The Climate Front: People Who Live There

By Robert Lundahl, Filmmaker and Journalist

(Los Angeles, CA) My interview with Patrick Anderson explores the impacts to front-line communities in Alaska and the Lower 48 as they confront not only intergenerational trauma, but the present day trauma of climate change.

PATRICK ANDERSON

Robert Lundahl:

Patrick could you introduce yourself and give us a little bit of background on your activities in Alaska in the field of health?

Anderson:

I certainly can, Robert. My name is Patrick Anderson, and I am myself Alaska native. I come from two different tribes so in my culture, being matrilineal, we claim our mother's tribe as our predominant tribe. So I am Tlingit Indian, and I come from the Eagle moiety and one of the clans in the Eagle moiety is mine, the Shangukeidí, or Thunderbird - so I was born in Alaska - ended up living in Seattle for a number of years, fortunate in some ways, unfortunate in others, but to that, background, led me to an undergraduate degree at Princeton University and a law degree at the University of Michigan.

So when I returned to the state of Alaska, I came back listening to my mother's voice - which is that you know after you've finished all of that you really should go back to Alaska and to help Alaska native people, so that's what I did and here I am, about 50 years later.

Robert Lundahl:

We talked about a number of things and one of them was where to begin –

Because, in our group at City University of New York, Hunter College - The Greenbelt Society in the Department of Geography and Environmental Science - we were talking about environment and climate change and you brought up health issues involving toxic stress and other matters that impact native Alaskans disproportionately. Can you introduce us to that concept and what you meant by that and how it fits into the bigger picture of environment?

Anderson:

I sure can Robert. Later in my career, I began to think that law was not really the field I wanted to be in, and the first position that I was hired to, was a compactor, which is an Alaska native organization that operates a contract with the United States government to administer health care within a certain region. During my tenure at that first job I came across a study, that to me, explained a lot of the issues that Alaska natives have faced.

My mother attended a Catholic boarding school for her primary school and went to a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school for high school – that was framed in a different way after I became familiar with the adverse childhood experience study and later on the whole world of toxic, tolerable, and normal stress.

I'm not trained as a psychologist, I'm not - I wasn't really into biology, chemistry…

But, since discovering the adverse childhood experience study I have related it to a number of root causes of problems and issues that not only Alaska natives but non-natives have faced, particularly in Alaska.

And so in the world of toxic stress behind me (fig 1) is the Village of Kivalina.

and within that community a very high number of residents will have significant amounts of experience that could qualify them to be a regular sufferer of toxic stress.

There are a lot of neurobiological and physical and chemical reactions to the stress response that I won't go into but what it does is it affects normal day-to-day living for all people, so when we were talking about climate change, if that was an empty peninsula behind me, there's no problem or issues - nature tears land up constantly but when you put people onto it not only changes the dynamics based on location based on the kind of weather that hits it but it changes dynamics because there are now people there who have lives and their lives are impacted and affected by what happens to them. If they're used to it, if it's normal, that is a different response than if it is unusual and out of the ordinary, so toxic stress has been a huge part of my thinking in terms of the root causes of a lot of problems that strike Alaska over the past half a century, or actually more than a century.

Robert Lundahl:

What are the challenges that native Alaskans in a village like Kivalina face specifically?

Anderson:

Well, the first is that the largest community next to Kivalina is Kotzebue. Kotzebue has about 3,000 people – its not a real large community - it's rural by U.S standards, but it is the regional hub and so in order to get to Kivalina, which has no roads, you need to fly from Kotzebue or from Anchorage.

There's a 3 000 foot runway on the peninsula that Kivalina is located on so any airplane that goes in has to be able to land on a gravel runway of about 3000 feet in length in sometimes very challenging weather in addition to that you can see that it's surrounded by water, but wells don't work there so they get their water source from another source bring in raw water into a huge tank. I think it's a seven thousand eight thousand gallon tank in Kivalina and from there they have to purify it – and from that point

I don't believe all of the homes are connected and in order to get water sometimes you have to drive to, not in a vehicle necessarily, but you have to have water picked up and delivered to your home, same thing is true with fuel.

The Chukchi sea and that area around Kivalina is covered in ice for a lot of the winter, and as a result, there aren't any barges coming in with fuel so there are some huge fuel tanks that carry all of the fuel supply for the community for the entire year and they fill it maybe once a year they have to have the money to be able to do that and in addition they have to have good weather and they have to schedule the barge in order to be able to commit plus the financing that comes in…