Circling the Midnight Sun

by James Raffan

  Further searching revealed nothing more. The best I could determine from a distance was that Shishmaref indeed had become one of the first victims of a rising warming sea and the people who lived there had gone elsewhere. There was talk of picking out a new site on the mainland and of getting funds together to build a road to that site and one day, very soon, getting everybody moved there. But suddenly, around 2008, after the great wave of worldwide coverage had rolled up on the beach, the web had gone silent. It was as if Shishmaref and its six hundred residents had vanished into thin Arctic air. My challenge was to find them.

  January 2012 found me in Nome, Alaska, where I had a good visit with Tom Gray, the head of the Alaskan Reindeer Herders Association. Aside from the fact that the head of the ARHA had no reindeer—in the last decade they had been scattered by incoming caribou herds and eaten by wolves, two-legged and four-legged, he said—I was surprised when he told me that Shishmaref was very much still on the map. If I wanted to go there, I should call either Fred Goodhope Jr. or Clifford Weyiouanna.

  Without missing a beat, he picked up the phone and put a call in to the Weyiouanna household and found Clifford at home. “There’s a guy here in Nome, a writer from Canada, who’s interested in talking to you. Would you be interested in talking to him?” Apparently he was. Tom nodded and handed the phone to me. I needed to think fast.

  “I’ve been talking to Tom about reindeer herding,” I began. And before I could I say anything more, Clifford butted in and said, “You’re talking to that guy, the old German. He’s not Native. He just thinks he’s Native. And anything he knows about reindeer he probably learned from me.” Obviously these two guys knew each other quite well.

  “I’m wondering if I might talk to you sometime about reindeer herding and climate change.”

  “Climate change!” He laughed. “There’s no such thing as climate change. Sure,” he replied. “Bering Air has a flight tomorrow morning and Era has a flight in the evening. Just let me know when you’re arriving.”

  Suspecting that a small coastal community might not have a well-stocked local store, I asked, “Is there anything I can bring from Nome? Do you need any supplies or fresh groceries?”

  “As a matter of fact I do,” he said. I could hear the smile in his voice, and got some sense that this wouldn’t be a request for fresh bread or lettuce. “I’m way low on Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce.”

  The sun had just poked its nose over the horizon when the Bering Air flight to Shishmaref took off at 12:30 p.m. the following day. The outside temperature was a balmy minus forty-eight Celsius. It was about the same inside the plane for the first half hour of the journey; the windows were frosted over. Partway through the flight I went to chat with the pilots and looked out over their shoulders at the shining vista as we headed north over the frozen landscape.

  The map in my hand, showing the borders of regional corporations owned by the indigenous peoples of America’s fortyninth state, made it clear that the relationship between the Native peoples of Alaska and the government of the United States was dramatically different than anything I’d encountered in Scandinavia or Russia. Signed in 1971, when the U.S. government was determined to bring oil from Prudhoe Bay to southern markets, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act was the first agreement of its kind in the circumpolar world to recognize First Peoples’ claims to ownership of traditional territories.

  In one fell swoop, ANCSA transferred title, including surface and subsurface rights, to forty million acres of land, established a royalty system for subsequent development on other Alaskan lands, and passed along US$960 million in cash, divided among twelve regional corporations and two hundred village corporations, including Shishmaref, which fell within the Bering Straits Native Corporation.

  I survived the bitterly cold ten-minute “snogo” (Alaskan snowmobile) ride to Clifford Weyiouanna’s house from the Shishmaref airstrip. One of the first things I learned from him was that the ANCSA had created at least as many problems as it had solved: “The problem is, back in ‘71 when we got the money and tried to set out a plan, we were not business people, never were. And all of a sudden we had some money to play with and a lot of big corporations played with it in the wrong way. And we had a lot of people come around to the village corporation trying to sell this and that, like from Anchorage and the lower forty-eight, and they never let us know that their business was failing. But they sweet-talked us. Those in Barrow are fortunate, because they have oil revenues and can pay dividends to the shareholders. Here, not so much. If the regional corporation doesn’t make any money—and it doesn’t—then there’s no dividend. Before ‘71 people used to do things that needed doing: hunting, chopping wood. Now wood is seventy-five dollars a load. Everything is about money, especially since ANCSA was passed.”

  In his seventieth year, sitting like the laird of the manor in his fleece vest and checked flannel shirt, emphasizing points with an omnipresent cigarette clenched between the first two fingers of his left hand, Clifford took me through a life story that was almost as surprising as my discovery that Shishmaref had not actually been swallowed by the sea.

  Born right there on this spit of shifting sand on June 26, 1942, Clifford learned to hunt and fish from his grandfather. When he had gone as far as he could in the local school, he and another promising student from town were awarded scholarships that took them to four years at a parochial school in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. After a short detour in the army he returned north and married into the Goodhopes, a reindeer-herding family. With his wife, Shirley, and their four children, he had built his own herd, which gave them a fine living, selling meat locally and antler velvet to the Koreans, until the same forces that had dissipated Tom Gray’s herd took his as well in recent years.

