I lived in Niugtaq (Newtok) for fifteen years, and I saw the land fall apart each year. The land is falling apart due to climate change, which causes the permafrost to thaw. In the fall time, Newtok loses even more land to flooding and high winds.
No words can describe how it feels to lose your first home, the one you grew up in your whole life. It's upsetting, but things happen for a reason. It's heartbreaking and pretty sad. I had to watch homes get demolished, things falling into the river like land, maqii (steam houses), homes sinking, and the school shutting down.
Just imagine how it feels to lose your first home because of something disastrous happening in your rural or urban area. And having to leave all your childhood memories behind, yet they still live inside you, playing and reminding you where you came from and where you grew up. Makes it harder to leave your first home, right?
If this happened to you, your reality would be stressful! Packing, unpacking, settling into a new home and driving back and forth. In addition, you would be stressed about the erosion, wishing it hadn’t happened in the first place.
There have been several attempts to stop the erosion in Newtok over the years. Newtok resident Marla Fairbanks remembers one example. In 1988, she was working for the City of Newtok and she spent a week helping her coworkers on a sand bag project to prevent the erosion from happening.
“We tried,” Fairbanks said. “We helped out by filling the sand bags and putting them on the erosion, but those sand bags didn’t help at all. The strong currents that come with high tide and low tide would damage the sand bags.”
Permafrost thaw is happening. It’s hard to stop and it makes erosion happen more quickly.
When I look back at the photos from six to seven years ago, I see homes - and I see Newtok being Newtok. Our village looked so complete at that time, but erosion was happening even then. I remember the edge of the land used to be so far away from homes; it crept up on us until one day it was super close to the first homes that were by the Ningliq River. Those were the first ones to be demolished by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Two or three years later the erosion got closer to the school, and I saw so much land gone due to flooding from storms including Typhoon Merbok, which ate the land away.
Permafrost thaw and erosion are realities. People should be informed and understand that this is a real thing. Newtok was more than just a home to many people. It was a place where they grew up, it was a place they never thought about leaving. It was more than just a home.
"Lessons From Newtok" is led by photographers Katie Baldwin Basile and Emily Schiffer and supported by the Newtok Village Council, Lower Kuskokwim School District, Fox Air, International Teaching Artist Collective, New York Foundation for the Arts, Provincetown School District, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and KYUK.