‘A Place to Escape To’: Why Some Alaska Native Villages Are Facing Relocation
When remnants of Typhoon Merbok hit the Alaska Native village of Hooper Bay in 2022, the impact was immediate and — for this roughly 1,400-person town on the edge of the Bering Sea — disastrous.
“It did an entire lifetime’s worth of erosion in one storm,” says Estelle Thomson, president of an Alaska Native tribe called the Native Village of Paimiut that has members living in Hooper Bay. “The inundation from the sea came in through our town. It damaged infrastructure. Thirty-seven people were permanently displaced from the village. So we had a huge disaster.”
That disaster is part of a trend of flooding, erosion and warming temperatures that’s explored in Alaska’s Vanishing Native Villages, a new documentary from FRONTLINE and the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at Arizona State University.
As the documentary reports, researchers have found that parts of Alaska are warming at up to four times the rate of most of the rest of the world. It’s a shift that has left residents of places like Hooper Bay fighting for their survival — and even facing potential relocation.
“Our ancestors said one day we will come upon this day,” Agatha Napoleon, who serves as the climate change coordinator for the Native Village of Paimiut, says in the documentary. “I didn’t think it would happen in my lifetime.”
In the above video drawn from Alaska’s Vanishing Native Villages, Hopi journalist Patty Talahongva, who directed the documentary and produced it along with Lauren Mucciolo, sits down with experts who’ve been studying what’s happening in villages like Hooper Bay. They tell her the threat is so severe because of changes to both the surrounding sea, and the frozen ground known as permafrost.
“Environmental warming is really doing a number on the permafrost,” says Tom Ravens, a civil engineering professor at University of Alaska Anchorage and an expert on the Arctic coast. “Permafrost is absolutely the glue that’s holding all the sediment along the coast in place. And of course, as that permafrost thaws, the glue is essentially disappearing, and it’s just draining into the sea.”
The thawing permafrost corresponds to higher rates of coastal erosion, Ravens says. What’s more, arctic waters aren’t freezing the way they have in the past — and as the sea ice disappears, so does the coastal protection it provides.
“The ice is almost like a seawall,” Brian Brettschneider, a senior climate scientist at the National Weather Service, tells Talahongva in the video. “When you’ve got five, 10, 20 miles of ice that is anchored to the coast, those big waves, those big surges that are offshore, they stay offshore. But now when you’ve got no ice armoring the shoreline, those waves — there’s nothing to stop it from just coming in and battering the coastline.”
That’s what’s happening in Hooper Bay, Talahongva reports in the video, and efforts to strengthen the village’s defenses haven’t been able to keep up. So for some in Hooper Bay, the conversation is changing from protecting the village to leaving it behind.
As the film goes on to explore, the prospect of relocating is fraught for many Alaska Natives — both because some tribes were relocated decades ago as part of U.S. government efforts to assimilate Alaska’s Native people, and because of the implications for their way of life, which revolves in part around harvesting food directly from the sea. That tie to the environment is deeply rooted in their cultures.
But in this case, relocation may ultimately become a matter of survival, says Thomson, the president of the Native Village of Paimiut.
“We’ve learned that within 15 years, the permafrost in the YK Delta around Hooper Bay, Scammon Bay and Chevak is going to be melted, and at the end of the century, the Bering Sea is going to be subsuming that entire area,” Thomson tells Talahongva. “So it’s become a priority for us to resettle our village in order for us to have a place to escape to.”
For the full story, watch Alaska’s Vanishing Native Villages starting April 22, 2025, at 7/6c at pbs.org/frontline and in the PBS App, and at 10/9c on PBS stations (check local listings) and on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel. It will also be available on the PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel. Alaska’s Vanishing Native Villages is a FRONTLINE Production with Five O’Clock Films. The correspondent, writer, producer and director is Patty Talahongva. The producer is Lauren Mucciolo. The co-producer is Belén Tavares. The senior producer is Frank Koughan. The editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath.
