Helen Kakoona, 28, with skinned seals in front of her home in Shishmaref, Alaska, on Oct 3, against the setting sun. ‘No other place feels like home but here,’ she says. Photo: AP
“Home sweet home.” That’s how Helen Kakoona calls her Alaska Native village of Shishmaref when asked what it means to live on a remote barrier island near the Arctic Circle.
Her home and the traditional lifestyle kept for thousands of years is in peril, vulnerable to the effects of climate change with rising sea levels, erosion and the loss of protective sea ice.
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Life in Shishmaref village, Alaska
Helen Kakoona, 28, with skinned seals in front of her home in Shishmaref, Alaska, on Oct 3, against the setting sun. ‘No other place feels like home but here,’ she says. Photo: AP
Small waves crashing into reinforced seawalls in Shishmaref, on Oct 4. Rising sea levels, flooding, increased erosion and loss of protective sea ice and land have led residents of this island community to vote twice to relocate. But more than six years after the last vote, Shishmaref remains in the same place because the relocation is too costly. — Photos: AP
Wearing a seal fur hat made by his mother, Andrew Kakoona, 46, sits on an ATV with a hunting rifle secured on his chest as he and his relatives get ready for seal-hunting in Shishmaref.
Children playing in Shishmaref, located on the small island of Sarichef – just 0.4km wide and about 4.8km long. Only about half of it is habitable, but hundreds of feet of shore have been lost in past decades.
Seal hunters Thomas (left) and Anthony Pootoogooluk unloading seals onto the edge of the lagoon in Shishmaref, on Oct 4.
The sun sets in the horizon as Ned Ahgupuk and his girlfriend, Kelsi Rock, piggybacking their one-year-old son, Steven, stroll along the beach on the Arctic Ocean in Shishmaref.
Seal hunter Wilbur Kuzuzuk, 53, dragging a spotted seal, his only catch of the day, onto the edge of the lagoon in Shishmaref. They might be at the edge of the world, but elsewhere they would be far from some of the prime spots for subsistence hunting of bearded seals and other sea mammals or fishing and berry- picking in the tundra that make up most of their nutrition.
A polar bear’s hide hangs on a rack near the village’s airstrip in Shishmaref.
Patrick Iyatunguk, a 31-year-old seal hunter, building his boat outside his home in Shishmaref.
The northern lights appear over Shishmaref on Oct 2.
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