#togiak

Banishment: It’s a thing in Alaska, but has it gone too far?

Togiak, Alaska in the fall. (Alaska National Guard photo)

YOU’RE OUTTA HERE

It is happening all over rural Alaska at an increasing rate: Tribal councils get together, make a decision, and give some bad actor the boot. Law and order in Native villages is different when there’s no State Trooper post.

But in a new twist, Togiak Tribal Council banished a crusty older white Alaskan, a longterm…

Frank Logusak, a tribal elder in Togiak, a ramshackle settlement of 842 people on Alaska’s remote Bristol Bay, is a hunter and a fisherman, a Yupik native who knew the village’s last shaman and can still build a sod house like the one his grandparents grew up in. Logusak is no scientist, but in his 64 years here, he has watched and felt startling changes in the world around him: shorter and warmer winters, less snow and ice, fewer bears and moose to hunt and increasingly scarce berries to gather in the summer.

For the last two winters, the village of Togiak has had almost no snow—a highly unusual phenomenon. In early April, the surrounding hills are barely dusted with a few patches of white. It is the same in the other 30 villages around Bristol Bay, on the easternmost frontier of the Bering Sea. The area is populated mostly by native Yupiks, descendants of fur-clad Siberians who crossed the Bering Land Bridge before the end of the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago.