Inside, I could see why – the house was boiling, and we all rapidly stripped off our coats and gloves. Cesa was in her early thirties, large and cheerful, and continually pestered by several hyperactive children.
‘Oh, a lot of people can tell you about the weather,’ she said, when we were all drinking hot chocolate around the table. ‘There’s only been one cold winter since ‘94 here. It’s so much warmer, and that’s a big change.’
I went for a walk around the village that evening. It was bordered on one side by a wide frozen river, with steep banks leading down to the ice edge. Lots of snowmachine tracks led along the river, which was clearly the equivalent of a main road in winter. But the spring break-up was just beginning, and dark patches in the snow indicated where water was seeping through from the thawing ice underneath.
Everyone from the very young to the very old seemed to get about by snowmachine, and the saw-like buzzing of motors made a constant background noise. There were fewer kids around than normal: I later found out to my surprise that most of the school seniors had gone on a trip to Mexico. Demolishing my assumptions about Indian villages, modernity was everywhere – televisions flickered inside most of the houses, and on a makeshift basketball court two wiry teenagers were sliding about on the ice, taking turns shooting the ball. Like other kids I’d seen elsewhere in the United States, they wore baggy jeans and sneakers, and moved with a disinterested, thoroughly urban cool.
As in Shishmaref, subsistence food is still vital. At a ‘pot-latch’ communal meal later in the evening, hunks of caribou shared space with jelly, ice cream and crisps on paper plates. The elders played bingo several nights a week, sitting attentively at classroom desks in the community centre. The Huslia village store was packed with dried soups, big plastic bottles of coke, biscuits and even some fresh vegetables like onions and carrots, a new shipment of which had come in on our plane. But in the summer the whole community moved out to ‘fish camps’ to catch salmon, and the traditional diet again predominated. Cesa’s own house, where we stayed in an upstairs boxroom, doubled as the village video store, and was well patronised by residents seeking repeat viewings of Eddie Murphy films and Titanic.
Although village life looked relaxed enough, the relationship between modernity and traditional lifestyles is never easy – in Huslia as in other Native villages across Alaska and the United States generally. The Koyukon Indian language – part of the Athabaskan language group, that includes the Apache and Navajo as far south as Arizona and California – is dying. Old people still speak it to each other, but the middle generation were beaten by their white schoolmasters if caught speaking it, and everyone now speaks English at home.
Alcoholism is a huge problem, even in ‘dry’ villages like Huslia, and several recent teenage suicides have shaken the community’s confidence to the core. No summary can explain the social crisis underlying this kind of tragic behaviour, but loss of culture is surely a central problem, contributing as it does to the breakdown of community values and roles, alienation, loneliness and poor self-esteem.7
In a way, these wider cultural changes ran parallel to changes in the surrounding environment. In the past people derived meaning from the regular progression of the seasons – from the migration of the caribou to the first appearance of the salmon in early summer. These rhythms, and the subsistence lifestyle generally, explained the world and made the people feel part of it.
But now the salmon sometimes failed to appear on time, and the previous year all the berries died before they got ripe. Hungry bears were ranging closer to the village. Willow trees were springing up where there used to be standing water, and most of the beavers had disappeared. The world was unravelling, and even the most stoic and experienced elders were at a loss to explain what it meant.
And underlying everything was the rising temperature.
‘Right now we hardly see forty below all winter.’ I was talking to Wilson Sam, Cesa’s father, the following morning in his kitchen. ‘I think we maybe saw one day of it, but the rest was like twenty-five, thirty below. And that’s all winter, that’s a big change.’ Wilson and his wife Eleanor were plucking geese, plunging the dead birds into boiling water to loosen the feathers then tearing off great handfuls and piling them up on the kitchen table. Wilson had shot over a dozen the day before.
‘My parents used to have really warm gear,’ said Eleanor. ‘I remember my late father, he had long caribou legging boots about this high.’ She put down her half-plucked goose to indicate. ‘All us children, we had fur coats too – real fur coats. My mother had a rabbitskin parka. Now the weather’s really changed, and people don’t use that kind of fur clothing so much any more.’
‘Now if it gets to forty below people say it’s cold,’ added Wilson. ‘But in them days it was colder. And it lasted for days sometimes. Worse than, what, fifty, sixty below. You know, real cold.’
Eleanor looked up, as if she had just remembered something. ‘My grandpa, he said in our Athabaskan language before he died, when he was in his eighties. He said the cold weather is going to get old. Because it’s getting warmer in Alaska, you know? The cold weather’s going outside.’
That afternoon I was riding Cesa’s snowmachine down a steep slope, trying to keep up with Harold ‘Farmer’ Vent, a Huslia old timer and councillor. Farmer looked like he’d seen a good few Alaskan winters: his lined face tucked under a pine marten skin cap, the buff-coloured tail hanging down the back, he looked every inch a skilled trapper. Always about fifty metres ahead, he kept disappearing around stands of forest and behind clumps of bushes, and I was worried about losing him. I had no idea which way led back to the village, and the landscape of forests, snow-covered depressions and riverbanks all looked identical.
Then, abruptly, Farmer drew to a halt. ‘This is it,’ he announced.
We were in a large bowl-shaped area, a kilometre or so across. Much of the snow had melted, leaving dusty grass and a tangled mat of dried-up pondweed. It was only then that I realised, with a jolt, that this had once been a lake.
‘The water’s just draining out,’ Farmer said. ‘I don’t know where it’s going. We used to paddle down here in canoes during the summer to get to my mom’s fish camp. We got to carry the canoes now.’
The area around Huslia used to be covered with lakes. ‘Every spring they still fill up with water, but then it just drains out – all the way to the bottom. All these lakes are drying up now, they’re just grass.’
He climbed back onto his snowmachine, and I followed him for a couple of kilometres more – up a steep bank and then down the other side before he stopped again. The scene was the same, though this time a line of birch trees surrounded the dusty hollow, indicating what had once been a lakeshore.
‘It’s all over the area,’ Farmer told me. ‘I trap way up towards Hog River, and all those lakes are drying out too.’
I asked what difference it made to the animals.
He shook his head sadly. ‘Ducks, beaver, muskrat…We used to shoot muskrat off this hill right here, but everything is drying out, so we can’t get nothing. With beaver it’s the same thing.’ He pointed to the edge of the bank. ‘There used to be a beaver house right over here. They’re all moving someplace, I don’t know where.’
We stood in silence, as Farmer stared at the ground. ‘It’s just – what do you call it?…Pitiful really. Even the geese and stuff, they’ve started disappearing now. Every year it’s getting harder and harder to live up here.’
Polar warming
Evidence of dramatic climate change is piling in from right around the Earth’s polar regions. Greenland’s ice sheet is thawing so fast that meltwater is running off at a rate equivalent to the annual flow of the Nile.8,9 Throughout the Northern Hemisphere winter snowcover has declined by a tenth since 1979,