With rising seas at their doorstep, an Indigenous nation in Washington state moves onward and upward

The streets are beginning to take shape from the dust of the sprawling construction site on the rainy Pacific shores of Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula.

Soon, the signs will be posted for Kwela Drive, named after the salmonberry, and Ranch Road, which takes its name from The Ranch, a historical fishing ground.

Those signs will mark the way to the neighbourhood that will take shape here in coming years, with a mix of houses, accommodations for elders and a parcel for tiny homes. For the Quinault Indian Nation, it is in very literal terms a village on a hill, a refuge from the rising waters of climate change.

It is being built at a remove from the ocean surf that crashes into the shores of Taholah, the seaside community the Quinault are slowly preparing to leave.

Taholah is situated on a triangle of low land between the Quinault River and the Pacific, whose waters regularly sweep over the rocky beach piled high with driftwood, and into the village. It’s a problem, the Quinault say, that is getting worse as sea levels rise.

Over the coming decades, people here will move to new homes in the hilltop community they call Taholah Heights, making them among the first communities in the U.S. to relocate away from waters that have been a lifeblood – supplying the blueback sockeye favoured for its oily richness – but which are becoming an increasingly destructive force.

Relocation is no longer a theoretical concept here. It is under way, making this small outpost on the northwestern fringe of the U.S. an important test case for the complexities and costs of bending human existence to the realities of a changing world.

Moving is “vital for survival – to adapt to things out of our control,” said Shavaughna Underwood, a legislative aide to the Quinault leadership.

Two years ago, she was living in a house on First Avenue, in a house metres from the ocean, when a storm pushed the waters of a high tide across the seawall. The inundation coursed through a nearby sewage lagoon, sweeping a fetid pool of thigh-deep water to her front step.

“It was really gross,” she said.

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Next door, Sonny Curley had to carry his elderly mother to safety. “Up until a couple of years ago I thought we could just stay here and it would just be high water once a year,” he said. Mr. Curley is a commercial fisherman, comfortable with the ocean – a descendant of Chief Taholah, after whom the village is named. But after the flooding two years ago, which lingered for four or five days, “we realized there’s no way,” he said.

For years, the principal obstacle to moving was financial. But last fall, the White House awarded the Quinault US$25-million. That was in addition to millions from Washington state’s carbon tax fund. The nation has applied for another US$13-million from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and is hoping for money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It is investigating ways to use low-income housing tax credits to bring further construction.

Money it has already received is funding infrastructure work that is roughly two-thirds complete, laying the road, water, sewer and communications foundations for the 60 housing lots in the first new neighbourhood. “It’s at least a generation before this is fully ready – 20 years,” said Faith Webster, senior planner with the Quinault.

But Daniel Papp, a Quinault labourer who was burying water pipe on a recent day, has already set his eyes on a lot near the rear of the subdivision, on a small hill overlooking the forest that, he hopes, his children can use to sled in the winter.

Construction on the first homes is likely to begin next year.

“It’s a preservation project,” says Guy Capoeman, president of the Quinault Indian Nation. “If we don’t get everyone on the hill, our folks are going to continue to live in danger.”

Displaced from much of their traditional lands more than a century ago, Indigenous communities across the U.S. were forced to live in places that, a major 2021 study by U.S. researcher found, “are on average more exposed to climate change risks and hazards.” Canadian Indigenous communities face similar threats. The town of Tuktoyaktuk in the Northwest Territories has begun a piecemeal relocation from encroaching ocean waters, moving individual houses that are particularly vulnerable as the shoreline rapidly erodes.

For the Quinault, though, “it’s not only climate change,” says Mr. Capoeman. Just off the coast from Taholah lies the Cascadia subduction zone, a tectonic fault that is expected to one day produce the “really big one.” If that happens, the Quinault have been told they would have just 10 minutes to find safety.

The attachment to the ocean is strong, as the source of crabs and clams, halibut and black cod. But some in the community already describe tsunami nightmares. Local leadership built support for relocation in part by showing a simulation that showed a 10-metre tsunami wave travelling 15 kilometres up the Quinault River.

The Quinault reservation boundaries were set in an 1855 treaty, with the village located in an area that had previously been a seasonal fishing grounds. Flooding has been a regular occurrence. The part of the village where Mr. Curley lives was once swamp, he said. The Army Corps of Engineers, which maintains the seawall, “has been telling them to get out this corner of the village,” he said.

The village on the hill, Ms. Underwood hopes, can help to address broader problems. In the village today, asthma and pneumonia are common in overcrowded houses.

Plans for the new neighbourhood call for homes for single people and elders living alone, in addition to single-family structure. “We can build houses that are better for people’s health,” she said.

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Ms. Underwood, 27, works in Mr. Capoeman’s office. She is so steeped in the discussions around relocation that “I can talk about it in my sleep,” she said.

Yet she just built her own new house in the lower village, the spot the Quinault are preparing to abandon.

“It was either be homeless or build a house – in a tsunami zone,” she said.

She equipped it with granite countertops, a sliding pantry barn door – and a concrete support pad to make it easier to move one day. A modular home, it still sits on wheels. The people who installed it left the steel tow bars to make it easier to pull up to the new village when a spot becomes available. Ms. Underwood figures that will take five to 10 years.

That is, if the Quinault are successful in addressing the myriad obstacles that confront them. One is political. How much should local tribal members be expected to pay for new houses? How much credit can they get for homes they already have?

“We don’t have the magic formula for that yet,” Mr. Capoeman said.

Then there is money. Officially, the Quinault estimate for the relocation is US$150-million. But they have two villages they need to relocate – Taholah and Queets to the north – and though their populations are small, with about 1,500 living on reservation, they will need to rebuild fire halls, police stations, stores and gas stations. Mr. Capoeman wouldn’t be surprised if the full price tag is closer to $350-million.

The federal government sees the Quinault as a demonstration tribe, he said.

But that includes demonstrating the immense cost of this endeavour. The Quinault need considerable additional funds to complete the relocation. Mr. Capoeman worries that those who follow – others looking to relocate, and requesting money for those moves – will make it more difficult for those who started, describing a “domino effect of tribes and other communities that are going to start to have the same concerns, and want to move up on the hill.”

And then, he adds, “there will be competition for those dollars.”

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