The Docket's Human Stories section occasionally publishes interviews with composite characters — figures constructed from documented public testimony, reported accounts, and the structural realities of specific roles. Bernadette "Bernie" Tulimaq is one such figure: a tribal relocation coordinator for a Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta community devastated by the remnants of Typhoon Halong in October 2025. Her role, her dilemmas, and the institutional contradictions she describes are drawn entirely from the public record, including congressional testimony, local reporting, federal program documents, and the experiences of real coordinators in Kipnuk and Kwigillingok, Alaska. She is not a real person. Her situation is.
The temporary tribal office occupies half a suite in a commercial building in midtown Anchorage, wedged between a tax preparer and a chiropractor. A laminated map of the Y-K Delta is taped to one wall. On the folding table that serves as Bernie Tulimaq's desk, a laptop displays a FEMA portal on one tab and a spreadsheet of phone numbers on another. The phone numbers belong to enrolled tribal members she's been calling, one by one, to collect decisions about the future of a village that currently exists mostly as a set of coordinates and a 92% vote.
Your job title didn't exist before the storm.
Bernie: No. I was tribal administrator. Environmental director. Grant writer when we needed one. After Halong, someone had to be the person who talks to FEMA in FEMA's language and talks to the elders in a way that doesn't make them feel like they're applying for permission to exist. So now I'm the relocation coordinator. I made the title up. Nobody argued.
What does a relocation coordinator actually do on a Tuesday?
Bernie: This morning I spent two hours on the phone with a woman in a hotel on Spenard Road whose FEMA housing assistance was denied because her living expenses don't exceed 30% of household income.1 Which is technically true if you define "household income" the way FEMA does and "living expenses" the way FEMA does. But her house is underwater. Literally underwater. So the math feels a little theoretical.
Then I had a call with our congressional delegation's staff about the BRIC program, which a court ordered FEMA to reopen, but they eliminated phased projects. Phased projects are the only way you build anything in a place with maybe four months of construction season.2
Then I ate a granola bar.
Then I tried to reach three families I haven't been able to locate since February.
Locate?
Bernie: We have about 700 enrolled members. After the evacuation, people went everywhere. Anchorage, Bethel, relatives in other villages. Some went back to the old site because they got denied housing twice in the city and had nowhere else to go.3 When we held the relocation vote, we were calling and emailing from this office for weeks trying to reach everyone.4
You know what collective self-determination looks like in practice? It looks like me on hold with a hotel front desk asking them to transfer me to Room 214.
Ninety-two percent voted to relocate. That sounds decisive.
Bernie: It is decisive. It's the clearest expression of sovereign will you're going to get from a community scattered across a state the size of Texas. The problem is that FEMA doesn't have a category for "community voted to move." They have categories for debris removal, emergency protective measures, and restoration of disaster-damaged publicly owned facilities.5 Restoration. Of what existed. In the place it existed.
We voted to leave, and the federal government's response is, essentially, "Great, let us help you rebuild right where you were."
There was a proposal involving skis.
Bernie: [long pause] Yeah. Someone at FEMA, and I want to be fair, I think they were genuinely trying to solve a problem, floated the idea of building new elevated homes at the original site and putting them on skis so the tribe could drag them to a new location over frozen ground in winter.6
I still don't know what to do with that. I think about it at least once a week. Houses. On skis. As federal policy.
What did you say?
Bernie: What do you say? I think I laughed. Then I said we'd prefer a road.
The Newtok relocation took thirty years. What did you learn from watching that?
Bernie: Everything you'd want to learn and nothing you'd want to repeat. The BIA spent six million dollars on roads at Mertarvik without coordinating with anyone to put water pipes underneath, so people moved into new houses with no running water and no flush toilets.7 The power plant couldn't handle demand. Kids went to a school with sewage in the basement. And now, 2026, the Trump administration cut funding so eighteen families don't know if their temporary housing is permanent.8
Newtok is what happens when eight federal agencies each do their piece without anyone doing the whole thing. The people who worked on it for decades call it a cautionary tale.9 Their words, not mine.
So you're trying to avoid a thirty-year process while operating within the same institutional framework that produced it.
Bernie: There is no framework. That's the point everyone keeps missing. Rayna Paul, who is a real coordinator, not whatever I am, told the Senate: there is no current program for relocation, no agency that handles it, no source of funding for it.10
We're assembling a plane while we're falling. Every grant comes from a different agency with different rules, different timelines, different definitions of what a "community" is. FEMA sees individual households. BIA sees a tribal government. The ANCSA corporation sees land title. The state sees a disaster zone to clean up. I see seven hundred people who need to be a village again.
Who actually has authority here?
Bernie: [sits back] That's the question I can't answer cleanly, and I've stopped pretending I can.
