[MUSIC] >> Hi folks, my name is Kaare Sikuaq Erickson. And I'm the North Slope science liaison for UIC Science. UIC science is one of 52 businesses owned by the Ukpeaġvik Iñupiat Corporation. And we are a Alaska native indigenous owned and operated Corporation in Ukpeaġvik, Alaska, formerly known as Barrow. We own and operate the Naval Arctic Research Laboratories, which are now decommissioned Office of Naval Research Laboratories that ran from 1947 to 1981. We own and operate the campus now, and we provide logistics to all types of scientists who do Arctic research, from terrestrial, to atmospheric, to sea ice, to even social sciences. We have a couple hundred, maybe two to three hundred scientists that visit our community each year. I'm the lucky guy who gets to set up all the orientation, and school visits, and all the liaison type stuff. So any communication with the communities, then that's my job. The top picture you see is a picture of the research sites in and around Barrow, on the Barrow and area environmental database. And that just gives you a picture of how much research we've had in our neck of the woods. That's roughly 25,000 research sites right there in and around our village. And as you can see a lot of them are situated on the Barrow Environmental Observatory that you see here. So my background, a little bit of my background, I'm from the, as you can see the stars on the map. I come from several different vllages. And my mom is a Iñupiat from Barrow, and my grandma's from Shishmaref. And then my dad is a Norwegian fisherman who was raised also in Unalakleet, you see the star there. So today what I was hoping to talk to you about are the Arctic indigenous populations in the Arctic. However, I will be careful on what I share with you because I really don't know much about the rest of the Arctic. As you see in this picture here there are lots of different Arctic indigenous populations across the circumpolar Arctic. And there are, although there are similarities, and we are dealing with a lot of very similar issues, there are a ton of differences. And a couple of big major variables that I really wanted to focus on today were one, the geographical setting, and two, the socio-economic situation in each of these villages and communities. Because these two variables, they vary from, obviously from country to country, from region to region, and even from village to village. And in fact in some cases people are dealing with this climate change even within the villages, from family to family, differently. So the variables could change very drastically. And today I will use what I know best in my neck of the woods, the Alaskan Arctic, the northern Alaskan Arctic as an example. So I'll take three communities that are fairly close in proximity to each other that would seem that they have so much in common. However, when you look closer at the geographical setting and the socio-economic situations, we're dealing with climate change very differently. So the first community that I'll introduce you to is Utqiagvik Alaska. And Utqiagvik is formally known as Barrow, and it's located on the Northern most point of the United States as you can see here, on the Arctic coastal plain, kind of jutting out into the ocean. Everything east of the Utqiagvik is the Beaufort Sea, and everything west of Utqiagvik is the Chukchi Seas. So we're right on that line there. As you can see on the left here, the eroding bluff here, this is about 12 miles down the coast from from Barrow. And this is called the belacqua site. And this emphasizes two things. It emphasizes the length in the time of our people who have been up here. This site right here represents about 2,500 years of continuous occupation by our ancestors. But it also emphasizes the threats that we face as far as global warming and climate change. So as you see up on the picture here, you can kind of see a house kind of jutting out of the side of the eroding bluff. And then the picture next to it one storm. So this is actually one season later, but it was one big storm that undercut the house and the bluff. And it caused it to slough off, and we actually had to get human remains off of the beach from this site. So people have been up here for a very very long time. And this location is actually some of the highest real estate in indigenous terms, because of its proximity to the leads, or to where the bowhead whales feed and where they travel. You can see on the image here that the proximity to the shelf, the deep water, the dark water out here, is it has deeper Atlantic water that upwells on to the shelf. And it provides a very highly nutrient environment for the bowhead whales, and beluga whales. And this picture, this map actually shows the red dots are where the bowhead whales feed, and the yellow dots or the beluga whales feed. And it's interesting because what draws the marine mammal, large marine mammal complex to the shelf environment, the organic material, is also the same material that gets upwelled onto the shelf and falls down. And the cold water doesn't allow it to fully break down. So it becomes the oil underneath our feet, which are the huge oil deposits in northern Alaska that many people have heard about. And they have extracted I believe up to 1 trillion dollars worth of oil in the last 40 years. We deal, the biggest threats as far as climate change geographically, I would say are the loss of sea ice which is a big thing. Because the sea ice protects village from the erosion. And the other thing is the loss of sea ice opens up the water, and there's a lot of energy that comes out of the water. And it really impacts the weather throughout the winter. So we have a lot more variable weather and not as consistent. The next village that I'll introduce you to is the village of Shishmaref. Shishmaref is located on a barrier reef Island on the Northern Seward Peninsula. As you can see here this picture here shows the Barrier Reff islands that run