The eye-opening, reported story of Jeremiah Kayoulik, an Alaskan Inupiat grappling with poverty, addiction and incarceration, and of the tenuous position of his hometown at the edge of civilization.
A hundred miles above the Arctic Circle, on a spit of land just seven miles long and 650 yards across at its widest point, some 400 members of the Inupiat tribe go about their lives. This is Kivalina, Alaska, where, like all of us, villagers fall in love, bicker with family, worry about money, and raise children. But unique to Kivalinan existence are extraordinary hardships that render life there nearly unrecognizable to most.
Kivalinans exist on the front lines of climate change. The cold arctic sea laps relentlessly at the island's shores, encroaching farther inland each year due to rising temperatures. Animals that the villagers used to hunt for subsistence-caribou, bowhead whale-no longer migrate on the same timetables or in the same patterns, eliminating not only a vital food source but a crucial tie to an ancestral way of life. The effects ripple outward. With each generation, more people are compelled to leave the island. As the land and population shrink in lockstep, a haze of despair insinuates itself into the Kivalinan mindset: suicides are on the rise, especially among young men; at least two have taken their own lives each year since 2016.
Through superlative immersive reporting, Jenni Monet introduces us to the people who are making their way amid these extraordinary circumstances. She focuses in particular on Jeremiah Kayoulik, the titular character, who by 13 had mourned the death of both parents and assumed responsibility for his three younger siblings, while also contending with incarceration and run-ins with law enforcement. In Jeremiah we see the stark, concrete consequences of struggles that are too often thought of in the abstract: the struggle of Indigenous People to hold tight to their forebears' way of life, the struggle to cohere as a community when colonialism, capitalism, and climate disaster are wedging apart its interests, and the struggle to maintain a connection to a landscape that is disappearing.
