UAF photo by Tom Moran.
Kwigillingok Elder David John speaks as part of a panel at the Western Alaska Interdisciplinary Science Conference in Bethel, Alaska, April 7, 2026. To the left of the photo is Kwigillingok Elder Fred Phillip. To the right is Kipnuk Elder Tim Samson and Jessica Lewis-Nicori, originally from Chefornak.

By Tom Moran

David John, a Yup’ik Elder from Kwigillingok, sat before an audience of scientists, students and residents and recounted the day the land became the ocean.

Speaking entirely in Yup’ik during the 2026 Western Alaska Interdisciplinary Science Conference in Bethel, John described holing up in his home when ex-Typhoon Halong tore through his village last October. At one point, his son looked at his GPS and told John that their coordinates were changing. They weren’t just weathering the storm, they were adrift in the current.

“He was in awe of the wind,” said Alice Rearden of Calista Education and Culture, who translated for John. “He said the land became like the ocean…and he said it’s a good thing the wind didn’t shift to the north because if it had shifted, they would have drifted out into the ocean.”

Shortly after John’s visceral account, the room shifted focus from narrative to data. Aviva Braun of the National Weather Service and Rick Thoman of UAF’s Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Preparedness delivered slideshows filled with ensemble forecasts and storm track maps. To a casual observer, their presentations might have seemed worlds apart from John’s. But to the record-breaking 160 WAISC attendees, they were two halves of the same whole.

A continuing tradition

WAISC is the brainchild of the late Todd Radenbaugh, a professor of environmental science at the UAF Bristol Bay Campus in Dillingham who organized the initial conference in 2008. The annual event is now led by Alaska Sea Grant, a federal-university partnership program based at UAF. WAISC’s location rotates among off-the-road system Western Alaska communities, including Dillingham, Nome, Bethel, Unalaska, Kotzebue and Naknek. Each conference centers on issues specific to its particular region.

“There’s always this place-based aspect to it because the goal is to bring in community members from the place where it takes place, but also the outlying communities, and to engage with the scientists in a conversation,” said Davin Holen, a coastal resilience specialist for Alaska Sea Grant. “That’s always been what makes this conference unique.”

Bethel is a hub community of about 6,300 people located on the Kuskokwim River, roughly 50 miles from its outlet into the Bering Sea. Given the location, it’s unsurprising that the central topic of the conference was ex-Typhoon Halong. The storm largely destroyed the coastal communities of Kipnuk and Kwigillingok, significantly damaged more than a dozen other villages and displaced 1,600 people.

“I think Halong and the urgency of an entire village being wiped out, people just thought, this is important,” said Chris Maio, a UAF professor of geography and repeat WAISC attendee. “This is not just a, ‘Let's meet and share some ideas and stuff.’ There's almost an emergency to it, to strengthening collaborations and determination to see this work go forward.”

Discussions of Halong and other recent storms dominated the first few conference sessions, which also served to illustrate another unique aspect of the conference: the weight given to traditional local knowledge. The event opened with a panel of John and other Yup’ik Elders describing their own experiences with Halong, as well as with climate and weather in general. John shared how people of his village charted changes in weather. A fog bank to the northwest presages a windstorm, he said. Trees get darker before a warm spell and make snapping noises before a cold one.

“When you're bringing in researchers, it’s just natural to bring in the experts on the land and the culture and the language,” said Basile. “The Yup’ik people are the original scientists of this place. They're the experts on the weather around here. Even the language has evolved around the weather. And so it makes sense in my brain to just pair the two together.”

While the event exposed researchers to a local perspective on Halong, it benefited locals as well, offering some an opportunity to step back and examine the storm from an objective distance.

“I was here (during Halong) working with people who were evacuated from the communities, and so I was in response mode and didn’t have a clear understanding of what actually happened,” said attendee Melanie Fredericks, who directs the Family Services Division for the Association of Village Council Presidents in Bethel. “And so the presentations about ex-Typhoon Halong were helpful for me, just in my processing and understanding.”

‘Narratives from a Resilient Coast’

While Halong loomed large at WAISC, it was ultimately just one topic in a three-day conversation that exemplified the term “interdisciplinary.” The theme of the event was “Narratives from a Resilient Coast,” a focus that both highlighted the storytelling bent of the conference and invited a huge breadth of subject matter.

The first day was dedicated to climate, landscapes and ecosystems in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, with topics including river erosion, fisheries management and sea-level tracking tools. The keynote address described the Nunalleq archaeological site in the village of Quinhagak.

From there, the subject matter got more eclectic. For example, a session called “Unearthing Stories from the Land” consisted of four presentations:Grade school and middle school students with Bethel’s “Dirt Busters” Lego robotics team described an archaeology activity book they created. Four enthusiastic Bethel birders listed avian species viewable around town. A graduate student from the University of Northern Iowa discussed climate impacts to the Iditarod. And another presenter summarized efforts by the local public radio station to digitize interviews with Elders.

“We wanted to stick with this theme of story, because when science is paired with story, it’s just so much more accessible,” noted Basile. “And so that theme allowed more topics in.”

Attendees also partook of field trips to a local organic farm or the headquarters of the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge. Others attended workshops on science illustration, skin sewing or water security. For some participants, the diversity of the conference offerings was a highlight of the event.

“I keep telling everybody, this is like a vacation for me. I’m just not thinking about my regular day job, like everything I do in a typical day,” noted Fredericks. “But it’s still very relatable to what I should know and what can be helpful to know in my day-to-day.”

“Vacation” is perhaps not the first word that sprang to mind for some of the out-of-town participants, many of whom were getting their first glimpse of Alaska off the road system. Walking to the conference venue, the well-appointed Yupiit Piciryarait Cultural Center on UAF’s Kuskokwim Campus, was an exercise in dodging both abyssal spring puddles and the splash from passing pickups and ATVs.

Bethel itself is a disorderly assemblage of small houses, imposing tribal and agency buildings, above-ground water pipes and gaily painted dumpsters, all fronting a rapidly thawing channel of the Kuskokwim. The early April conference brought with it snow, sleet, rain, wind and sunshine in equal measure.

The impact on faraway attendees can be very different than attending a conference in urban Alaska, noted Renee Fredericks, a native of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta (and Melanie Fredericks’ cousin) who works for the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium in Anchorage. She described explaining a honey bucket (the flush-toilet alternative in places without piped water) to some conference-goers, and also pondered the sticker shock some probably experienced when they opened a restaurant menu.

“When you're out here, you see how people are living, and it’s just so different from a city that you live in in the Lower 48,” she said. “A picture’s worth a thousand words, but, boy, being here in the middle of it is worth way more.”

The next WAISC will take place in spring 2027 in Nome.

Tom Moran is a science writer for Alaska Sea Grant.