At latest PI-AK exchange, subsistence and sovereignty take center stage

The two CASCs shared ocean-spanning reflections at the Hawaiʻi Conservation Conference in late July

Jerilyn Kelly waded with care across the muddy loʻi kalo (“taro patch” in Native Hawaiʻian), pulling large green weeds from the beds where the purple root grew. She appreciated the deliberateness each movement required. The muscle memory was a time machine, transporting her from Oahu, Hawaiʻi, to her home lakes in Quinhagak, Alaska, in spring. 

“Doesn’t this remind you of gathering buttercups?” she asked in the mud, reflecting on annual harvests of the flower, picked as frozen lakes and ponds melt.

Kelly, an assistant tribal climate resilience liaison with the Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center, couldn’t imagine planting wild kapuukar (buttercups, in Yup’ik) as Native Hawaiʻians do with taro. But she could fathom doing so with quagciq (sourdock). 

She looked, too, at the wooden racks used to sun-dry the plants at Papahana Kuaola, a nonprofit dedicated to economic and cultural sustainability and environmental health, based in Kaneohe. The racks were large and had no roofs, but resembled the structures used to dry salmon and other fish in Quinhagak.

“And we dry stinkweed in a similar way,” she said, “before we use them for medicine.”

The pilina — Native Hawaiʻian for “relationship” — between native plants and people found thousands of miles from each other was shared in late July in Honolulu. As the latest chapter in the Pacific Islands-Alaska Collaboration, the Pacific Islands CASC welcomed members of the Alaska CASC to participate in the Hawaiʻi Conservation Conference. The conference included the PI-AK-led forum, “Building Pilina across the Ocean: Supporting Indigenous-led Climate Adaptation Research and Planning in Hawaiʻi and Alaska.”

Kelly was one of four panelists on stage at the forum, joining Kari Lanphier, Keolani Booth and Rachel Lekanoff before a large congregation. The quartet spoke of Alaska and Hawaiʻi’s parallel lifeways: subsistence, lands and waters, and the relationship between native foods and adaptation. 

“It keeps coming up over and over again, the idea of food security as climate resilience,” said Allison Bidlack, a research associate professor at UAF and managing director with the Alaska CASC, who also moderated the panel. 

Involved with the PI-AK since 2018, Bidlack has helped champion the collaboration’s studies into flood modeling, stream chemistry, fish health and climate downscaling models. And future CASC-catalyzed partnerships may still come. “There are always places for us to learn from each other around climate adaptation, and what that looks like in Indigenous spaces,” she said.

Sovereignty and political representation have historically been limiting factors for Indigenous communities’ efforts to adapt to changing landscapes. During the forum, Kelly recalled an attempt, more than a decade ago, by community leaders in Quinhagak to build a new airport and road roughly three miles outside of the village. The existing infrastructure was being lost to erosion, but the village faced financial penalties that made the new project impossible. 

“I was very thankful for the opportunity to share that issue,” she said. “We claim sovereignty, but we have all these rules and regulations by outside organizations and funding sources that restrict our sovereign capacity.”

Appreciating stillness, acknowledging difference

Days before she sat in a nail salon in downtown Waikiki, Gabe Canfield was sleeping on the floor of the only school in the Gwich’in Athabascan village of Venetie in Alaska. 

As the Alaska CASC’s Northwest Boreal Partnership climate adaptation catalyst, Kungunna (Canfield’s Inupiaq name) shared the space with 120 others, all present for the Venetie-Arctic Village Tribal Conservation District gathering.

Boat rides, beaches and rejuvenation were woven into the week’s education. Conversation flowed like water. Listening was active, like the resettling of branches after a breeze. Balance, rest and organic connections, Canfield said, mark the strong relationship with subsistence that Venetie – one of the few rural communities in Alaska without a Native village corporation — enjoys. 

The absence of transaction in Venetie, Canfield reflected, was in stark contrast to Waikiki.

“In the middle of downtown Waikiki, you can’t do anything for free. It can make you feel disconnected from a place if you have to pay to do anything,” she said. 

She was happy to find a Native Hawai’ian business to support, where a serendipitous interaction with her nail tech brought further perspective to her feelings and acknowledgement of where they were.

“There is a slowness and stillness which exists in [Indigenous] Alaska and Hawaiʻi,” Canfield said. “They are so different from places where capitalism and commercialism rule your life.”

Individual expenses hit hard in both places. Because of the isolation of Hawaiʻi as an archipelago, Native Hawai’ians, like communities in rural Alaska, struggle with high freight and gas expenses.

“Tourism also affects prices,” Kelly said. “Hawaiʻi, because they’re islands, have little land. In Alaska we have so much land, but little access.” 

Onstage, the “Bridging Pilina” panel elucidated these feelings, while also acknowledging the ways in which Native Hawai’ian and Alaska Native communities are different. Even though their goals are similar, the communities’ economic and social structures, political representation and varying feelings about receiving federal funding mean that adaptation and action within a changing climate are likely to require different paths forward.

At Papahana Kuaola, the color of the ocean in the offing boasted greens and turquoises, much different from Alaska’s muted blues. The rain fell warm, not cold. There was, in July, a sunset, a dark night — a jarring change for Alaska CASC visitors.

But there were also ripples of Alaska in the waterfalls and punawai (natural springs) running nearby the taro fields. In streams, Canfield recognized species of tropical fish she kept at home.

“I found my fish’s Indigenous friends!” she said. “I appreciated how much life there was everywhere, all the time. A diversity of animals and plants, everything alive.”

In the stillness which she was seeking, a sameness rose to the surface of waters, reflecting Alaska — a feeling of pilina.

Kelly, who visited Papahana Kuaola in 2023, found particular value in returning and strengthening relationships.

“Last year was an eye-opening experience for me, I was in awe of all the work that the Native Hawai’ians were doing,” she said. “And this year, I was able to digest more. If I hadn’t gone through that experience last year, I wouldn’t have made [connections to] native plants here in Alaska.”