Sea level rise, associated coastal erosion, river flooding, and permafrost thaw are contemporary threats to the infrastructure and sustainability of villages and tribes throughout Alaska and many parts of the Arctic. State and Federal agencies already work with villages to develop plans that involve the collection of data to determine rates and risks to ways of life. The NSF Navigating the New Arctic (NNA) program (among 10 Big Ideas) aims to increase the co-production of knowledge to accelerate the development of sustainable planning trajectories for villages. Yet bringing academic science to address contemporary and future challenges must involve partnering village educational and vocational needs for sustainability along with process, engineering, and climate change studies to fill data gaps leading to social and engineering solutions. COVID travel restrictions made building collaboration and partnerships more challenging for NNA, but we scientists must also embrace the exposure of racism and colonialism this past year across society and use it as an opportunity for science and indigenous communities to create open dialog leading, hopefully toward genuine solution-based science.

As we navigate forward in this changing Arctic, we have attempted to chart a course that holistically considers both the physical world and human dimensions of these new realities. Accordingly, any rigorous study of the changing Arctic must be grounded in the lived experience and self-determination of its inhabitants and provide opportunity for people to take ownership over their own short- and long-term response to these grand challenges. Therefore, we developed a proposal to embrace the Yupik and Cup’ig cultural relationship with the changing phases of water (“meq”) in the Arctic environment of the outer Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, including the impact of rising sea level, coastal erosion, river flooding, permafrost collapse and its impact on traditional ecosystem services as well as safe and sustainable water and sanitation infrastructure. Following on from an NNA planning grant, we deepened existing partnerships with Arctic people in Mekoryuk and Kongiganak, through collaboration with the Alaska Pacific University/Alaska Native Tribal Health Council (ANTHC). We have coproduced new dialogues with communities at risk to emerging environmental threats caused by climate change. This was a collective journey to join traditional knowledge systems with western science tools to quantify the rate of landscape change in an uncertain Arctic future and evaluate how this change impacts long range planning to meet regional needs for sustainable livelihoods and infrastructure. We also plan to use these data in partnership with the Alaskan regulatory ecosystem and other NNA projects to suggest changes in structural barriers faced by underserved communities in Alaska. Our approach is intellectually linked to both formal and informal education in the villages of Mekoryuk and Kongiganak, but also builds and integrates new scholars from the Alaska Pacific University (a Tribal university) in careers in environmental sustainability, community engagement, and climate communication. Our work sharing Indigenous knowledge through an Indigenous educational philosophy and the newest scientific approaches will provide a means of forecasting the outcome or rates of landscape change that will not only inform our partner communities planning for future water/sanitation infrastructure but also provide a predictive framework for similar communities over the coming decades in contrasting deltaic mud and bedrock foundation systems.

Our resulting science proposal emerged as a collaboration between the villages of Mekoryuk and Kongiganak, UMass, APU, and UAF. It was a journey of collaboration and vulnerability to create a vision.