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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, just as Curley's 84-year-old mother struggles with advancing dementia.
“It’s scary,” said Hannah Curley, Sonny's sister, who lives three blocks away and hasn't had to evacuate. “Nights when it’s really stormy, I’ll go and check on them a couple times during the night, and then I have cameras up too, so we can see if it’s getting really bad.”
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.
“Where are we going to go if the house does get in a state where it’s not livable?” Sonny Curley wondered. “Where are my parents going to go and where are my kids going to go?”
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EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part of a series of on how tribes and Indigenous communities are coping with and combating climate change.
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Across the U.S., tribes suffer some of the most severe impacts of human-caused climate change but typically have the fewest resources to respond. Along the coasts, where a federal report has predicted seas will rise 10 to 12 inches (0.25 to 0.3 meters) by 2050, tribes have taken key steps toward relocation. That includes the Shoalwater Bay Indian Tribe, just 91 miles (146 kilometers) south of Quinault, and Newtok Village on the western coast of Alaska.
“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,” said Michael Spencer, who researches and teaches on social work and public health among Indigenous people at the University of Washington.
The Quinault, historically known as skilled fishers and hunters who traveled the water for trading, ceded millions of acres to the U.S. 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.
Taholah is close to the ocean and rests on estuary soils and fill that are infiltrated more easily by saltwater. With tidal ranges that average 9 feet, the sea level rise that is expected to accelerate in coming years will have significant impact, said John Callahan, climate scientist for NOAA.
Quinault has 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 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers raising the seawall by about 4 feet (1.22 meters) in 2014.
The flooding has left some homes plagued by mold and destroyed several outbuildings. Likely worse is in store: Taholah is expected to see a sea level rise of 1 to 2.6 feet by the year 2100, according to a 2018 Washington Coastal Resilience Project report.
“We’ve seen the ocean come over the berm and actually come up against and even on top of the roofs of homes. In my 50-something years, I’ve never seen something like that,” said Quinault President Guy Capoeman.
The more than 3,000-member tribe has an economy powered by the timber industry, its seafood store and a beach resort and casino. About one-fourth of the people live below the poverty line, according to Census data.
The tribe published a relocation plan in 2017, and laid out 59 residential lots with sidewalks, street signs and fire hydrants on a site about a half-mile away and 130 feet above sea level. Around 300 dwelling units are planned. They've already moved their Generations building, which includes elders programs, Head Start and day care.
The new village is planned as a climate-resilient space, with a farm to provide food if they are cut off during a disaster and solar and biomass for energy.
But progress has been slow. More than half of $25 million awarded by the Interior Department — most of it planned for building the first homes -- has been held up for a lengthy process of submitting planning and design documents.
“I guess when being awarded the funds, you’re thinking: ‘Let’s get this going. We have the money, we’re ready to do this. Let’s move,” said Alyssa Johnston, project developer for the relocation. “But after a few months of being in this position, you just kind of learn that there’s a lot more to it, to acquiring the funding.”
They’ve gotten $12 million through Washington state’s Climate Commitment Act, but most will go toward relocating another Quinault village, Queets, which also has flooding issues. A small amount has been earmarked to study salmon declines due to glacier melt and rising river temperatures. The tribe relies on the fish for everything from food to jobs to cultural traditions.
In 2020, Quinault took an $8 million loan for the Generations building and has continued to search for additional funding. But last year the tribe was turned down for two key federal grants.
Tribal leaders say no one will be forced to move, and some residents don't want to.
From his small home perched 17 feet off the ground, James DeLaCruz Sr. has watched the landscape change over the past 30 years. He once planned to build a sitting area on the beach outside his door, but it's no longer wide enough.
Yet DeLaCruz, 75, calls the ocean his “happy place,” finding comfort from the sound of waves. He even enjoys storms.
“At any day, the earth can split out there; a great big wave. If that’s our calling, that’s our calling. So I don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ve lived next to the ocean for 75 years. I’m still here.”
And he worries about the cost. So does the Curley family, with the parents afraid of starting over with a new mortgage long after retiring. They'd be doing it without Sonny's help; declining salmon numbers have sharply cut his income, and he recently had to stop contributing to payments.
But Sonny and Hannah know it's time to go.
“It’s kind of a love-hate relationship that all of us have in this area, because we are a people of the water, of the ocean, the river,” Hannah Curley said.
“But on the other hand, the ocean has a mind of its own and you can’t change things.”