  “I knew things weren’t going to last forever,” he said, “so I took my last big cheque from the Koreans and invested it in the apartment complex here in town. I’m so glad I did that, because here we are with no reindeer and changing times. Really changing times.”

  “What about that?” I asked, hoping we might get onto the topic of climate change and the apparent evaporation of the whole community. “I’m glad you’re here, but a little surprised, after hearing about the town that ‘surrendered to the sea.’”

  “Not yet,” he said, lighting another Winston. “More hotcakes?”

  Throughout our conversation, after he’d tucked away the four big bottles of Lea & Perrins I’d brought, Clifford moved back and forth between the dry sink and the kitchen table, keeping a steady flow of thick black coffee and homemade sourdough hotcakes. He told me the food was for his grandsons, who were working outside on this bitterly cold day to dig a grave for one of their friends, who had hanged himself the previous week. And then he told me the story of the sourdough, which was the same age as his dad, who lived next door. “Yup, that starter has been going as long as my dad has been alive. The hotcakes you’re eating are the same culture that has been in this family for ninetythree years.”

  “What is it like for a young person, living in Shishmaref?” I ask. “Will your grandchildren be living here, keeping your starter going, when they’re ninety-three years old?”

  He laughed. “I doubt it. It’s different now. It’s all about computers. The school is the biggest employer in the community. Cooks, teacher’s aides, custodians. We have two of our own local people who have come back as graduate teachers. We have one lawyer who had graduated from here. We have one pilot flying for Era Aviation. Having our own people teaching here is a big deal. Teachers from the lower forty-eight don’t last very long. It’s hard on the kids when teachers rotate too much. But other than that, kids have to leave town to get an education and a job. It’s a dry town. We used to be ‘damp,’ which meant there were some controls on who could bring in liquor. Now we’re dry. The richest guy in town is the bootlegger, selling booze at $250 a bottle. Go figure. I’m not sure there’s a college in black market economics for that.”

  “What ab
out the community relocation?” I tried again. “Five years ago, it sounded imminent.”

  Clifford leaned back in his chair and took a long draw on his cigarette, exhaling slowly and letting the smoke swirl around his head. “Yeah,” he said, “it was. They said, ‘Next year, next year.’ But I’ve always wondered, how are you going to get the fuel and stuff up from barges on the ocean to a community up the hill on the mainland? Me and Shirley, before she passed, we liked the ocean. It provided us with food. But most of the village voted to move. We were two of the eighteen people who said no. Right now, I don’t know what is going to happen. There are communities up and down the coast that are in the same situation. The government built up the seawall. And we could move, if there was money. But there isn’t money. Or we could break the community apart and head to Nome or Kotzebue. I don’t know. And in the meantime, with all this just hanging there, there’s no money for fixing up what we have, keeping our water and sewer lines going, keeping the airport going. This is a very difficult place to live, and especially so for the young people. But it is our home. It’s different now that the reindeer are gone, but I still have my cabin and the corrals and the grazing leases if they ever come back. And unless we have some kind of huge disaster, I think we’re likely going to be here for quite a while yet.”

  True to his word, Clifford excused himself and packed up a picnic of hotcakes and Thermoses of hot coffee and headed to the edge of town on his snogo to resupply the gravediggers. During the hour or so he was gone, he suggested, I should put on my things and go for a wander through town, which I did. “People are friendly here. Just say hi and tell them what you’re doing.”

  Later, Clifford’s children and their spouses and his grandchildren came by. Respectfully, they checked out the stranger and asked a few questions of their own. Clifford took out some photo albums and walked me through nearly seventy years of life on the edge of North America. He showed me a guestbook with names of buyers from Korea and Japan and, of course, the names of some of the reporters and journalists who had come to document the end of days in Shishmaref.

  “Are you the first victims of climate change?” I finally asked.

  “I don’t know. There’s a lot going on here. And yes, things are changing. But things have always been changing. This is not an easy place to live. But we know how to make do. We know how to adapt.”

  “Are you worried about the rising sea levels?”

  “Yes. But we have far more pressing problems that we need to deal with first. Like housing. And education. And giving our kids some options for the future.”

  “Do you think the move is going to happen one day?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I started a relocation committee but it kind of lost steam. I was acting chairman for quite a while. And I was sitting here at my kitchen table then and the phone rang. There was a lady on the phone. She said she had some money to help with our relocation. She said it was so-and-so from the Smithsonian. She told me that she could possibly fund about $200,000.”

  His black eyes burned into mine as the story continued: “I told her we were looking for money for a feasibility study to see about building a road to the new site. I asked her what the money was for. She said that it was to move the cemetery. I couldn’t believe it. We’d already done a questionnaire, and 95 percent of people said leave their relations where they are. I told her that one of the last things Mom [his wife, Shirley] said before she died was ‘Leave my body here.’ She had money to move the cemetery, she said, from the Smithsonian. I said, ‘Lady, we’re more interested in the live ones than the dead ones.’ And I hung up.”

  Before the evening Era Aviation flight back to Nome, Clifford offered me more hotcakes and a sample of the ninety-three-year-old starter to take home, along with a set of handwritten instructions on its care and feeding. We bundled up and headed out to the airstrip. There is no terminal building in Shishmaref, just a garage for the government snowplow, so we sat among a group of people on idling snogos and sleds waiting for the plane to arrive.