We hold the sovereign decision. The vote. The moral authority. We can speak for enrolled members. We can apply for our own disaster declaration, which we did, and FEMA approved it in June.11 But we may not own the land we want to move to. That might belong to the regional corporation. Newtok's land transfer took seven years and an act of Congress.12
Meanwhile, the state sends contractors to the old village site to do repairs without telling us. Our tribal administrator found out what was happening in her own community from a Facebook photo.13 Senator Murkowski called that "wrong." It is wrong. But it's also the system working exactly as designed. The system doesn't require consulting us. It just requires spending money.
You mentioned an interim village idea.
Bernie: Paul proposed it at the Senate hearing. Both communities, Kipnuk and Kwig, come together at a temporary rural site while the permanent location is developed.14 It solves the Mertarvik problem. You don't wait until everything's built to move people, but you also don't move people into houses without plumbing. You create a bridge. A place to be a community again. To heal. To make decisions together in the same room instead of over hotel phones.
No federal program funds it. Obviously.
What keeps you doing this?
Bernie: [quiet for a moment] The site we voted to move to, the 92% site, it's where our ancestors lived. Before the federal government moved us to the coast a century ago for ship access.15 We're not asking to go somewhere new. We're asking to go back.
The federal government put us where the water is. Now they want to put us back where the water is. We're saying: we know where the high ground is. We've always known.
Is there anything you'd want someone in Austin or Miami or suburban Colorado to understand about what you're doing?
Bernie: That this isn't remote. I mean, geographically, yes, you can't drive here, there are no roads. But the problem isn't remote. There is no federal framework for relocating a community.16 Not an Alaska Native community. Not any community. Period.
When the next hurricane takes out a coastal town, or a wildfire makes a subdivision uninhabitable, someone's going to be sitting at a folding table making phone calls, trying to hold a community together while the government offers to rebuild what just got destroyed. I'm just early.
Footnotes
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Alaska Beacon, "Six months after Halong, typhoon survivors tell senators Alaska villages need more than disaster aid," May 7, 2026. https://alaskabeacon.com/2026/05/07/six-months-after-halong-typhoon-survivors-tell-senators-alaska-villages-need-more-than-disaster-aid/ ↩
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Alaska Beacon, "FEMA is reopening a disaster management program, but some tribal leaders question its fit for Alaska," March 30, 2026. https://alaskabeacon.com/news/2026-03-30/fema-is-reopening-a-disaster-management-program-but-some-tribal-leaders-question-how-it-will-fit-alaska-needs ↩
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Alaska Beacon, "After Halong: Return and recovery," August 3, 2026. https://alaskabeacon.com/2026/08/03/after-halong-return-and-recovery/ ↩
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Anchorage Daily News, "Western Alaska storm evacuees plan for new homes," March 29, 2026. https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/rural-alaska/2026/03/29/western-alaska-residents-evacuated-during-ex-typhoon-halong-plan-for-new-homes/ ↩
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Dickinson Law / Penn State, "Addressing Climate Impacts in Alaska Native Tribes." https://insight.dickinsonlaw.psu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1465&context=fac_works ↩
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CNN, "These Alaska villages were swept away by a typhoon. They're fighting with FEMA to not rebuild in the flood zone," May 17, 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/17/climate/alaska-villages-typhoon-fema ↩
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KYUK, "Digging into Newtok's relocation to Mertarvik," July 3, 2025. https://www.kyuk.org/public-safety/2025-07-03/digging-into-newtoks-relocation-to-mertarvik ↩
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KYUK, "Newtok was supposed to be a model for climate relocation. Here's how it went wrong," May 29, 2025. https://www.kyuk.org/science-and-environment/2025-05-29/newtok-was-supposed-to-be-a-model-for-climate-relocation-heres-how-it-went-wrong ↩
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Alaska House Majority, "HJR46, supporting Kipnuk and Kwigillingok's desire to relocate," May 19, 2026. https://alaskahousemajority.com/2026/05/19/hjr46-supporting-kipnuk-and-kwigillingoks-desire-to-relocate-in-wake-of-ex-typhoon-halong-passes-house/ ↩
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Alaska Public Media / KYUK, "Alaskans rocked by Halong plead with feds for help relocating," May 5, 2026. https://alaskapublic.org/2025-western-alaska-storm/2026-05-05/alaskans-rocked-by-halong-plead-with-feds-for-help-relocating-our-land-is-no-longer-safe ↩
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Alaska Public Media, "FEMA approves tribal disaster declaration for Kipnuk," June 8, 2026. https://alaskapublic.org/news/2026-06-08/fema-approves-tribal-disaster-declaration-for-kipnuk ↩
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Research report, Section 6: ANCSA land ownership and Newtok precedent. ↩
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Alaska Beacon, May 7, 2026 (ibid., fn. 1). ↩
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Alaska Public Media / KYUK, May 5, 2026 (ibid., fn. 10). ↩
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Anchorage Daily News, March 29, 2026 (ibid., fn. 4). ↩
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Alaska House Majority, May 19, 2026 (ibid., fn. 9); Don Antrobus quoted in Alaska Public Media, May 5, 2026 (ibid., fn. 10). ↩
