Gutbucket, by Emily Raboteau
At the end of the world, rituals offer a lifeline
I AM A MOTHER raising Black children in New York City, which is unceded Munsee Lenape territory. Often, I am afraid for my children’s lives. Where my family lives, the storms are growing worse, and the water is rising, and these are not the only threats to our safety. I have come to the Arctic to ask you what changes you have witnessed, and to humbly ask, with your permission, for your wisdom about survival.
This was the script I had rehearsed for my journey to a coastal Alaskan village in the late summer of 2022, when my boys were eleven and nine. It felt like something I would have to revise, potentially extractive and teetering on false equivalence, yet important to get right to justify the carbon footprint of traveling such lengths and leaving my children behind. The last place I’d flown this far from home to study survival was Palestine.
orionmagazine.org/article/gutbucket-yukon-canada-permafrost-melt/
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