Paimiut Culture Camp
Cultural Rangers for Climate Resilience on the Yukon Delta
Nestled on the watery lands edge of Yup'ik country, lies a community brimming with energetic youth, humble coordinators, and passionate Elders.
In August 2024, community facilitators, Elders, and healthy country planners, organised and delivered a Paimiut Culture Camp with a group of youth.
The Camp was centred on rehabilitation efforts from the impacts of ex-typhoon Merbok and community-based, cultural responses to climate change.
When Merbok made landfall in late 2022, Naparyarmiut (Hooper Bay) - “the place of the stake village people” - and its surrounds experienced significant storm surges, winds over 70mph, and devastating flooding.
The storm stripped the town of one of its main defences from the Bering Sea, an intricate sand dune system held together by dune grass and years of establishment.
These dunes served as more than a barrier from storms cooked up out at sea, they were alive with ancestral connection, memories, leaves for tea, and borne generations of nesting birds.
Western Alaskan coastal communities are disproportionately affected by the changing climate.
These areas are front lines for intensifying storm systems and their subsequent impacts, including coastal erosion, flooding and storm surge, changes to wild-harvested resources, loss of power, and community relocation.
The Native Village of Paimiut (NVP) is well aware of these changes and impacts, having already been relocated as a community and are now experiencing first hand the severe effects of climate change.
As a means of empowering the community, NVP representatives and partners initiated a project to ensure necessary skills are embedded in future generations.
Based on grant funding, a Paimiut Culture camp was carried out in the summer of August 2024 as a pilot ‘Cultural Ranger’ program.
The program works under the direction of Elders, cultural facilitators, and the Applied Archaeology International team.
Focussed on culturally-appropriate field recording methodologies, techniques in dune restoration, and beginner skills in GIS, the program combines on-ground restoration action with strategic planning and values mapping to deliver a cultural map of landforms and identifying impacts and threats.
While full-scale restoration of the dune system was not the intention of this field session, imparting on the youth skillsets to adapt and build resiliency to the changing climate is the goal with this program.
Armed with dune grass seedlings, a GPS, and generations of knowledge, a team of Paimiut Cultural Rangers embarked on their Hondas to the coast.
01 / 15
Another aspect of the project was learning migratory seabird monitoring techniques.
On the last day of dune grass planting, the team came across nearly 20 Short-tailed Shearwaters (Ardenna tenuirostris) washed ashore.
Spending the summer months feeding in the Bering Sea, these are the same species that breed and nest off the southern coast of Australia in fall.
With cultural connections in both hemispheres, this seabird connects communities across oceans and data collected by Cultural Ranger groups contribute to our understanding of the largely unknown lifecycle of this migratory seabird.
The Paimiut Cultural Rangers are working with the Wudjari community (via the Esperance Tjaltjraak Native Title Aboriginal Corporation) on the southern coast of Western Australia to deploy live feed satellite tracking devices to these migratory seabirds to map and monitor their migratory route, condition, and habitat impacts.
By documenting wash ups, tracking their migration, and contributing to global datasets, the Paimiut Cultural Rangers are integrating with a global initiative to better understand this species for its management.
In addition to building skills and knowledge of Our Youth, outcomes from this pilot project include a cultural landscape map of the Old Village, for its preservation and protection.
This pilot project falls within a broader cultural planning program, led by the Alaska Wildlife Alliance, that involves interviewing our Elders for their guidance on action plans for climate change adaptation in our communities.
This information will be fed into a community plan to direct the development of an environmental education program that will contribute to enlisting the help from potential partners like the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the University of Alaska, Alaska Pacific University.
We anticipate the benefit to community is to show the value of our unique traditional ecological knowledge to youth and community members alike and to provide an opportunity to expose youth to potential career paths utilizing Yup’ik traditional knowledge.
Elders and culture bearers working with Our young people will be invaluable.
It promotes the perpetuation of traditional and indigenous environmental knowledge and the continuation of the innate rules our society has lived by through the passage of oral history.
We anticipate this pilot project will help us to secure funding to carry out additional phases of the Paimiut Cultural Ranger Program; for our Elders past, present, and emerging.
