COMMUNITY-ENGAGED CLIMATE ADAPTATION: PARTNERING WITH SEARCH AND RESCUE IN NORTHWEST IÑUPIAQ ALASKA

August 23, 2023
by Charlie Hahn (Anthropology), Chase Puentes (Geography) and Ellen Koukel (Atmospheric Sciences)

“I was right there across the lagoon, just past the airport,” one hunter recalls. “I had a phone and was using the GPS maps on my phone, but I couldn’t see. Eventually I got through to Reppi and had people come find me. At one point they were just a few feet away but we couldn’t see or hear each other it was blowing so bad. They end up finding me and got me back home.”

It’s mid-December and our team of UW graduate students is gathered at the community center in Kivalina, a 500-person Iñupiaq community in Northwest Alaska. We’ve just shared a meal of homemade chili, baked fish, and potato salad and are discussing stories of past search and rescue events with several core volunteers from Kivalina’s Volunteer Search and Rescue organization (KVL-SAR). Outside, the remnants of a winter storm are blowing, though not quite as severe as what the hunter describes above. And everyone was still thinking about the historic typhoon Merbok which just a month earlier had crashed into western Alaska causing widespread damage to villages across the region.

The group, led by Replogle “Reppi” Swan Sr. (KVL-SAR President) and Colleen Swan (KVL-SAR Administrator) discusses priorities for SAR capacity building and new potential collaborative research projects. These include: outfitting first responders with GPS/messaging devices to improve rescue communication, co-hosting a wilderness first responder training for SAR responders and community members, developing an audio/video archive of SAR response stories for hunter safety and training purposes, and expanding our work on local sea-ice monitoring and forecasting through social media.

Read the entire article at the University of Washington Program on Climate Change: https://pcc.uw.edu/blog/2023/08/23/northwest-inupiaq-alaska/