In late summer, Alaska’s tundra is littered with little round dark purple berries the size of pencil erasers. In the Cup’ik dialect, they’re known as kavlakuaraq. Botanists call them Empetrum nigrum. English speakers in Alaska call them blackberries or crowberries.
Last October, Victoria Hill went looking for the berries, which normally cover the tundra behind Hooper Bay, a Bering Sea coastal village of about 1,300 people. She found a few, but not nearly enough to fill a berry bucket. “There’s almost next to nothing,” she said. “Not like a carpet like it used to be. They were just scattered. You had to go far.”
A little more than a year earlier, in September 2022, the most dramatic storm in Alaska’s living memory slammed into the state’s Bering Sea coast. Small, predominantly Indigenous communities bore the brunt of Typhoon Merbok, which gathered momentum in the Pacific Ocean before it moved northeast into the Bering Sea. The region is still recovering today. Homes were flooded, ripped from their foundations and destroyed. Fish camps were ruined. Many people lost their boats and the gear they need to harvest their main sources of food: fish, seal and moose. And crowberries and other subsistence foods were lost, too. In a part of the U.S. where the subsistence lifestyle is essential for survival, Typhoon Merbok’s impact was devastating.
And so, like many others in her community, Hill, who works for the Hooper Bay Tribal Council, went without blackberries this year. In Hooper Bay and other Alaska Native communities off the state’s road system, fresh fruits and vegetables are hard to come by. The lack of crowberries — one of the only fresh foods people have easy and affordable access to — means people have lost an otherwise abundant and easily accessible source of antioxidants, vitamin C and fiber, as well as an antibacterial home remedy.
“There’s almost next to nothing.”
Another subsistence staple was also missing: mouse food. The zesty, woody roots of tundra grass and other plants are cached by rodents for the winter and then harvested by humans and mixed with moose soup or seal meat. There are two kinds of mouse food: a sweet-tasting teardrop-shaped root known as utngungssaq, and a longer, stick-like variety called marallaq. “Those ones are good,” Hill said. “They’re nutty.” They’re high in fiber, contain protein and many Alaska Natives consider them very nutritious.
When the remnants of Typhoon Merbok hit Hooper Bay, floodwaters from the storm surge inundated an area 18 miles inland. Brackish water, many feet deep, soaked the land for days. “I don’t think the mouse population recovered, because there was just water all over,” said Hill. As a result, Hill and her neighbors are going without mouse food this year.
There are other signs the storm impacted wildlife and vegetation. Roy Bell — “the botanist,” as Hooper Bay residents call him — has spent his whole life out on the land, learning about plants. “I noticed that the areas where they flooded, many — like the medicines and the berries — they’ve all gotten bad,” Bell said.
With fish, seal and moose also missing from local freezers, people are instead relying more heavily on the local store, where 10 pounds of oats costs $28.99 and a box of Cheerios is $17. “So I am trying to square my money, trying not to spend too much money,” said Bernadette Rivers, standing in the store in October, planning a meal for three of the seven people who live with her. She was holding an onion, and a one-pound ribeye priced at $21.39. Rivers, who works the bingo games run by the tribe and the city, receives $1,900 a month from the state’s supplemental nutrition program, “but it’s not enough for the whole month,” she said. “It’s gone in two and a half weeks.” Subsistence foods are essential. “Over the summer when my sons are here, they go catch herring fish, and that’s what I survive on over the winter,” she said. Last fall, someone gave her a moose leg, which she tucked away in her freezer.
ROUGHLY 18 MILES INLAND from Hooper Bay, about a dozen small wooden shacks once stood on the riverbank overlooking the barge landing in Chevak. All were severely damaged or destroyed by Merbok’s hurricane-force winds, their contents scattered: Hunting rifles, fishing rods and nets, tools, gas cans, personal floatation devices and all sorts of other flotsam are still scattered across the landscape.
“I lost so many fishing nets,” said Ryan Bukowksi, who lives in Chevak. The typhoon knocked out power, so he also lost all the fish he’d harvested and stored away for that winter: Nearly everything in his two chest freezers thawed out and spoiled. “I ended up getting rid of all of that and starting all over,” he said. “I didn’t want (to get) botulism.”
“I lost so many fishing nets.”
Bukowksi said he applied for individual assistance from FEMA. He received a small amount, which he used to buy rope, paddles, buoys, anchors, boat batteries and more, but it wasn’t enough to replace all the food and gear he’d lost to the storm. He lost nine nets, for example, but was only able to buy two new ones. And now those are gone, too: “Some of them got stolen this summer, because everybody’s short on nets,” he said. “But I don’t mind. I can start all over again next year.”
Bukowski is lucky. He’s young and in good shape and he can still get out to fish. But the burden on people like him is heavy: He’s not only fishing for his family, he’s also fishing for friends and neighbors who haven’t fared as well since the storm.
This story was adapted from reporting for local public media station KYUK and supported by a field reporting grant from the Center for Rural Strategies and GRIST.
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