along Northern Coast of the Seward Peninsula. If you know anything about Barrier Reef Islands, they tend to move around regardless of climate change. They are made of sand, and climate change is actually expediting the erosion of the island. However, if you look into history, the island is traditionally a summer gathering location for the people from that whole area, from this whol Northern Seward Peninsula. This whole area would gather here in the summertime to get away from bugs, but also to gather, to trade, and to put away certain animals that were available out there. The wintertime they would spread back out and go back to the other areas. So it was never a real long-term permanent establishment. Although there are a few of sod houses on the island that are very old. And some old sites on the island that show that people did live there, as a region it wasn't the center for the region until the Lutheran Church established a mission there. And then the Federal Government required students to go to school in the missions. So it became a permanent village at that point. And now we're kind of having, seeing the ramifications of making that a permanent village on the Barrier Reef island. And in fact Shishmaref has such a bad problem with erosion, and is facing so many problems with climate change, that they've become the poster child for climate change for the last 20 or 30 years. If you haven't already heard of Shismaref, you can see some of the pictures here. This one is taken last year of one of their main roads being eroded. Some of the more famous pictures that you have of houses literally falling off the Bluffs into the ocean. And then of course, we have a lot of our sea mammals that are really suffering from the rising temperatures. So they face, climate change is really impacting this village in multiple ways. The open water in the winter here, you see here on this picture. It is a really big impact on the village as well. Like I said about Utqiagvik, the energy that is put into the environment when there's open water during the winter can be really devastating, and has a huge impact on both land and air travel. The third village that I will introduce you to is Unalakleet. And Unalakleet is located even further south than Shismaref as you see here on the Norton Sound, very shallow Norton Sound. And Unalakleet as far as a geographical setting, it's located on a sand spit on the Unalakleet River. We have a really good gravel source. We have a good water source. However, our water system has some issues. But it's geographically, it's kind of, it has all the resources that it necessarily needs. It's also located, as you can see on the language map here, it's located right on the borderline of Inupaq, Yupik, and also Atabaskin, so we have, it's a very rich mixing of those cultures. We have several different cultural groups in Unalakleet, it's really a kind of a melting pot of several indigenous cultures. We're further south than Utquivik and Shishmaref, so that we do have a problem with even just getting snow to last throughout the winter now. As you can see some of our Caribou Hunters here driving across Barren Tundra, which is a little bit of snow, that's a really big impact. Just the traveling during the winter that we're very used to. Also we're having huge fish die-offs bird die-offs, bird die-offs, marine mammal die-offs in the Bering Sea right now. The ecosystem is getting hit really hard in the Bering Sea right now if you haven't already heard. And then one of the biggest things that we face in Unalakleet is, one thing is erosion obviously on the on the houses that are near the coast. But then our storm surges during the wintertime are probably one of the biggest threasts that we have seen in the past decade. And this happens because we have such a shallow Norton Sound that during the winter, when that storm comes in and puts pressure on the water, it pushes the water up into our river valley. And as you can see here, this is our crane at our fish processing plant. And the picture below is during a winter flood where it came in and flooded the entire valley, and even went over the dock and everything. And the bottom picture too as well, that was another winter flood where we had some really bad flooding. So the socio-economic situation in Unakleet is actually very unique as well. It's very different from Shishmaref in that we are a commercial fishing town. We have a commercial fishing processing plant right in our town, and that kind of fuels the economy in our village so that we do have jobs available. However, we don't have a North Slope Borough style, we don't have a Borough in our region. So we don't have that tax base. So that that's one big difference from the North Slope to a region that we live in further south. And as far as land status, our village is surrounded by State and Federal land, but it's not locked up in any type of preserve or park. So it does give us some freedom as far as traveling on the land with vehicles. So in conclusion, I'd like to remind you that the Arctic is someone's backyard. It's our hom,e and we're all dealing with these changes that we're facing very differently in our environment. Number one, the geographical setting. Is the village on a riverbank, is it on a coast, is it on melting permafrost, is it on gravel? Those are all huge variables that will have impact on how we are being impacted by climate change. The socio-economic situation is also a huge huge variable on how we're able to deal with the situations that we deal with. Depending on if we have the resources to deal with them. Depending on who owns the land around our villages. And depending on the laws that impact how we deal with our resources. Country to country, this varies greatly. Even though we're dealing with the same types of threats to our communities. And finally, I'd just like to remind you that we are people too. We have kids, and we have futures, and thank you for your time.
