Kivalina, an Inupiat village that’s eroding into the Chukchi Sea, has gained international attention as a focal point of climate change.

But the settlement of 400 also has a strong tradition of religious music, including Sunday services where churchgoers read music and sing in four-part harmony both Gospel and liturgical songs.

Haines piano and voice teacher Nancy Nash recently traveled to churches in Kivalina and nearby Point Hope and was wowed by the level of musicianship she encountered. “I was blown away.”

Now Nash is hoping to produce a book of music for morning and evening prayer services and communion service in both English and Inupiaq that captures that oral tradition and helps preserve Native language. “There’s no music in the schools, but in the churches people love singing. It’s a hunger for music and a positive thing for the Episcopal Church.”

For 20 years Nash has served as music coordinator for the Episcopal Diocese of Alaska, which has 50 parishes spanning the state. Her job has taken her to churches in Fairbanks, Anchorage, Juneau and Sitka.

At a diocesan convention in Anchorage last October, Point Hope elder Doris Attungana approached her and sang into her ear The Venite, Psalm 95, as sung in the village. “She asked if it was the same one I’d been teaching and would I come to Point Hope.”

Nash recorded Attungana, notated the tune and found it through research on her return home. It was written by English composer William Crotch. “For 100 years they’ve been singing a 200-year-old tune. They passed it down (orally). They sing it in Inupiaq.”

Nash said Point Hope is the longest continually inhabited place in the Americas, with a known history dating back 2,500 years. An Episcopal mission was set up there in 1890, and the first and only Inupiaq prayer book was created in 1923.

Villagers apparently learned the songs from a medical missionary, John Driggs. Tony Joule, the first Inupiat teacher in Bureau of Indian Affairs schools in the Northwest Alaska region, may have been the first to teach Natives in the region to read music, but the music still is handed down mostly orally, said Dr. Byron McGilvray.

A former director of choral studies at San Francisco State University and Eastern New Mexico University, McGilvray served 30 years as vocal coordinator for the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival. He has twice visited Kivalina, once to record choral music there for an album.

Being able to hear a melody, then sing it in harmony, was once a skill taught in churches throughout the country and was common, particularly in the American south. But the spread of electronic entertainment in the past 50 years eroded those traditions to mostly rural and remote places, McGilvray said.

To find such a rich musical tradition in Northwest Alaska is unexpected, and it’s clear the church has played a pivotal role, he said. “It’s very important to the people. In services, everybody sings, even the elders.”

But the tradition may not last, McGilvray said, as there are pressures on the culture.

In the 10-year-gap between his two visits in 2004 and 2014, the singing tradition seemed to have waned, he said. Besides the physical threat to the village from rising seas, climate change has brought the loss of sea ice, forcing residents to spend more time hunting to get their food, he said.

There’s also more entertainment, like Netflix and satellite cable. “There’s a fear it won’t last. I fear that, and I think (the Inupiat) fear that, too,” McGilvray said.

Nash said she wants to go back to Kivalina and get the notation for two pieces of service music she doesn’t have. “Then we have to get the words in modern Inupiaq notation. No one has done that.”

Nash said she is hoping her work can pass Inupiat singing on to a wider audience.

“It’s about finding the songs they’re singing, and writing the text in Inupiaq and setting it in a form that can be digital. It’s preserving both language and cultural traditions,” she said.

A similar preservation effort is under way in the Russian Orthodox Church to save liturgical music as sung in Native languages, Nash said.