Learning to Sing In the Midst of Climate Change

I shut the door and place my cell phone on my desk. It is routed to the loudspeaker so I can type as Orville Huntington from the Huslia Tribe in Alaska speaks softly to me from thousands of miles away. He sounds tired. He's been traveling and glad to be back home where on a good day it is 60 below.

I'm interviewing him for an article on polar science for Winds of Change. Before I began the interview, I searched for Huslia in the tattered Atlas my husband & I have had forever. I finally found it. It's pretty much in the middle of nowhere, but from the photos Orville sent me, it looks beautiful. There are 300 people in his village and it is situated alongside the Koyukuk River, a principal tributary of the Yukon River. Orville tells me that in English, Koyukuk means willow river. I ask him what his language is and he asks me what mine is. It goes like that. His language is Diné Athabascan.

When Orville returns home to be among his people again, he goes into the woods and burns food. Salmon is a good food to burn. Salmon is the cultural food of the Huslia. It brings him back to where he belongs. Orville is a polar scientist. He studies the impact of climate change on the ecosystems in the extreme polar regions. He does surveillance, he observes and records and measures and then relates back to other scientists all over the world. As an Alaska Native, he will tell you as a matter of fact the world always leans toward chaos. At the same time, he will tell you that crazy things are happening in the polar regions that he has never seen before: tumbleweeds are careening through the village, birds that he has never seen before are appearing, purple spring flowers are popping up in the fall. It's not just the ice melting. And probably, the most disturbing thing that is happening: thousands of fish are dying from strange diseases. He asks me if I have time for a story. I say yes and he tells me a story that is like a nightmare. I ask him if it frightened him and he says no. He says no because the Huslia are taught as children not to be afraid of things they see that can't be explained through logic. So he tells me this story and he says, "Now that story will be part of your life forever." I trust what he saw was real. Orville is a hunter and Huslia hunters see things all the time that don't make sense logically; the things they see make sense spiritually. "You can't go into the woods as a hunter and be weak," Orville tells me. "You have to be strong. Your songs must be strong. Learning to sing is hard. I know what the animals I hunt are saying to me and that's how I make my songs."

I ask him how his people will survive the impact of the climate change and he chuckles. "We'll be fine," he says. "We're already adapting. It's the people in the lower states who won't know what to do. I'm educating my people now to minimize what is coming. We can't control the outside world, but we can teach our children to be creative in their solutions."

I talk to this patient, soft-spoken man for over an hour and I still want to ask him questions. I have all these notes. Pages of notes. I have to find a way to piece them together. I have to make them whole. I think about the story he told me and I can't write it. It is a story for me and since I am not Huslia, I am still frightened by it. I wake at four in the morning and look over my notes and set them aside for an entire day. Tomorrow I will try to write this article, I tell myself. Tomorrow. In the meantime, to honor the Huslia, I try not to focus so much on my illness. I try to find some song inside me that is strong. I crawl back into my bed and sleep late into the morning.