Several wooden boxes poked up above ground along the coast in Savoonga, on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea. A few feet deep, the caches are traditionally filled with walrus, reindeer and whale meat. But residents have not been able to use them in a while and, aside from rainwater on the bottom, the cellars stood empty in September.
Ice cellars – or siqlugaq, in Yup’ik – are underground caches that Indigenous peoples in the Arctic have been using for thousands of years to store food. As the Arctic has been warming almost four times faster than other parts of the world, the practice is changing.
Researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks have been looking at how villages in Alaska – and Arctic communities in other countries – are reimagining the future of ice cellars. Last month, they visited St. Lawrence Island to discuss their findings.
“We’ve heard that some communities – not all of them but some – are having a hard time relying on storing food underground,” said Yoko Kugo, one of the researchers with the UAF Center for Cross-Cultural Studies who is leading the project.
For the past three years, Kugo and other UAF researchers have been visiting Savoonga and Gambell on St. Lawrence Island as well as Anaktuvuk Pass and Point Hope on the North Slope.
They learned how food preservation practices vary depending on local landscapes and diets. And they heard from residents that permafrost thaw and erosion have been causing some of their ice cellars to collapse or flood.
Despite the challenges, many continue using ice cellars and hope to preserve the practice, Kugo said.
Michael Koskey, another UAF researcher working on the project, said that while the climate is expected to get hotter throughout this century, the temperatures should fluctuate less underground. He said people might be able to maintain their traditions “if they’re willing to go a little deeper and a little further inland.”
The project, funded through the National Science Foundation, is a part of a larger effort to understand how Indigenous people in the Arctic and sub-Arctic have been adapting to climate change. Kugo and Koskey have been working with researchers who are doing similar work in Russia, Mongolia and Japan where people are making use of ice cellars too.
In Japan, the practice is more about preserving traditions, while in some communities in Russia and Mongolia, people need ice cellars to keep food and drinking water cold, Koskey said.
Alaska residents – especially elders – also like storing food in ice cellars because the food takes on a certain flavor they enjoy, Koskey said.
“In all of these places, to some degree, there's a hold on to it, because it's a tradition of the past. It's an identity thing,” Koskey said. “They feel they need to be able to continue living when things change inevitably again.”
During the most recent meeting in Savoonga, residents asked researchers about climate predictions – and stressed the resilience of Indigenous people in face of environmental change.
Elder and hunter John Waghiyi said that the warming is not detrimental to their way of life.
“We harvest walrus now, they're still very fat, healthy. Polar bears are fat, they're healthy,” Waghiyi said. “We still very actively harvest the marine mammal resources.”
Kugo, with UAF, invited more feedback at the meeting and said that researchers hope to continue to learn from residents.
“They have the traditional knowledge they have passed down for many generations,” she said.
Overall, she said that residents in the four Alaska communities asked them about practical takeaways from their research, like techniques and materials to repair ice cellars or to build community underground storage. There was also interest in exchanging knowledge with people from across the Arctic and sub-Arctic, Kugo said.
“They are looking for what they can do and do together,” she said. “This project might be a bridge between the communities.”
While researchers are nearing the end of the social science part of the project, climate evaluations are continuing.
Collaborations with other countries will go on as well. At the end of October, Kugo plans to present the project at the international symposium on Arctic research in Tokyo. She hopes to talk more with researchers from Japan, Mongolia and Siberia there as well.
