During the 2026 basketball season, students displaced from Kipnuk and Kwigillingok were based in Anchorage but played under their village names. They'd been offered a choice: try out for the Anchorage schools that had taken them in, or represent the villages they'd been forced to leave. Some chose their villages, even though home was a damaged coastal community 400 miles away, its school closed and its infrastructure failing.
The whole community was living with some version of that choice. In March 2026, more than 92 percent of Kipnuk's 662 adult tribal members voted to leave. The Yup'ik village on Alaska's western coast, battered by Typhoon Halong, chose relocation over rebuilding. Two-thirds of voters preferred an inland site near the historic settlement of Cicing, about 13 miles northwest, on land owned by Chefornak's village corporation. It was a sovereign decision, and very nearly a unanimous one.
Seven months later, the community has a destination it hasn't secured. The land belongs to another community's corporation, with no completed transfer publicly documented. No federal agency has been assigned to lead the move, and public records don't show an environmental review, an infrastructure design, a housing plan, or an estimate of when anyone might live there.
Kipnuk's tribal president called it "a long process." Reporting on the two Halong-damaged villages has said relocation could take a decade. Both descriptions may turn out to be optimistic.
Who Builds the New Kipnuk?
The Bureau of Indian Affairs runs a Voluntary Community-Driven Relocation Program meant to coordinate exactly this kind of move. Kipnuk isn't among its three implementation projects or its eight planning projects. In June, FEMA approved a tribal disaster declaration for Kipnuk to help repair damaged infrastructure, but local reporting noted that FEMA has no clear mechanism for moving a whole community. The Denali Commission, which coordinates village infrastructure in Alaska, lists bulk-fuel work for Kipnuk among its current projects, and nothing on relocation.
Kipnuk voted overwhelmingly to relocate. Seven months later, no federal agency has been assigned to lead the move, no environmental review is underway, and there is no construction timeline.
In Senate testimony in May, the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium laid out what a relocation actually takes: water, sewer, housing, school buildings, transportation, and energy, each overseen by a different federal agency with its own rules, application process, timeline, and decision-makers. Across all of them, the testimony said, there is no consistently defined lead.
Kipnuk has made its decision. Carrying it out depends on federal agencies organizing themselves around that decision, and for this village, that hasn't happened.
Where the Children Went
While the adults voted and the agencies sorted out jurisdiction, Kipnuk's children were spread across Alaska.
Chief Paul Memorial School in Kipnuk and Kwigillingok School are closed for the 2026–27 school year, the second year in a row without local schooling. As of late August, 145 students from the two communities were enrolled in Anchorage schools, and another 115 elsewhere in the Lower Kuskokwim School District. By late 2025, students had landed in Anchorage, Bethel, the Mat-Su Borough, Kenai Peninsula, Fairbanks, and boarding schools around the state. At least six districts were absorbing children from two villages.
Anchorage tried to keep the younger students together, placing them at the Anchorage Native Cultural Charter School and in College Gate Elementary's Yup'ik immersion program. Older students went to Wendler Middle School and East High School. For children still in the villages, the district was looking at distance learning for kindergarten through eighth grade, and high schoolers could use an existing online academy.
The immersion placement matters more than it might seem. A parent who wants a six-year-old learning in Yup'ik can find that at College Gate Elementary in Anchorage, and can't find it in Kipnuk, where the school is closed. A family in that position moves to Anchorage, and the village loses another household over what was, underneath, a question about a first-grader's school day and the language it happens in.
As we've reported before, a school is also transportation, routine, language instruction, disability services, and the schedule a family builds around all of it. Closing one changes where families can realistically live. Each family decides where to send its kids, and those decisions pull the community apart along the lines of school enrollment, whatever the community intended. The closure is spreading Kipnuk out one household at a time.
Lahaina's situation runs nearly the other way. There, the town is being rebuilt and families are being priced out of returning; housing costs are what keep them scattered. Kipnuk's families have agreed on where they're going, but nothing has been built there, and in the meantime they're being pulled apart by the absence of schools and working infrastructure, the basic things a family needs before it can stay in one place.
What the Wait Requires
People are doing what they can to keep the village whole in the meantime. Students play under their village names in Anchorage gyms. Families go back to Kipnuk in season for berry picking and other subsistence work, keeping up their relationship with land they've voted to leave. Younger children carry the language through immersion classrooms in a city far from where it was spoken every day.
A relocation vote doesn't end the community's tie to Kipnuk. That tie lives in practices, seasonal rhythms, and knowledge that need the land even after the buildings and pipes on it have failed. Moving the village was never meant to mean giving those up.
That is part of what makes the wait so hard. Kipnuk voted to build a new place on land it doesn't yet control, through agencies that haven't been given the job, on a timeline no one can estimate. For however long that takes, the community lives spread out: children in Anchorage classrooms, families in Bethel apartments, elders in villages across the delta.
The vote was clear. Until the federal side starts building, the work of holding Kipnuk together across all those miles falls on the families themselves, and the basketball rosters and berry trips show they've already taken it on. What the village looks like when it reaches its new site will depend less on the 92 percent than on what people manage to keep alive in the years in between.
