Stephanie Alexie awoke one morning to find her home surrounded by water too deep to wade through. “It looked like the ocean,” she recalled. Neighboring houses appeared barely suspended on top of rippling blue pools—mirrors reflecting the clear sky. In the distance, the wooden boardwalk built over marshy tundra dropped off into a vast sea. Alexie and her children were stranded until neighbors came by with a boat to her corner of Nunapitchuk, a Yup’ik village of roughly 550 people.
The land Alexie’s home sits on never used to flood. But in the last few years, seasonal transitions in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta—an area of western Alaska where the state’s two longest rivers empty into the Bering Sea—have become more disruptive. Now, every spring, when the region undergoes a great thaw and chunks of ice break free from frozen rivers, Alexie finds herself sitting on an island.
Alexie’s home survived the May 2020 floods, which were the worst the village had experienced in years. But floodwaters rose dangerously close to the building’s foundation, rotting the insulation underneath its floors. Black mold—likely a result of moisture trapped in the home—bloomed across the kitchen ceiling.
Alexie worried about where she and her family would go if the home became uninhabitable. It already felt like it was bursting at the seams: 26 people shared its four bedrooms. Mattresses with dozing children lined the living room floor. And toys and clothes spilled out of closet doors into the hallway. “There were too many things and no room,” she described.
(Katie Basile for The Margin)
Steven and Lucy Alexie’s grandchildren look out the window of their home in Nunapitchuk, Alaska, on April 12, 2025. Steven and Lucy Alexie’s grandchildren at their home in Nunapitchuk, Alaska, on April 12, 2025.
Alaska is home to 40 percent of the country’s federally recognized tribes, nearly half of whose members are based within roughly 200 villages in rural Alaska. These Alaska Native communities are diverse in culture and geography, but share a common risk: Alaska is warming two to three times faster than the global average. A 2024 assessment by the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium found that 144 of these tribes were facing some form of erosion, flooding, permafrost degradation, or a combination of all three.
Stephanie Alexie at home in Nunapitchuk, Alaska, on April 12, 2025.(Katie Basile for The Margin)
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