal her historic election victory, even though she is a Democrat. She's already won over her conservative colleague, Sen. Murkowski, who is also up for re-election.

In contrast, neither candidate carries an agenda which speaks directly to the climate questions that have lingered after the storm: In the fastest-warming place on the planet, how seriously should we accept extreme weather as our new normal? And how best should we be preparing for it?

For Murkowski's part, she leans on the bipartisan infrastructure bill that she championed last fall which allocates around $130 million for community relocation projects and $86 million for climate resiliency efforts – relatively small pots of funding when considering the estimated 13 million people in the U.S. who the National Climate Assessment predicts will need to escape sea level rise in their lifetime.

"We have a lot of work to do on our long game," admitted Rep. Peltola but also added that she'd only been on the job twelve days.

The GAO’s most recent call for climate response reform came just as Golovin was starting to pick up the pieces left in Merbok’s path.  On Monday, September 19, a new watchdog report was released, calling attention to the fiscal risks facing the federal government in reacting to extreme weather events as opposed to planning and preparing for them.  “Managing climate change is on [the GAO’s High Risk List] in part because of concerns about the increasing costs of disaster response and recovery efforts,” the report said.  

Roughly $315 billion dollars in federal spending have gone to respond to communities across the country battling drought, wildfires, flooding, or violent storms – and that’s just between 2015 to 2021.  In the Norton Sound region where Golovin is situated, disaster estimates have reached $40 million dollars from 2004 to 2011. With these costs projected to increase, it has many environmental practitioners wondering what it will take to enhance climate resilience programs.

“What we’re looking for are solutions that are designed for us here in the Arctic,” said Mayor Brown as he maneuvered his SUV over dunes of fresh sand that blew into the village like snowdrift. 

“Right now, some of the relief that’s been offered to us is fine if you live in Florida," he said downshifting on the soggy beach. “But we’re not Florida.” 

Since mid-morning, the mayor had been waiting on the arrival of Sen. Murkowski where he planned to drive her around Golovin's muddy streets, showing her the homes that had slid from their foundations, and introducing her to villagers like Bobby Amarok whose house now needed new floor insulation. (The original layer had been contaminated by floodwaters that seeped in with spilled diesel fuel and sewage.) He also planned to ask the senator to help extend subsistence quotas for area hunters, too. More moose meat could help replace some of what the storm took, he reasoned.

As he waited, it felt like time was fleeting. Freeze-up was maybe five or six weeks away. The sense of urgency was metaphor for the ensuing climate crisis targeting his typhoon-torn community.

“We are actually starting to think more proactively when it comes to how we make our coastal communities more resilient in the face of climate change,” said Murkowski at the FEMA gathering in Nome. “But for communities like Shishmaref, Shaktoolik, or Golovin that are sitting on ground as flat as this table with no protection around them – is that the safest place for those people,” she asked rhetorically. “Even though their families have been there for generations?” 

Back in Amarok’s kitchen where the room’s entire linoleum floor had been stripped revealing nothing but plywood, he and his daughter Lisa recalled the memories they shared between one storm season to the next – a drifting boat docked at their doorstep, one year; a disappearing lighthouse a few years before that – they were vivid points in a timeline captured through the family window.  

“I know I need to find a safe place to stay up the hill,” said Amorak, acknowledging Golovin's vulnerability.  But the thought of relocating anywhere else blew his mind.  He wouldn’t even leave his couch when the typhoon began to rise around him.  But villagers, including his son, knew when to put his stubbornness to rest when they arrived in deep water to carry his aging body away in the bucket of a front-end loader.  

“Where else would I go?” he said, shrugging his shoulders with a laugh.  “This is home." ◼️