In Far Northeastern Maine, a Native Community Fights to Adapt to Climate Change – Inside Climate News

First of two articles about the Passamaquoddy Tribe’s struggles with sea level rise, water quality and habitat resilience on the coast of Maine.  

SIPAYIK, Maine—On the Sipayik peninsula in Maine, Passamaquoddy tribe members are surrounded on three sides by water, and on all sides by reminders of their vulnerability to a changing climate.

They see it in a rising sea level that erodes beaches and drowns marshes.

They see it in their wastewater facility, which is at risk of a tidal flooding disaster.

They see it in the homes that can’t keep the weather out and residents who can’t afford their power bills.

And they see it in the collapse of ecosystems that have fed the Passamaquoddy people since their earliest days.

For tribe members, it is not just a place they’ve called home for more than 10,000 years. It’s a place they’re striving hard to protect and prepare for what’s coming.

“That speaks to who we are, our namesake and what we’re about. It’s in our DNA. We’re fishers, we belong in this place,” said Sipayik resident Ralph Dana, 57, a tribe member who works as the aquatic restoration coordinator at the Sipayik Environmental Department.

Dana, a former Marine Corps private first class, game warden and tribal chief, has lived in Sipayik since he was 4 years old. He has watched Sipayik’s coastline give way to the rising sea and its fish disappear due to warming waters, a causeway and other infrastructure that has permanently altered the town’s ecosystem. 

Dana and the tribe are now working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and nonprofit organizations on costly alterations, but Dana knows he may never see them completed. And he fears that at some point in the near future, townspeople may have to consider some form of managed retreat from the coastline. 

“We’ve got nowhere to go,” said Dana, a father of four and grandfather of five. “Our infrastructure is in danger.”

“The First to See the Sunrise”

Around 600 enrolled tribe members live in Sipayik, which contains the Passamaquoddy Pleasant Point Reservation. It’s a small area, less than one square mile. 

The man-made causeway connects the southern tip of the peninsula to Eastport, which is billed as the “easternmost city in the continental U.S.” From the eastern coastline of Sipayik, New Brunswick, the Canadian province, is visible across Passamaquoddy Bay.

“We’re one of the first to see the sunrise, so it’s a very beautiful location,” said Rep. Rena Newell, the tribal representative to the state Legislature and a former Passamaquoddy chief.

Brian Altvater, a 69-year-old spiritual leader in the tribe and lifelong Sipayik resident, said it’s special to live in a place where generations of your ancestors have been born, lived and died. There are still a lot of family ties.

“You pretty much know everybody, everybody knows you and you have a lot of relatives,” Altvater said.

“We still have that sense of community that you don’t find in too many other places,” Dana agreed. Both of his parents were born and raised on the peninsula and were fluent speakers of the Passamaquoddy language. Dana’s father and father-in-law previously held the position of tribal chief, just as he did. 

Within that close-knit community, however, about a third of people are living in poverty and about a quarter have disabilities, according to the Census Bureau’s 2023 American Community Survey. Pleasant Point Reservation’s poverty rate (30.9 percent) is three times higher than the state as a whole (10.4 percent).

According to the tribe’s climate action plan, average life expectancy on the reservation is 49 years. The average for the rest of Maine, and the U.S., is around 78 years.

“We’re still lagging,” Altvater said.

Climate Planning 

 The Passamaquoddy’s deep cultural roots and present-day vulnerabilities are part of why the tribe has invested in protecting Sipayik from climate impact in recent years.

The Pleasant Point Passamaquoddy received a $5 million resilience planning grant from the Interior Department in 2022. The tribal government launched the Sipayik Resilience Committee that same year and created a climate action plan, filed with the EPA, in 2024. 

“People have shown a lot of positive energy and interest for these types of projects,” said Jasmine Lamb, co-director of the resilience committee.

Robert Wood, who heads the planning grant work, said that $5 million is “seed money” that enabled the Passamaquoddy to begin determining where the tribe is most vulnerable and where the funding might come from to fix it.

“We’re in a space-limited environment when it comes to planning. In this rocky landscape, even if you have land, it doesn’t mean you can build on it,” he said.

The recent freezes and clawbacks of federal grant funds for climate resilience have thrown uncertainty into their future planning, Wood said, but they’ve been able to retain their grant from the Department of the Interior, which preserves their momentum for the time being.

“At the moment, we are able to take action. We’re just hoping that there isn’t a gap between where these monies can take us and what we’ve learned,” Wood said.

A Resilience “Basket” 

The tribe’s approach to resilience isn’t about singular actions, like installing sea walls to prevent tidal flooding or air conditioners to beat heat waves. It’s about changing the way the entire Sipayik community lives, and recognizing its limitations, Wood said.

“Climate is one of those factors you can be resilient to, but it really requires that a community be resilient in a universal way,” he said.

Wood said the tribe has come up with a resilience “basket”—a nod to the woven baskets traditionally made by the Passamaquoddy and other Wabanaki tribes—that encompasses everything they need to live safe and healthy lives. The list ranges from food and energy security to safe homes and infrastructure, from cultural heritage and connection to a healthy environment and clean water.

“If they’re all strong, you end up with a community that’s able to respond very quickly and maybe even get out of the way of some of these threats,” Wood said.

Eroding Away

As a child, Dana said he loved to climb a large boulder that sat on the shore of a small nearby island. Today, the rock sits 30 feet away from the shoreline it once touched.

“This is what we’re dealing with in and around our community. It’s washing away,” Dana said.

It’s a dramatic example of how sea level rise and erosion are reshaping Sipayik’s coastlines, but it’s not the only one.

The nearby NOAA buoy in Eastport has recorded about 9 inches of sea level rise since the early 1900s, according to state climatologist Sean Birkel. Most of that change has happened in the past three decades.

“There is an acceleration in the level of sea-level rise. It’s about twice what it was historically,” said Peter Slovinsky, a marine geologist with the Maine Geological Survey.

According to the Maine-based nonprofit Island Institute, the Gulf of Maine is rising faster than the global average due to the effects of the Gulf Stream and seasonal wind patterns. The Eastport buoy recorded its highest annual average sea level ever in 2023.

The Maine Climate Council’s 2020 scientific assessment projects that sea levels along the state’s coast will reach about 1.5 feet above pre-industrial levels by 2050 and 3.9 feet by 2100.

That’s the mid-range expectation; the Climate Council advised that the state needs to be prepared to deal with as much as 3 feet of sea level rise by 2050 and more than 8 feet by 2100.

Longfellow said sea level rise is already swamping the salt flats and marshes on the low-lying areas of the Sipayik peninsula and eroding the bluffs on the eastern side, where the tribe’s wastewater facility, several residences and a walking trail are located.

Lamb said the sea level projections indicate the southern part of the reservation “could be an island in the next 50 to 100 years due to sea level rise.”

Sea Level Rise and Flooding

Maine’s coastal bluffs have no way to repair or replace sediment lost to erosion, Slovinsky said. When a bluff erodes too far, it simply crumbles.

“Those bluffs, once they fail or once they erode, don’t reform,” he said. “… They are what is being impacted significantly along the Maine coastline.”

One Sipayik homeowner has had so much erosion eat into his backyard that it’s given him a “million-dollar beachfront” — for the moment, Longfellow said.

“It’s good for now, until the storms hit,” he said.

Rising seas mean high tides and storm surges creep farther inland than they used to. The Maine Climate Council estimates that 1 foot of sea-level rise will cause as much as a 15-fold increase in “nuisance” flooding associated with daily tides. It also turns the likelihood of a once-in-a-century flooding event into a once-in-a-decade occurrence. 

NOAA data showed the Eastport area had an average of 30 coastal flooding days per year from 2020 to 2024, triple the annual average (10 days) from 1950 to 1959. According to the IPCC, the Eastport area has around a 95 percent chance of yearly 4-foot flooding events by 2050.

Warming ocean temperatures are also creating wetter, more intense storms.

The highest water level ever recorded at the Eastport buoy was 14.4 feet, which occurred during a nor’easter in April 2020. A trio of brutal storms in December 2023 and January 2024 broke records at tidal gauges in more southern parts of Maine and reached the fourth-highest water level at the slightly more sheltered Eastport gauge, Slovinsky said. 

The wind and rain from that storm caused damage to homes and buildings all along the coast, including in Sipayik.

Usually, these intense storms haven’t made landfall at seasonal tidal peaks, like the spring “king” tides, Slovinsky said, but if it does happen, the amount of flooding could be devastating.

“It takes the marriage of perfect conditions for us to have our worst flooding,” he said. “… Statistically, it’s hard for us to get that event. … That’s why I think we’ve been spared for a long time.”

That’s the kind of storm Longfellow said he worries about hitting Sipayik as they become more intense.

“Unfortunately, when we get really big storm events here, mixed in with our tidal events, there are times that it floods into areas that get closer and closer to residential areas,” he said.

The tribe’s open stormwater ditches along the roadways aren’t prepared for the combination of heavy rainfall runoff and tidal flooding, Wood said. “Flooding, especially in a coastal zone, comes from two directions,” he said. “… It can overwhelm your ditch systems and sewage lines.”

The low-lying causeway that connects Sipayik to Eastport is another source of concern. It sits within the current 100-year floodplain, meaning it could flood or have soil washed out under the right storm conditions today. In a few decades, climate models show the causeway flood becoming a near certainty.

Sewage System in Peril

Rising seas in the near future are particularly troubling for the wastewater treatment facility that serves Sipayik. The main plant and three of its freestanding pump stations are already within the 100-year floodplain.

“We know that if we experience a 100-year flood now, we’re going to have 2 to 3 feet of water over the floor of the treatment plant today,” said Chuck Applebee, superintendent of the Passamaquoddy Wastewater Facility.

That seawater would do more than just damage machinery and overflow sewer lines, Applebee said. The salt would kill the microbes that the facility uses in its treatment process, and untreated sewage could get swept out into Passamaquoddy Bay.

If that happened, it would take weeks for the wastewater facility to be operational again, Applebee said. The escaped sewage would be toxic to local sea life, including commercial species like lobster and halibut, for much longer.

“It would be a mess,” Applebee said.

Slovinsky said Sipayik is one of many coastal Maine communities dealing with this situation.

This summer, the tribe replaced sewage manhole covers in Sipayik’s floodplain with bolted covers and water-tight gaskets to prevent flood intrusion. 

“If they get 3 feet of water over them, they’re going to leak substantially,” Applebee said of the old manhole covers.

The facility is also going to raise the height of its reactor walls. The bigger project, however, is relocating the entire wastewater facility to a spot above the floodplain, Applebee said.

A report completed for the tribe in 2024 estimated the cost of relocating the facility at around $45 million, and raising each pump station at about $3.1 million apiece. With inflation and market changes, Applebee said that number is likely already outdated and will be even more so by the time they’re able to build the new facility.

“The tribe’s taking it seriously, and they’re working as expeditiously as they can,” he said.

The Passamaquoddy secured a $4 million grant from the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 2024 to pay for raising the walls at its current facility and engineering and equipment costs for the new facility. That funding was temporarily frozen earlier this year, but eventually released.

Applebee said they’re currently working on the design, securing construction funding and choosing the new site. The goal is to build as close to the existing wastewater facility as possible, while still protecting the new facility from the peak flooding expected by the end of the century, he said.

“There’s a 100-year mark today, but there’s a new 100-year mark 25 years from now,” Applebee said.

Meeting Basic Needs

The disastrous December 2023 and January 2024 storms were revealing, in a way, Wood said. The damage they left behind on Sipayik homes and buildings showed where the tribe most needed to invest to be more resilient to future storms.

Since then, the tribe was able to replace roofs on some of the most vulnerable homes in Sipayik with stronger metal ones, Wood said, funded in part by their grant from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. 

Many homes are susceptible to basement flooding, especially in marshier areas of the reservation, Wood said.

“You can get mold both from the tops, from the rain that comes through the damaged roofs, and you can also get it from the bottom,” he said.

Having grant funding to replace those roofs was key. Altvater said many of his friends and neighbors are living in dilapidated homes because they depend on Social Security or disability payments, which aren’t enough to cover a major repair.

“If you don’t stay on top of those things, they’ll come to haunt the community,” Altvater said.

The Sipayik Resilience Committee is taking on minor repairs, such as fixing gaps and insulating windows, to weather-proof the community. Lamb said some Sipayik residents have energy bills above $500 a month, and it’s a particular burden on lower-income residents.

With help from the College of the Atlantic, the Resilience Committee performed 11 energy audits in 2024, Lamb said, and it has provided insulating window inserts to 50 homes. The college’s grant, which would have funded more weather-proofing work, was cancelled as part of the lTrump administration’s larger clawback of grant funding this year, but the committee and Sipayik community are still trying to complete as many projects as possible, she said.

Lamb said the Resilience Committee got its start with the overwhelming community feedback that electricity costs were unaffordable and more sustainable sources were needed. Maine’s electricity prices have risen 55 percent since 2014, according to the Maine Monitor.

Making people’s homes more comfortable and weather-proof is a form of climate resilience, Lamb said, and it also enables community members to get more involved in other resilience work.

“To have space to talk about climate resilience, we need to be meeting people’s just basic needs at home,” she said.

Climate Resilience at Home

The committee held its first symposium on energy resilience in May, with members of the Sipayik community and representatives of other Native tribes that are working on affordable and green energy. Lamb said there’s a lot of interest from Sipayik residents in more expensive efficiency upgrades, like installing heat pumps, and in the possibility of residential or micro-grid solar power.

“For it to be citizen-led, it really helps people feel more engaged in our projects,” she said. “… I think people have been happy to see what the community can achieve for themselves.”

The day after the energy resilience symposium, Sipayik lost electricity, Lamb said. Power outages are a common occurrence during storms in rural Maine, she said, and the tribal community wants to have better backup power supplies when that happens. 

As part of her Ph.D. assistantship, Lamb is on a team researching ways to make a more resilient power grid for Pleasant Point and Eastport, including a possible microgrid. She is also studying energy efficiency at the tribe’s drinking-water well.

Climate resilience at home also includes food security, another part of the tribe’s resilience “basket,” Wood said. The tribe is constructing community garden plots across the reservation, including standing garden boxes that are more accessible for older residents, to encourage growing more fruits and vegetables, he said.

When the Sipayik Environmental Department started planting bushes in erosion-prone areas to help hold the soil in place, they chose raspberry and blackberry bushes, Longfellow said, to be available for the community to pick once they mature.

“[We’re] trying to strengthen the community by putting climate resilience in their hands,” Wood said. “… We’re just becoming stronger day by day.”

Elsewhere, the Sipayik Environmental Department and volunteers are trying to restore much older elements of the Passamaquoddy diet.

Vanishing Traditional Food Sources

In the Maliseet-Passamaquoddy language, the name of the tribe, Peskotomukatiyik, means “the people who spear pollock.” But you don’t see many pollock in Passamaquoddy Bay anymore.

“It’s not present and abundant the way it used to be,” said Dana.

Pollock and other groundfish species like flounder and haddock were a core part of the Passamaquoddy diet for thousands of years, as were shellfish like lobster and clams. Dana said tribal elders can recall harvesting lobster and clams while standing on the shoreline, with no need for a boat.

John Carter, 34, remembers his father fishing for cod and halibut right off a breakwater in Eastport.

“Now there’s none of that,” Carter said.

Commercial harvests of softshell clams and lobsters at ports near Sipayik have declined 58 percent and 44 percent, respectively, since 2008, according to the Maine Department of Marine Resources. The DMR doesn’t have harvest data for groundfish species, as they haven’t been commercially harvested in the region recently.

The Passamaquoddy “simply don’t have access to the same marine resources that used to be their backstop, if not their day-to-day subsistence opportunities,” Wood said.

Rising sea temperatures have made the area uninhabitable for some cold-water species, while simultaneously making it more welcoming for the invasive (and clam-destroying) green crab. According to the University of Maine, the Gulf of Maine’s surface waters have warmed 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1890s, and it’s continuing to warm faster than the global average.

“If you’re going to be resilient to climate, you also have to have habitat resilience,” Slovinsky said.

Breaching the Causeway

Decades of commercial overfishing in the region have contributed to the extreme loss of marine life around Sipayik, as has development. 

