A well-respected Yup’ik Elder from the Kuskokwim River village of Akiak has a new seat on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)'s National Advisory Council. Mike Williams Sr. is the chief of the Yupiit Nation, what he calls a consortium of federally-recognized tribes. Williams Sr. was named to the 29-member council in December 2023.
“My Elders at Yupiit Nation in our area told me that climate change impacts is [sic] going to be hitting us down the road and we have to get prepared for it,” said Williams Sr. during a phone call from his home in Akiak.
FEMA’s National Advisory Council works with the agency’s administrator on disasters: how to prepare for them, respond and manage them, and on aspects of recovery and mitigation.
Williams Sr. was spurred to apply for the seat by impacts from Typhoon Merbok in 2022. He said that people living in Western Alaska who lost fish camps to the storm should have received assistance from FEMA to rebuild them. Many of those camps still have not been replaced.
Williams Sr. said that rural Alaska’s struggle to strengthen food security does not receive enough attention at the federal level.
“Looking at the Yukon with now fishing for the last four years, it’s a disaster,” Williams Sr. said. “Of course our fisheries on the Kuskokwim River is the same. So I think the issue of food security and our subsistence way of life, I’m gonna bring that knowledge to the National Advisory Council.”
Williams Sr. is one of three tribal members on the council, which was founded in 2006 after Congress passed the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act.
According to FEMA, the council has made hundreds of recommendations to the agency over the last 16 years and has heavily influenced the way in which the agency administers both public and individual assistance. In an email, a FEMA spokesperson credited the council’s influence to create regional tribal liaison positions within the agency.
Williams Sr. said that his nearly three-decade effort to address the impacts of climate change in Alaska’s rural communities also influenced his decision to apply for the seat. Some of those impacts include what he’s seen at home in Akiak, where 200 gravesites were relocated in 2010 and at least half a dozen homes were moved in 2019 due to erosion and flooding along the Kuskokwim River.
“Life is not gonna be the same as we have seen it,” Williams Sr. said. “I’m hoping to give FEMA all of the information on the research I’ve been involved with in some years past to help communities before, during, and after disasters.”
According to a report released in January 2024 from the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC), at least 144 Alaska Native communities face serious environmental hazards due to climate change, including severe erosion and permafrost degradation. FEMA is among a number of federal agencies whose efforts to address the unmet needs of Alaska’s most environmentally threatened communities were described as “inequitable” and “inefficient and ineffective.”
Williams Sr.'s three year term on the FEMA National Advisory Council expires in November 2026.
