Tununak is a traditional Central Yup’ik community on the northwest coast of Nelson Island, on a narrow barrier spit between the Bering Sea and the mouth of the Tununak River, about 119 miles (192 km) west-southwest of Bethel and 71 miles (114 km) south-southeast of Hooper Bay, Alaska. Nelson Island is the second-largest island in the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge. Its western shore rises in high, rugged cliffs, while the south is low-lying and dotted with small lakes and streams. Peaks in the north exceed 1,300 feet (400 m). The island is formed by Quaternary and older Cenozoic olivine basalt, resting on Cretaceous or Cenozoic sedimentary bedrock of sandstone, siltstone, shale and conglomerate. Tidal channels separate the island from the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta to the north and east, a wet lowland of alluvial fans and permafrost that can reach 656 feet (200 m) deep. Sand dunes taller than 100 feet (30 m) line the Bering Sea coast, and riverbanks and shorelines are eroding severely. Summer temperatures range from 42 to 59 degrees Fahrenheit (6 to 15 degrees Celsius), and winter temperatures average 2 to 19 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 17 to minus 7 Celsius). Annual precipitation is about 17 inches (43 cm), and snowfall about 28 inches (71 cm), which wind drifts into sheltered spots. Pack ice normally forms in mid-November and breaks up in early May.

Humans have lived at Tununak for many centuries. Old Tununak, an archaeological and historical site adjoining the village, has about 250 features running parallel to the coastline and to historical beach ridges, including sod house pits. Its occupation is estimated to span at least 3,000 years. The Thule culture, dating from about AD 1000 and considered ancestral to modern Alaska Native peoples, lived in small semisubterranean houses framed with driftwood and covered in sod blocks. Over time, its people adopted larger men’s houses, or qasgiq, where men over about ten years old slept, ate, worked and taught younger men. In 1878, Edward W. Nelson, a Smithsonian naturalist, recorded six residents, one a non-Native trader. Jesuit missionaries opened a small chapel and school in 1889, but they found the villagers hard to convert, citing their migratory subsistence culture and powerful shamans. The mission closed in 1892. A government school was built in 1925, and a Northern Commercial Company store opened in 1929. The Bureau of Indian Affairs later ran a school in a building since converted to school district housing. Father Paul Deschout lived on the island from 1934 to 1962, and his long relationship with residents had great influence. The 1950s brought change through service in the Alaska Territorial Guard, work in fish canneries, a high school and a facility for tuberculosis treatment. By the late 1970s, the men’s house had been abandoned.

Today, the village consists of approximately 70 houses, one main road running from the airstrip to the school, a community hall, two stores, and a post office. Most of the village is without running water; families pack water in 5-gallon (23-l) buckets from wells and use honey buckets for sewage. The largest building in the village is the school and the community hall is used for village potlatches, meetings, elections, bingo, and dancing. Tununak had 411 residents in the 2020 census, up from 327 in 2010, and 97 percent identified as Alaska Native. Subsistence fishing, hunting and gathering remains central to diet and culture. Seal meat, seal oil and herring are staples, and beluga, walrus and Steller sea lions are also taken. Coho is the most harvested salmon species, and blackfish and edible plants supplement the diet. Erosion threatens the spit on which the village sits, as storm surge and river processes attack both shores. A gabion seawall built in 1984 and a 2,500-foot (762-m) boardwalk, completed in 2015 on the river side, slow the loss. A 2021 state assessment projects that most infrastructure will be out of erosion’s reach through 2075. It does expose one road and the bridge to the landfill and old airport, at a replacement cost of about $500,000. The assessment did not account for climate change. Scientists believe warming is accelerating erosion in many Alaska coastal communities as sea ice protects shorelines for fewer months a year, and the Bering Sea recorded record-low winter ice in 2018 and 2019. Read more here and here. Explore more of Tununak and Nelson Island here: