Compared to even the most basic houses in the Lower 48, Elena Bodfish’s family home in Wainwright, Alaska, is modest. The cloud-gray, weathered two-story has no flush toilet, just a “honey bucket” that has to be emptied by hand; according to family lore, the house was built on a foundation made from the salvaged wood of an old shipwreck. But the place has its charms: It sits just above the beach on Alaska’s northern coast, and it has a picture window that looks out on the Chukchi Sea, a finger of the Arctic Ocean. Sometimes, between spring and fall, you can glimpse walruses and seals passing by on their migration routes. So Bodfish’s mother wasn’t happy when she learned years ago that they might have to pick up their home and move it—or risk seeing it collapse into the sea. The Bodfishes are Iñupiat hunters, a native subsistence culture that has dominated Alaska’s North Slope for more than 10,000 years. When I arrived at their home at dusk one evening in September...