Standing near his front yard, Charles Warsinske gazes at the sprawling expanse of rippling open waters that surrounds his native village of Taholah in northwestern Washington State. The seventy-two-year-old fondly recalls growing up on this remote stretch of Pacific coast, digging for clams and playing football with his friends on a large beach near his parents’ home.
That beach has all but disappeared, submerged under rising waters that have gobbled up chunks of this tiny settlement just west of Seattle, which members of the Native American tribes belonging to the Quinault Indian Nation have called home for generations. Once a half mile away, the sea now laps against the village’s shore. Residents are exposed to repeated flooding, as the stone seawall that protects the land is regularly breached by winter storms.
“It’s very expensive to move buildings and infrastructure.” - Quinault Indian Nation Vice President Fawn Sharp
Since 1950, the sea level off Washington’s coast has risen by up to four inches, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. As the climate warms, the water level around Taholah, on the Quinault Indian Reservation, is predicted to rise up to 2.6 feet by 2100, spelling potential disaster for the low-lying coastal community. The village lies in the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a fault line which puts it at additional risk of inundation from a major earthquake and tsunami.
The resulting vulnerability has pushed the nation to pursue a dramatic solution. In 2017, the Quinault signed off on an ambitious plan to relocate nearly 700 tribal members and key at-risk buildings—including the reservation’s school, senior center, food market, and gas station—to higher ground.
“It was a heart-wrenching decision,” says Warsinske, a former community planner for the Quinault. “But there was no other option. The signs of dangers were on our doorsteps in the most literal way.”
Across the country, dozens of coastal Native American tribes are struggling to cope with the threats to their lands, cultures, and economies wrought by climate change and other environmental factors. Most communities are opting to adapt in place, reinforcing existing infrastructure or building anew. But those like the Quinault who make the difficult decision to relocate face institutional hurdles.
The rising sea is just one way that climate change is affecting the Quinault. The summer runoff from Anderson Glacier—located in the Olympic Mountains, northeast of the reservation—once fed cool water into the Quinault river system, making it a welcoming habitat for salmon, especially sockeye salmon, called “blueback” by the Quinault, a fish population unique to the region.
Taholah, a Quinault Indian Nation village, is being perilously encroached on by the rising sea and is being moved to safety.
But after decades of shrinking, the last remains of the glacier melted a decade ago. With a warming ocean and a lack of glacial melt to keep the river flowing cold and deep year-round, it has become increasingly difficult for salmon to find their way to spawning grounds above Lake Quinault.
As a result, fisheries are being upended: “We used to process 70,000 pounds of fish a day at this time of the year,” says Shane Underwood, manager of the Quinault Indian Nation’s fish processing plant in Taholah. “Now we’re lucky to catch half of that.”
In April, for the fourth year in a row, the Quinault closed the river to blueback fishing after its fisheries department forecast a sixth consecutive record-low run.
“It’s a big deal,” says Tyler Jurasin, the Quinault’s fisheries operations manager, noting that almost half of the reservation’s population directly depends on fishing for survival. “We have people taking temporary jobs to pay the bills.”
There is also a painful cultural loss that comes with the dwindling salmon numbers, says Justine James, a Quinault cultural resource specialist and tribal member. “As long as I can remember, attending funerals, weddings, birthday parties, I grew up with cooked blueback on a cedar stick, just as my family has for thousands of years.”
These days, however, James isn’t eating a lot of salmon—and neither are most tribal members. “We have opted not to have salmon as often, especially blueback, even for tribal rituals,” he says. “The numbers have dropped so low that we’re trying to preserve them in any way we can. We don’t want to be the last generation to see the blueback return to the mighty Quinault.”
In response, the nation created the Quinault Salmon Recovery Program, a community endeavor to re-create the environment that has long made the Quinault River a perfect habitat for the blueback. This effort includes buffering streams, repairing culverts and roads near the river, enhancing riverbanks with native trees, and clearing fish runs in an effort to reconnect the river to its floodplain and create better spawning habitats.
Jurasin estimates the entire project could be completed within the next decade if funding sources are available. “We have the strategy,” he says. “But implementation will depend on available dollars and timing.”
Construction is already underway at the new village, which rests on 200 acres of land about half a mile from the existing village. The work began with the Generations Building, a facility hosting senior services and early childhood education programs that was built using $15 million worth of tribal funding. Moving the remainder of the village will be a much costlier challenge.
“It’s very expensive to move buildings and infrastructure,” says the Quinault Indian Nation Vice President Fawn Sharp, adding that the entire relocation could cost as much as $400 million when all is said and done.
This is no small task. Anna Weber, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council who studies climate adaptation policies, says there is no single government framework designated to help tribes threatened by climate change navigate the complex, costly process of community relocation.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency provides financial help to communities coping with climate change, as does the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The Isle de Jean Charles Resettlement Project, for example, relocated one Louisiana community farther inland, away from the sinking settlement, with federal funds from the department. But Weber says little of this goes toward large-scale relocation efforts like the Quinault’s.
“The support is tied to specific disaster declarations, so communities can apply for funds only after they are hit by a flood, wildfire, hurricane, or other disaster,” she explains. Recent research has also found that Native Americans are less likely to get help from this pool of limited federal aid than other Americans.
Other federal agencies, including the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Army Corps of Engineers, provide disaster assistance. But funding is broad and must be spread nationally, Weber says, limiting the scope of its effects. “It’s sort of a drop in the bucket.”
The Tribal Coastal Resiliency Act, a bipartisan piece of legislation sponsored by Congressperson Derek Kilmer, Democrat of Washington, aims to provide tribes with more relief. The bill, which was reintroduced earlier this year and is currently moving through the U.S. Congress, plans to create dedicated federal funding to help tribal communities undertake climate-change adaptation projects.
“The Tribal Coastal Resiliency Act has an enormous potential to help the Quinault Indian Nation and other tribes grappling with the effects of climate change,” says Sharp, who is lobbying for more federal support in her additional role as president of the National Congress of American Indians, which represents more than 500 registered tribes.
Sharp is also seeking alternative funding streams to finance her tribe’s relocation. She came close to realizing this goal in 2018, when Washington State almost passed a ballot initiative that would have placed a $15 per ton fee on carbon emitted in the state, with 10 percent of the revenue dedicated to tribal climate-mitigation projects. The measure was defeated amid a multimillion-dollar campaign led by the fossil fuel industry.
“That was probably the lowest point I hit in all my years of climate fight,” says Sharp, a former lawyer who helped create the ballot initiative.
Sharp is currently working on a proposal to place a carbon fee on businesses operating in the reservation, which features rich timberlands and a port. She’s also contemplating a lawsuit against oil companies that, she believes, “are directly responsible for causing the damage” and should be paying “for generations of exploitation.”
For Sharp, despite knowing that the road ahead may be long and difficult, the promise of a new village on higher ground offers hope and opportunity.
“While there’s a sense of loss in closing the lower village chapter, there’s also the chance of opening an entirely new one in the new village,” she says. “And that’s been a galvanizing part of the process—engaging with the community in an exercise to envision the future that we all see, our collective future.”