I AM A MOTHER raising Black children in New York City, which is unceded Munsee Lenape territory. Often, I am afraid for my children’s lives. Where my family lives, the storms are growing worse, and the water is rising, and these are not the only threats to our safety. I have come to the Arctic to ask you what changes you have witnessed, and to humbly ask, with your permission, for your wisdom about survival.
This was the script I had rehearsed for my journey to a coastal Alaskan village in the late summer of 2022, when my boys were eleven and nine. It felt like something I would have to revise, potentially extractive and teetering on false equivalence, yet important to get right to justify the carbon footprint of traveling such lengths and leaving my children behind. The last place I’d flown this far from home to study survival was Palestine.
I was joining my colleague, Dr. Maria Tzortziou, a distinguished professor of environmental sciences who studies the effects of climate change upon vulnerable ecosystems and communities, including the basin where the Yukon River joins the Bering Sea. This is one of the fastest warming parts of the planet, or as Maria put it, “a ground zero.” Ours was an interdisciplinary effort. While she prepared to conduct measurements with her NASA-funded research team that would capture changes in the coastline from as far as space, we’d work together gathering testimony from elders in the Native community whose tribal council office would serve as our base, having collaborated with Maria’s team for several years. To truly understand the impacts of environmental change in the coastal Arctic, Maria explained, scientific questions need to derive from the people who live there. For instance: why are the salmon dying?
To say I felt like I was traveling to the edge of Earth only indicates my bias. Technically, I wasn’t even leaving the United States. To the Yup’ik people who’ve lived through subsistence hunting and gathering in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta for millennia, that region is the center. It took two days and five flights to get there, each plane smaller and later than the one preceding it:
New York to Chicago.
Chicago to Anchorage.
Anchorage to Bethel.
Bethel to Emmonak.
Emmonak to Alakanuk.
On the second of these flights, the old man seated directly behind me suffered from severe memory loss. Every few minutes, for six straight hours, he asked his companion, whom I took to be his long-suffering wife, where they were going. “Anchorage, Rafael,” she repeated. “How many times do I have to tell you?”
Three minutes later, he’d ask her again: “Where are we going?”
“I already told you,” she’d moan. “You’re not connecting the dots.”
Adding to the sense of disorientation (mine) were the pink drifts of fog lit up by the low-hanging sun, not yet set though it was late at night, because we were so far north.
On the fourth of these flights, a tiny biplane carrying more weight in mail than human cargo, I found myself buckled next to a woman in her fifties crying like an
