Growing up in Chefornak, Jessica Lewis Nicori says her dad taught her how to listen to the weather.
“Go outside. Look at the sunrise. Look at the water,” Nicori said.
Now, she said she gives that same advice to her younger cousins before they go out hunting on a boat: “Just watch the weather,” Nicori said. “I know you can look it up on your phone, but my dad used to look at the clouds.”
Nicori told this story while she was on a panel at the Western Alaska Interdisciplinary Science Conference in Bethel on April 7.
She and other Y-K Delta community members, Elders and researchers explored shifts in weather patterns and flood events in the region as part of a multi-part panel called “Changing Landscapes.” It touched on fall storms, including ex-typhoon Halong, which displaced the populations of multiple villages in October 2025.
Several of the panelists felt the effects of that storm firsthand, including Kwigillingok Elder Fred Phillip. He said he felt there was a shift in weather events around the time of the 1964 earthquake that struck Alaska. That’s around when storms started to feel more intense.
“My first observation was back in mid-70s where the storm practically covered the whole village, the infrastructure, boardwalks,” Phillip said.
He remembers the community’s resilience, and how the village came together to mend the boardwalks.
“Our Elders told us at community meetings, the weather, the climate is changing,” Phillip said. “They didn't use the word climate change, but that's what, but that's what they were telling us.”
He said he remembers Elders saying there would be changes in the winter, that they wouldn’t be cold like they used to be.
Anthropologist Ann Fienup-Riordan presented testimonies from interviews collected in her work about the changing weather on the Y-K Delta, translated into English by Alice Rearden and Veronica Kaganak.
In one of those interviews, Pete Jacobs of Bethel shared a similar story about how his Elders tried to make sense of the changing weather patterns.
“He said they'd mentioned that the weather wasn't like it was in the past,” Fienup-Riordan read from the interview. “They tried to understand what caused it to become that way. People said in the past that the weather has become like this, following its people.”
That sentiment echoed throughout the conference: a teaching that the weather follows the behavior of its people.
Conference organizer Katie Basile with Alaska Sea Grant spoke of how the inverse could also be true.
“If the weather is changing because of our behavior, in a way that's scary. But we can change our behavior to change the weather again,” Basile said.
First-hand knowledge of changing weather patterns isn't only held by the Elders of a community. Environmental changes have informed reality for some of the Y-K Delta’s younger generations.
UAF undergraduate students Daisy Carl and Glennesha Carl grew up in Newtok — a community that faced years of worsening environmental impacts and erosion. In 2024, after a decades-long process, the village officially relocated to a new site, Mertarvik.
“My family was one of the first families to move to Mertarvik,” Daisy Carl said. “But I did my first everything [in] Newtok; I took my first steps and went on my first bike ride there. Little me was thinking about having a future at Newtok.”
Both students were part of a photography project documenting the human impacts of climate change on their community. Glennesha says she has also been writing about her experience while in college.
“For my classes at University of Alaska Fairbanks, I wrote a bunch of essays and poems about what Newtok was like. I was surprised how much people didn't know about Newtok. Many residents of Alaska that I spoke to also haven't heard about us,” Glennesha Carl said.
Carl said spreading awareness about communities hard-hit by climate change can help be a part of the solution, and it can bring in more funding. She said she stands by the communities impacted by Halong who are seeking to relocate.
“I want people to show more empathy for Kipnuk and Kwigillingok,” Glennesha Carl said. “It's their first time. For us, we had to do fundraising and apply for so many grants.”
Carl said she saw firsthand how working together as a community made the process much easier. She hopes more communities will involve youth and kids' voices when it comes to environmental change.
