In October, as planeloads of evacuees from Alaska villages leveled by Typhoon Halong touched down in Anchorage, Tim Ackerman set about organizing a tribal hunting party.

They gathered their rifles and left out of the town of Haines on Alaska’s southeast panhandle, driving north along the rocky shore, scouting for sleek, dark heads breaking the smooth surface of the water.

The evacuees, the hunters knew, would soon be craving seal.

The storm hit a Yupik region 700 miles west on the Bering Sea coast, and even though Mr. Ackerman is Tlingit, he knew that Alaska Natives most everywhere took comfort in the taste of golden seal oil, rich in omega-3s and considered a medicinal soul food. It didn’t take long for him to shoot a 150-pound harbor seal, he said. The group paddled out by canoe, hooked it and hauled it in.

“Came into town, cleaned it up, wrapped it in two layers of Visqueen and tied it all shut, put some handles on it and took it out to the airport, weighed it in, and it was ready to ship,” Mr. Ackerman said.

The seal traveled by small plane to Juneau and then on an Alaska Airlines jet to Anchorage, where it was butchered and portioned for individual meals. The meals rode to a giant freezer at the Alaska Native Heritage Center, an organization at the center of an unprecedented wild food distribution effort to help more than 600 evacuees, mostly sheltered in Anchorage hotels, maintain their traditional diets as they await word on when, if ever, they can return home.

“Holed up in a hotel room and not able to go out and practice your subsistence, you’re basically separated from what you knew,” Mr. Ackerman said.

Sinking Slowly

Kipnuk and Kwigillingok, the two villages hit hardest by the storm, sit on wet, treeless tundra braided through with rivers and streams. The typhoon pushed a tidal surge inland in the middle of the night. Dark water rose around homes, many with large, multigenerational families inside, wrenching them off their foundations. Residents described floating for miles in their houses, huddling together, praying for safety. Hundreds of residents were evacuated with little more than the clothes they wore to bed. Both villages suffered catastrophic damage, and deep winter conditions now hamper repairs.

Alaska’s remote Indigenous communities function, in a way, as closed systems, sustaining cultural practices that have been repeated with the seasons for thousands for years — many of them focused on the gathering, preserving and preparing of food.

People in the devastated villages speak Central Yup’ik, a language with a vast, nuanced vocabulary to describe the natural world, with words that often have no English equivalent. The diet there — made up of 80 to 90 percent wild food like fish, moose, marine mammals, berries and greens — remains traditional in a way that’s rare in the United States.

Daniel Paul, president of the village of Kipnuk, lost his house and three freezers full of food in the storm. In November, he was living with his wife and three children in a hotel in Anchorage between a movie theater and a Walmart.

Mr. Paul said, in Yup’ik, the river names from near the village — Cheeching, Qinaq — and described hearing them in his grandfather’s voice when he was 5 years old.

“This summer, I was showing my son the river’s name and the creek’s name and the land’s name,” he said.

But with the place now largely uninhabitable, there is no food being hunted, gleaned or shared, and without those culinary rituals, the language loses many of its key objects. Without a reason to speak the names of animals, weather and places, where does that leave the people of the villages?

In fact, the very tundra — nunapik in Central Yup’ik — where the village residents used to bury food for cold storage is thawing and shifting because of climate change.

“This spring, I noticed that the land and the water were different,” Mr. Paul said. “Everything is sinking slowly.”

A Giant Freezer

Kelsey Ciugun Wallace had only been president and chief executive of the Alaska Native Heritage Center for a few days when the storm hit. Between back-to-back coordination calls from home while surrounded by her four children, she made moose soup for dinner. Ms. Wallace, who is also Yup’ik, lives in Anchorage but makes a point of feeding her children traditional foods, introducing seal oil, smoked fish and moose to them as babies. Around the table at dinner, her 9-year-old daughter Kiah asked her how the evacuees would eat. Ms. Wallace explained that emergency agencies would cook for them.

“Then she looked at her moose soup and then she looked at me, and she was like, ‘Do they not get to eat our foods?’” Ms. Wallace said.

Ms. Wallace thought about elders stuck in hotel rooms in Anchorage who had never eaten a French fry, and young children who would miss traditional meals. That led her to make calls about getting a big freezer. Then, she posted on Facebook, asking for wild food donations. The response soon became a deluge.

“People were sharing and sharing the post,” she said. “I had people in my personal and social media inboxes being like, ‘Hey, I’ve got some fish, I’ve got moose, I’ve got all this stuff. Where can I bring it?’”

