Time Is Running Out for Tribe Facing a Rising Ocean

Standing water lies beneath the home Sonny Curley shares with his parents and three children on the Quinault reservation a few steps from the Pacific Ocean in Washington's Olympic Peninsula. The back deck is rotting, and black mold speckles the walls inside, leaving the 46-year-old fisherman feeling drained if he spends too much time in the house. "You can tell your body's not right; it's fighting," said Curley, standing in the family's kitchen. "You're using your energy to fight something that's not supposed to be there." These are the effects of an ocean that has moved ever closer since Curley's parents bought the house about 15 years ago in Taholah, the tribe's largest village, where the Quinault River empties into the Pacific. He estimates the ocean was about 30 feet away back then. Now waves sometimes top a 15-foot seawall, and the family's been forced to evacuate three times in the past four years, as Curley's 84-year-old mother struggles with advancing dementia, the AP reports.

Faced with rising sea levels and increasing flooding, the Quinault Indian Nation has spent at least a decade working to relocate hundreds of residents and civic buildings in Taholah to higher ground. There's also the threat of an earthquake and tsunami from a major offshore fault line. But that relocation depends on money, and a patchwork of federal and state grants has fallen far below the estimated more than $400 million needed. Across the US, tribes suffer some of the most severe impacts of human-caused climate change but typically have the fewest resources to respond.

The Quinault, historically known as skilled fishers and hunters who traveled the water for trading, ceded millions of acres to the US government more than 150 years ago in exchange for a roughly 200,000-acre reservation on the coast. The tribe was promised peace and a permanent home, tribal leadership have said. But now a key section is threatened. The Quinault have made flooding-related disaster declarations 26 times from 1957 to 2022, and they have become more frequent. About one-quarter have come since 2016, despite the US Army Corps of Engineers raising the seawall by about 4 feet in 2014. "When you move people to marginal lands and you marginalize them within society, you layer climate change on top of that ... they're vulnerable to climate," says one researcher. (Read the full story here.)