  When it did land on the distant end of the runway and eventually taxied up, blasting ice crystals in everyone’s faces, the pilot threw open the doors and called for people to help unload. Anxious to do something to keep the blood moving, I stepped forward and took my place handbalming cardboard boxes from the plane to waiting sleds.

  There were a couple of mailbags and then cases of milk, bread, cereal, and fresh carrots. The last box was a corrugated container unlike any other, made of some kind of waxed cardboard and cinched tight with white plastic straps. Just as I read “Foot” on the top of the end that was emerging from the plane, I realized why Clifford’s grandsons were digging a grave.

  By chance, I had become part of a crew lining up on either side of a shipping crate cradling the body of nineteen-year-old Gilford Iyatunguk, back from autopsy in Anchorage. The last thing I saw, as I shook hands with Clifford and stepped into the dim yellow glow of the small plane’s interior, was Gilford Iyatunguk’s girlfriend in her parka, crumpled over his makeshift coffin as they got ready to take it to the newly prepared grave.

  Back at the Nugget Inn in Nome, I couldn’t get that box and Gilford Iyatunguk’s unceremonious return to Shishmaref out of my mind. I paced my room. A fuzzy satellite connection fed to an ancient TV bolted to the wall brought images and commentary of the Australian Open tennis tournament, normally a functional diversion. A box. A cardboard box.

  I got on the Web to see what I might learn about this young man. There he was on Facebook, large as life, one shot of Gilford in the kitchen and another selfie taken with his girlfriend. In his last status update, posted on December 31, he wished the world Happy New Year. His favourite quotation read: “Life moves pretty fast, if you don’t stop and look around once in a while you could miss it. JUST DO IT!”

  Life moves pretty fast. And then it doesn’t. And then your body gets sent out to Anchorage for autopsy and you come home in a box. Nineteen years old. Poor Gilford.

  While I was walking around Shishmaref during Clifford’s supply run, word presumably had spread that there was a stray dog in town. A young lad who introduced himself as Dennis Davis pulled up on a snogo and asked if he could interview me on his video camera for a film he was making.

  “Trying to capture the view from here,” he said when I asked what it was he was trying to do. After all the media that had been through this town, it certainly made sense to me that people here would want to tell their side of the story. As we stood there in the bitter, bitter cold, as the wind whipped up off the frozen ocean, Dennis asked some very good questions about what I had found in my travels around the Arctic world so far. But the conversation didn’t go much beyond that. Like me, he got cold and wanted to keep moving. As he was putting his helmet back on, he suggested we stay in touch and gave me his email address.

  Looking at Gilford’s smiling face on my computer screen, I emailed Dennis to ask what had happened. He replied almost immediately: “He was drinking and took his own life. It is sad that there is nothing to do in a small village hence this is one of the reasons for me doing this documentary video is to get people out in the world to see what it is like and to try and come up with things for people to do not just get stuck in a black hole.”

  So complex. So incredibly sad and simple. When every other aspect of your life and your being was shaped and controlled by outside forces, was the most definitive act of “fate control” taking your own life?

  Alaska had the highest rate of suicide per capita in the United States in 2007; the U.S. average was 11.5 suicides per 100,000 population; Alaska’s rate was nearly twice that, 21.8 per 100,000. The stats for young men in Gilford’s age group (fifteen to twenty-four) were seven times higher than that: between 2000 and 2009, 141.6 per 100,000 each year, which is the overall suicide rate for all demographic groups in Chukotka.

  Youth who are exposed to suicide or suicidal behaviour are at higher risk for attempting suicide than youths who are not. The Statewide
Suicide Prevention Council said more than 90 percent of people who died by suicide had depression or another diagnosable, treatable mental or substance abuse disorder. As the feel of that box came back into my fingertips, I suspected this was not simply a suicide problem. It was a fate control problem. Either way, why weren’t we who lit our lamps with northern coal and oil, we who were getting rich and fat from the bounty of the northern larder, we who were fussing about the fate of the polar bear—why were we choosing to do so little about it?

  Next stop along the Circle was Kotzebue, population 3,200. In addition to being the centre and seat of the Northwest Arctic Borough, Kotzebue claimed to have been the home of the world’s largest polar bear, a big male tipping in at over a thousand kilograms. It was also the main expediting and organizational centre for the massive Red Dog mine, the world’s largest producer of zinc concentrate, located 150 kilometres northwest of town in the heart of the Brooks Mountain Range.

  Kotzebue had been on my radar since I’d read The Firecracker Boys, a shocking account by Dan O’Neill of an American plan as crazy as the nuclear diamond-mining program at Udachny. Led by Edward Teller in 1958, Project Chariot, which was never realized, called for the opening of a massive harbour north of Kotzebue with “peaceful” nuclear explosions, to kick-start the economy of the state America had purchased from Russia a century earlier. In The Genocide Machine in Canada, Robert Davis said the real aim was to “measure the size of a bomb necessary to render a population dependent after local food sources have become too dangerous to eat due to extreme levels of radiation.”