Portraits of Resilience

Shishmaref is an Inupiat Eskimo village of roughly 600 people, living on a small barrier island 34 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle in Alaska. In September this year I had the opportunity to spend a week on Shish, photographing the impacts climate change is having on this remote Arctic community.

Through a project funded by the UN Environment Program (UNEP) I am working with other photographers to help create a mosaic of images documenting the resilience of northern communities as they cope with the effects of climate change. The residents of Shish may soon become the first refugees of global warming as rising sea levels and melting permafrost are causing their island to quickly erode into the Chukchi Sea.

Ken Stenek is the science teacher in the local high school and has witnessed the disappearance of over 250 feet of coastline in the 10 years he has lived on the 7x1 km island. The pounding waves of the sea are slowly swallowing the land and have already forced more than a dozen families out of their homes.

The Inupiat also rely on a subsistence lifestyle, hunting and gathering much of their food and the animals they depend on as part of their survival are becoming harder to find as they migrate further north, away from the island.

Residents have recently voted to move their entire village to a safer, more solid site on Alaska's mainland. But even if they can persuade state and federal government officials to finance the move—the cost is estimated at $100 million—many villagers fear that life will never be the same.

Despite the bleak outlook, the community is very gracious and welcoming to outsiders and continues to be known locally for its high-quality seal oil, fermented meat and Native art.
There are increasingly more stories like Shishmaref appearing both in the Arctic and on small island states around the world.  Throughout the spring and summer of 09’ I will travel with other photographers as part of a UNEP project called ‘Portraits of Resilience’ which will attempt to visually document climate impacts on Saami regions in Norway, Nenets villages in Russia and Inuit communities on Greenland.

The photographs will be displayed as part of a public presentation at the next global climate change negotiation, taking place in Copenhagen in December 2009.  The images I produce will also be exhibited locally at the Winsor Gallery in Vancouver in November.

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