In the Fulton Street Subway station in New York City, the crew of eight kids from Western Alaska waited for the train. It's a place 16-year-old Jojean George said feels far from home.
“It's very new to us because in Alaska the air is, like, clear and fresh, and here it's like the humidity is very, how do I call it, like, strong, warm, really warm,” George explained. “Like a maqi – a steam bath.”
After a two-day journey involving four planes and an overnight stay in Bethel, the students were on the last leg of their trek, headed out to Brooklyn. There, their work was on public display as part of an exhibit called “Lessons from Newtok,” chronicling life as kids growing up through climate impacts.
It took a lot of help to get the students to New York, including grants from the JKW Foundation, International Teaching Artists Collective, and donations from the Mertarvik and Bethel communities. Bethel-based photojournalist Katie Basile led the project and chaperoned the students through the city with members of the Mertarvik school.
For most of the group, it was their first time outside of Alaska, and their first time in a major city. In less than two days, they’d gone from a village of 600 to a city of over 8 million people on the opposite side of the country.
The crew shuffled into a packed subway car, one of their school chaperones carrying a cauyaq, a Yup’ik dance drum, positioned in the tangles of a drawstring backpack. As the subway car bent and swayed it moved with him, pressing against the sticky shoulders of strangers packed together like groceries in a tote.
The students grew up in the village of Newtok. In October 2024, the community finished evacuating to the new village of Mertarvik. The ground under the old village was unstable due to permafrost deterioration in a warming climate.
The exhibition in New York included the students’ writing and photographs about leaving their home in Newtok and building a new life in Mertarvik. It pulled from excerpts of letters exchanged with their pen pals in Provincetown, Mass. — a coastal community on the East Coast facing similar climate impacts.
In addition to seeing their work in the world, it was also the Newtok students’ first time meeting their pen pals in person.
Daisy Carl and George took pictures on the Brooklyn streets, speculating about how the meeting might go.
“The picture they took in August, or whenever they took it, they looked very young, and when we went on Zoom, they looked older than their pictures,” Carl said. “Yeah, so I don't know if I'm gonna be able to recognize them.”
Lessons from Newtok
At the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, the students’ work covered a six-paneled canvas. A photo captured the Newtok students pressed together on a fishing skiff on their way to visit the ghost town of their former home. Images of village dogs sat side by side with a picture of a Provincetown pup, bundled up in a chic winter coat.
Through letters, blown up on the canvases, the Provincetown kids asked what it meant to pack water or to live without a running tap. The Mertarvik students answered in pictures — an image in the display depicted a student scooping water from a wintery stream into a bucket.
Both communities wrote about their homes becoming threatened by water. They both understand what it means to live in houses built on shaky ground.
The exhibit was in a park next to the East River. With tall city skyscrapers rising up from its banks, it’s not a waterline that’s encroaching on daily life. Not in the same way waterlines have caused the Provincetown kids to regularly prepare for winter floods or the Newtok students to leave their home village behind.
The students said that they hope their work being on public display will spread climate awareness. Thirteen-year-old Casey Cox from Provincetown said that it also highlights how the effects of climate change have become common ground for kids across the United States.
“I hope that they can learn that despite Provincetown, Mass. and Cape Cod and Alaska being very different, places that they can have similarities,” Cox said. “And they're similar even though they're very different at the same time.”
After an afternoon of meeting other photographers and showing off their installation, the students from Provincetown and Mertarvik were itching to move. The crew walked a few blocks along the East River to a pier filled with basketball courts.
The sport is big in both communities, something they picked up on in their letters to one another. The students mixed into teams to play, the Manhattan skyline glittering behind them as the sun set and the city lights flickered on. Student Thadious John from Mertarvik said that the match was a friendly one.
“It's fun playing basketball with them,” John said. “It's not like playing basketball back at home where it's more competitive. And here, it’s good.”
Afterward, the students gathered by the river. The Newtok kids unpacked Yup’ik dance fans and the dance drum that travelled with them across the country, teaching the Provincetown kids how to yuraq.
The city’s night music of car honks, train clatter, and rowdy pedestrians rustled around them, but the kids couldn’t be distracted.