Ms. Wallace’s request circulated as far away as Utqiagvik, previously known as Barrow, Alaska’s northernmost community, 700 miles north of Kipnuk and Kwigillingok. Bowhead whales are the biggest source of wild protein there. Whaling crews hunt them and the community breaks them down together, providing hundreds of pounds of food.

Josiah Patkotak, mayor of the North Slope Borough, which includes eight Inupiat villages, said people there understood the heartbreak of losing a winter food supply. The village had a good fall hunt and put away whale meat for Thanksgiving and Christmas feasts, he said.

“Whaling captains donated part of what we’d stored up,” he said.

The borough sent just under a ton of food, including birds, caribou and whale. As they were packing it up, they considered that people in the Yupik region don’t usually eat bowhead, he said, so they included instructions: Warm it up, add salt, have a cracker with it.

“It became a real heart-to-heart with people that we didn’t know,” he said.

By late November in Anchorage, the freezer at the Heritage Center held a remarkable smorgasbord: Ziplocs of shiny black dried seal, fish heads, walrus flippers, tubes of ground moose, cubes of bowhead blubber, caribou sausage, tubs of seal oil, piles of frozen salmon from almost every major river in the state, quarts of inky blueberries and stacks of hemlock branches heavy with pearly herring eggs. More arrived daily.

But how to get the food to 600 people spread across a city? The effort is two-pronged, Ms. Wallace said: Food is served communally in hotels at mealtimes and also is delivered directly to hotel rooms. Bean’s Cafe, a nonprofit that trains kitchen workers transitioning out of homelessness, prepares the meals. (The organization also makes thousands of meals weekly for Anchorage’s unhoused population, providing some traditional foods to them, as well.)

Scott Lingle, the chief executive of Bean’s, studied at the Culinary Institute of America, but Native cooks in his kitchen taught him about preparing Indigenous foods.

“It’s definitely a learning curve, and I rely heavily on my staff,” he said. “There’s a lot of involvement. I’m not going to pretend that I know everything about everything just because I’m a chef.”

Hitting on the right recipes has been tricky because preparations vary by community. On a recent afternoon, for example, two Indigenous cooks prepared their family versions of fry bread. One variation, from the Bering Sea coast, was flat with small slits in it. The other, from the Far North, was doughnut-shaped.

Even so, Bean’s serves evacuees salmon several times each week and moose stew weekly, he said.

“When I’m able to say, Today we’re having moose stew,” he said, “there’s a certain calmness that comes over our whole entire population.”

Hunger for Home

Across town, at another hotel housing evacuees, the Heritage Center crew went door to door, knocking, announcing themselves and handing over bags. Andy Attie and his partner, Brittany Paul, took their bag into a small room where three children played. The children gathered around as Ms. Paul pulled each item out of the pack, delighting in a moose loin wrapped in white paper.

The day before, Mr. Attie had managed to make a simple moose soup on the burner in the small kitchenette, he said. He had borrowed an uluaq, a crescent-shaped traditional knife, but he had wanted other ingredients like potatoes and Montreal steak seasoning. Getting those required a ride and cash he didn’t have. He pointed out the window, where the Chugach Mountains towered behind a Home Depot, saying he was used to the wider horizons of the sea and tundra. If he were home, he said, he could hunt and make his own knife. Being in the city made him hungry for wild food in a different way, he said, causing an uneasy feeling.

“I’m not sure how to explain it — you crave for it, and sometimes you don’t have it,” he said.

But, he said, when you have it and you eat it, the feeling goes away, at least until you are hungry again.

Mr. Paul, the president of Kipnuk, said it was hard to express the culture shock that people from the village experienced. One of the losses is work. In the village, cash-paying jobs support subsistence activities and buying fuel for boats and snowmobiles, but food-related work defines peoples’ sense of purpose.

This time of year, they would be trapping blackfish and going to the coast to look for seals and gather driftwood for heat, he said. Though he leads Kipnuk, he describes himself first as a hunter.

“For me, growing up with my late grandfather as a hunter, we mainly go out to the sea for what the sea gives us, to the ocean for whatever we can get in our hands, what we are granted,” he said.

Mr. Paul said the sea ice that used to protect the coast from fall storms doesn't form at the same time anymore, and the migration patterns of birds has changed. He opened his hotel room freezer and pulled out an old Gatorade bottle, shaking about a tablespoon of seal oil in the bottom, all that he had left.

“I’m craving for some seal meat and some smelts and tomcods,” he said.

He worries his children will forget the flavors that surrounded them in Kipnuk.

“My children are adapting to fast food,” he said, adding that they were starting to like McDonald’s and Domino’s Pizza. “Yeah, back home, we don’t have those.”

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