The construction of the causeway in the 1930s permanently changed the tidal flow around Sipayik, disconnecting Cobscook and Passamaquoddy bays. Areas of Cobscook Bay have become muddy, shallow and unproductive, Wood said, and far fewer fish swim there.

Dana said the tribe is working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to find ways to breach or replace the causeway to restore some of the tidal flow. It’s only in the planning stages right now, he said, and it’s a project that Dana expects to be both lengthy and expensive.

“I probably won’t see it in my work career. I may not see it in my lifetime,” he said.

From a solely environmental perspective, Dana said the best option would be to remove the causeway entirely, but doing that would also cut off road access that people have relied on for nearly a century. It could also disrupt water lines and electrical connectivity.

“If we want everything back the way it was, that infrastructure goes away,” he said. “… It very quickly becomes a complex decision-making process.”

Dams built upstream on the rivers that flow into the bays around Sipayik have prevented species like alewives and Atlantic salmon from reaching their inland spawning grounds, decimating not only the migratory fish but also the many species that rely on the juveniles returning downstream as a major food source. 

“We’ve seen significant declines, especially over the last 100 years,” said Chris Soctomah, a fisheries biologist with the Sipayik Environmental Department.

The Alewives “Will Feed Everything”

The environmental department has worked with nonprofit organizations for several years to remove dams—or build fish-accessible passages around them—on the nearby Schoodic, St. Croix and Pennamaquan rivers, Longfellow said. They are also using DNA sampling to track species distribution.

“That fish will feed everything. It will feed other aquatic species, other terrestrial species, other avian species. It will feed you and I,” Dana said of the alewives. “… That’s an opportunity to bring the pollock back.”

Dana said that before the construction of the dams, the rivers that flow into Passamaquoddy Bay could support as many as 80 million fish migrating upstream. In 2002, they tracked only 900 fish reaching their spawning point, he said.

This year, about half a million alewives and other migratory fish traveled upstream, Dana said, thanks to the efforts to modify the dams that had blocked their paths. With generations of consistent work, he thinks the population in local rivers could eventually reach as high as 40 million again.

“It’s survival. It’s linked to who we are. I mean, we are fishers. That’s who the Passamaquoddy are,” Dana said.

The tribe also launched a community clam garden project in 2022, with the hopes of restoring a major food source to Sipayik. Despite some early hurdles, including the almost-total loss of their first crop to predatory green crabs, garden organizers expect to have enough mature clams to hold their first community harvest in summer 2026.

If clams, alewives and all the species that rely on them can rebound, Soctomah said he believes fishing can once again become a major part of the Passamaquoddy way of life.

“It’s going to really bring back traditional practices, I think,” he said.

The Long Haul

Facing this array of resilience challenges leads, inevitably, to another question: Will it still be possible for the Passamaquoddy to live in Sipayik in the future?

“They have all the intention in the world of staying here and being here another 10,000 years or more,” Wood said, but he also acknowledged it would be a challenging path.

Relocation has been part of tribal discussions about climate change, according to Dana.

It’s an important option for Maine’s coastal communities to consider, Slovinsky said, especially if natural disasters are likely to cut them off from emergency response or subject them to rebuilding again and again.

“It is a tool in the drawer for handling climate change,” Slovinsky said.

The tribal government has contemplated purchasing and developing other property inland, Dana said. But relocating 600-plus people would come with its own logistical and financial challenges.

“Any inland community isn’t just going to move over and let the tribe set up next to them because the water’s coming,” Dana said.

Then there’s the emotional side of the equation. Lamb said she was surprised the first time she was contacted by a researcher working with other Native tribes on relocation.

“I was kind of jarred to be approached by them, because I was like, ‘Oh, we’re in that basket also,’” she said. “… People don’t want to leave.”

Moving away from Sipayik wouldn’t feel like home, Altvater said.

“It’s nice to know we’ve been here for at least 13,000 years. So this is home. It’s like, how does a salmon know where to spawn? There’s a million rivers that they could go up, why do they go up this one? Because it’s in their DNA,” he said.

Coming on Sunday: The Passamaquoddy have lived with foul-smelling, unhealthy drinking water for 50 years. Now, Trump’s budget cuts are only making matters worse.