1. The Width of a Day
2. Threads

a thread from chapters V and VII

The families the line divided

For generations the strait was a road, not a wall. Then, for forty years, people on Little Diomede could look out at their relatives' island and not go there.

beforeA strait with a word for crossing it

People on both sides of the Bering Strait were tied together by marriage, kinship and trade. Iñupiat and Siberian Yupik families had crossed for generations, and Diomede people traveled by skin boat as far as Nome to trade.^1,11

The Diomede dialect of Iñupiaq has its own words for those trips. One verb means that people crossed to Little Diomede from Big Diomede; another means crossing to the Diomedes from East Cape in Siberia.² In the same glossary, Imaqłiq is the main village on Big Diomede and Iŋaliq is Little Diomede. The people of Little Diomede are the Iŋalit.²

1920s–1948Emptying Big Diomede

After the Soviet Union took control of Big Diomede in the 1920s, most of its people moved across to Little Diomede, leaving only about a dozen behind.³ In 1948, as the Cold War border closed, Soviet authorities set up a military post on the island and ordered the 25 to 30 people still living there to move to Naukan, a Yupik village on the Chukotka mainland.^3,4

About ten years later Naukan itself was closed, and its people, including the families from Big Diomede, were spread among other villages.³

The border closed in 1948 from both sides. Jim Stimpfle, who later organized the Friendship Flight, recalled that it was in September.¹

1948–1988Close enough to see

From the village of Diomede, on Little Diomede's west side, every window looks across at Big Diomede.⁵ For about forty years, the people living there could see their relatives' island and not visit it.

“It's always a reminder, each and every day.”

August 7, 1987A voice on the radio

When Lynne Cox swam from Little Diomede to Big Diomede, the two sides talked by radio. In an oral history recorded by the Park Service, Jim Stimpfle remembers Albert Iyahuk of Little Diomede speaking in Siberian Yupik with a woman on the Soviet side, Marguerita Siganova of Lavrentiya. Talking, they worked out that they had the same father.¹

June 13, 1988The Friendship Flight

The next summer, an Alaska Airlines 737 flew from Nome to Provideniya in Soviet Chukotka. About 80 people were aboard, among them Governor Steve Cowper, Senator Frank Murkowski, reporters, and Alaska Natives hoping to meet relatives.^6,7 Accounts of the flight time vary from under half an hour to 45 minutes.^1,6

TIME described one reunion: Ora Gologergen, 72, meeting her childhood friend Uksima Uksima, 73, and the two greeting each other in Yupik.⁶ Cowper called reuniting Native families the most important part of the trip.⁷

1989–todayVisiting without visas

In 1989 the two countries agreed that Native residents of the Bering Strait region could visit relatives on the other side without visas. Visitors still need a passport and an invitation, and may stay up to 90 days.^8,9

The arrangement has not always worked. For about three years before 2015, Alaska Natives had to apply for visas again, until the program resumed that July.⁸ We have not found a reliable report on whether it is working today.

2016Looking for a grandfather's family

In 2016 Etta Tall, born on Little Diomede, traveled across Chukotka looking for relatives of her grandfather, Michael Francis Kazingnuk, who was born on Big Diomede around 1900.¹⁰

“I always wanted to go there, I always wanted to touch it.”

A family reunion story from KNOM the next year carries the same thread: relatives on both sides, seventy years after the line closed.⁴