DON GONYEA, HOST:
A week after the remnants of a typhoon slammed into coastal communities in Western Alaska, residents and hundreds of evacuees are taking stock of the damage. As KYUK's Sage Smiley reports, many of those from the worst-affected Alaska native villages lost their homes in the devastating storm.
SAGE SMILEY, BYLINE: In Western Alaska, the Yukon and Kuskokwim River Deltas merge into an expansive flat tundra of tens of thousands of square miles. It's dotted with small villages - total population about 30,000. In mid-October, the region was rocked by a series of storms that flooded and wind-damaged dozens of communities. Some of the hardest-hit villages were evacuated to the largest community in the region, 6,500-person Bethel, where evacuees were housed in an emergency shelter or with family.
LUKE AMIK JR: Everything is lost now.
SMILEY: Luke Amik Jr. waited in a hangar and Bethel. Around 90% of the structures in his home village of Kipnuk have been destroyed.
AMIK JR: All our - all the memories and how it looks and how it looked like - all the houses are gone. We can't see Kipnuk the way it was again, and that's really bad.
SMILEY: Amik Jr. says he doesn't know what the future holds, but his connection to Kipnuk itself - the ocean, the river - is at the forefront of his mind. Yupik people have lived here for thousands of years. People's livelihood and culture is tied up in the land. By Western economic standards, it's one of the poorest regions in the United States, but it is rich in what are now referred to as subsistence foods - Native foods.
AMIK JR: I hope they build another village a little higher and make a road to the ocean, so we can go hunting (laughter).
(SOUNDBITE OF FROZEN FOOD BANGING)
SMILEY: Thirty miles away in Kwigillingok, another village that took the brunt of the storm, Donny Andrew loads hundreds of pounds of frozen food gathered from the land around him into a four-wheeler and trailer. Helicopters fly overhead.
DONNY ANDREW: Halibut, smelt, berries.
(SOUNDBITE OF FROZEN FOOD BANGING)
ANDREW: Salmon.
(SOUNDBITE OF FROZEN FOOD BANGING)
ANDREW: Yeah, taking as much as I can. They're going to store them for us in Bethel.
SMILEY: Andrew had three chest freezers full of foods indigenous to this region that were floated away in his shed when the storm hit. He's luckier than some, whose freezers broke open and the food was ruined. And it's not just food. Community members in Kwigillingok describe whole graveyards of family and ancestors swept away.
Across the Kuskokwin Bay in Quinhagak, residents say the beach looks like a bomb went off in a museum. Wooden masks, pieces of kayak frames, intricate carvings, weapon shafts litter the sand. A centuries-old archaeological dig, one of the largest collections of pre-contact Yupik artifacts in the world, is devastated.
Before colonial contact, Yupik people moved with the seasons from summer fish camps to winter sod houses. Then villages were built around schools and churches and in low-lying areas where a barge could dock. That means that swaths of these communities are vulnerable to the kind of storm surge flooding that devastated villages. Marvin Jimmy evacuated from Kipnuk. He says he hopes to return there and move to the hill that's near the village.
MARVIN JIMMY: That's where they were going to make it first, but a barge couldn't make it through. That's why they moved to where Kipnuk is right now.
SMILEY: He says his life in Kipnuk depends on the foods and land that are there. He can't really imagine being anywhere else.
For NPR News, I'm Sage Smiley, with reporting help from Nat Herz in Kwigillingok and Evan Erickson and Eric Stone in Bethel.
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