Gulls forage on the Norton Sound beach at Nome on Oct. 2, 2020. Norton Sound is part of the Northern Bering Sea. (Photo by Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)
In winter, Papa would stand at the north-facing window of his home, looking to the open sky and his neighbor’s sleeping garden. “Alapaa,” he would say: “It likes to be cold,” in Inupiaq. He was talking about Sila, the weather.
And on January days during my childhood, when we all gathered for supper and the house shook from coastal storms and the snow berms throughout town grew and grew over the season, Papa would say something like “Piqsiġuktuq,” to my Gram, mom, aunties and uncles.
In Inupiaq, piqsiq translates to “stormy.” The syllable ġuk means “likes to” and tuq signifies “it or they.” The string of sounds sounded familiar and comfortable, but I didn’t understand that it translates to “It likes to be stormy.”
Because Papa and Gram were punished, physically and psychologically, for speaking Inupiaq in school classrooms as children, they did not want my mom and her siblings speaking the language and experiencing the deep and unjust shame and pain they carried. Mom and her siblings understood Inupiaq but couldn’t speak it. I grew up not speaking or understanding it. As a kid wearing braids and bobbles, I didn’t have the knowledge that our language is imbued with the Indigenous understanding that the weather, Sila, is living with us. And Sila is boss.
Papa was born with this understanding. In fact, he understood the weather so well he was a traditional weather forecaster. I imagine he learned the signals from his dad, who learned them from his father and the generations before him who made Uņalaqłiq, the southernmost Inupiaq settlement, their homelands. What settlers changed to Unalakleet. He would stand at the beach, look out at the ocean, the current, the clouds and the color and movement of it all, and let Sila decide our days, our week ahead. If wind was coming, we couldn’t hunt ugruk. If Sila said “rain,” we waited to fish for humpies until a good stretch of clear skies arrived for days of hanging and drying. Sila told us, and continues to decide for us, our activities.
Our language is imbued with the Indigenous understanding that the weather, Sila, is living with us. And Sila is boss.
– Laureli Ivanoff
Papa was a slight, slender and sinewy man with a full head of gray hair and browline glasses. He moved with purpose, was comfortable with silence, never complained, and always seemed to look ahead. He wore scratchy wool plaid button-up shirts, chewed snuff, and smelled like earth, fresh air and no nonsense. He had the most wrinkled face I’d ever seen, sported a crewcut, had large ears that stuck out, and was the type of man who, when he talked, people listened.
We often ate supper at Papa and Gram’s house. All of us. Aunts, uncles, all the cousins. So many that there weren’t enough chairs, and Papa or Dad would haul a bunch of white 5-gallon buckets from the back porch to fit as many as could sit at the kitchen table. I never wanted to sit on one of those buckets. My legs were too short for my feet to reach the floor, and the raised rims on the lids hurt my thighs.
On those cold or stormy winter days, Gram would stand at the oven and stir a pot of fresh caribou soup. The yeasty smell of baking bread wafted through their small home and softened the talk, as we knew we’d eat fresh bread slathered with Crisco very soon. The oven and all our bodies warmed the room. Some of us young cousins stole away to play in the back bedroom, reserved for grandkids who lived with them, to escape boring adult conversation and the stuffiness. I didn’t know it then, but those conversations I passively heard while thinking of something to do shape my values and mindset today.
THIS TIME OF YEAR, communities throughout coastal Western and Northern Alaska are thinking of and preparing for the coming fall storms. When I was a child, we experienced fall storms, but nothing like what we’re seeing today. I grew up hearing about a major flood in the 1960s. My dad’s dad’s house floated off its foundation and landed in the spot where it still stands, where my uncle and auntie now live. When it landed there, my papa jovially asked the man across the road, “Can I be your neighbor?”
Last fall, Typhoon Halong started in the central Pacific Ocean, southeast of Japan. The storm traveled north and hit Alaska’s entire western coastline, flooding and damaging 45 communities and forcing the total relocation of Kipnuk and Kwigillingok residents, turning them into climate refugees. In response, the governor declared a state disaster emergency, and the president approved a federal disaster declaration.
These floods used to occur once every 100 years or so. Today, the fall storms that bring high water are a threat every year. I chatted with Alaska’s leading climatologist, Rick Thoman, about the frequency of storms. He said the oceans are warming. Glaciers and ice sheets are melting. “They combined to produce a double whammy driving sea-level rise,” he said. “Coastal erosion is aggravated by the longer sea-ice-free season. Warmer oceans can increase also the intensity of storms.” That was likely a factor in the ferocity of the Halong flooding. He said permafrost is thawing only a few feet above sea level in places, and the sinking and settling land can cause catastrophic flooding where it might otherwise have been minor.
As we brace for whatever Sila may bring to us this fall, I often wonder what Papa would say today, looking out of his window. I wonder what he’d think when it rains for days on end and we’re unable to dry our fish like we used to on the fish rack. How we are now drying our fish inside empty bedrooms, garages or hallways, using fans. I wonder what he’d say about the ocean eating the coastline where he and Gram camped during fishing season. I wonder if, standing on the sandy beach, looking west to the horizon, he could see the messages in the signals and predict the weather like he used to. I wonder what kind of conversations I would hear, sitting at the kitchen table. I wonder what Sila would tell him.
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This article appeared in the August 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Sila decides.”
This article first appeared on High Country News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
