WASHINGTON — Lawmakers in the state and national capitols implored their colleagues this week to help two western Alaska villages relocate to safer ground after a devastating storm last year.
More than the specifics each lawmaker asked for, the speeches in Juneau and Washington, D.C. were a recognition that it takes a lot of government support community relocation. They were also a bid to not forget two communities far from the centers of power.
State House member Nellie Unangiq Jimmie represents Kipnuk and Kwigillingok. Homes were set adrift there when the remnants of typhoon Halong struck in October. Caskets were unearthed. Jimmie urged the Legislature to pass a resolution to support the communities decision to re-establish themselves.
"Kipnuk and Kwigillingok have voted to relocate," Jimmie said on House floor speech. “That sentence does not come close to carry the weight of what it actually means to say. It means accepting that your land [that] your family has known for thousands of years is gone. The water didn’t just take our homes. It took our dead.”
The Alaska House passed the resolution Tuesday without opposition. It urges the governor to develop a relocation framework. It also calls on Alaska’s congressional delegation to restore and expand federal funding for community relocation and oppose cuts to disaster relief for the villages.
In the U.S. Senate Wednesday, Sen. Lisa Murkowski also asked for the federal government to better support Kipnuk and Kwigillingok.
Murkowski recalled meeting a 6-year-old storm evacuee in an Anchorage shelter. The girl was coloring and showed the senator the drawing she'd made of her house and family.
“And then she kind of hugs my leg, and she says, 'Are you afraid of the dark?'" Murkowski recounted. "And I said, 'No, I'm not afraid of the dark. Are you afraid of the dark?’ And she said, ‘I didn't used to be, but now I am.”
The girl had been in one of the homes that was carried away by the storm waters. Murkowski said she doesn’t know how that six-year-old’s trauma will ever go away.
The senator said the government needs a more coordinated response for disaster relief and relocation, and to make its programs easier for small villages to navigate.
