ANCHORAGE, Alaska — It’s a good bet that President Barack Obama will never use a honey bucket.

The five-gallon drums serve as makeshift toilets in large swaths of rural Alaska, where residents empty the waste-filled buckets into nearby sewage lagoons. Obama’s historic visit to the Alaska Arctic on Wednesday will shed a rare spotlight on the plight of Alaska Natives and others who live in more than 200 far-flung Alaskan villages under conditions unimaginable in most of the United States.

Obama’s goal on this trip, the first by a sitting president to the Arctic, is to showcase the havoc he says human-influenced climate change is wreaking on Alaska’s delicate landscape: entire rural villages sinking into the ground as permafrost thaws, protective sea ice melts and temperatures climb.

Alaska Natives have joined the president in sounding the alarm on climate change. Yet the obstacles they confront daily in rural Alaska extend far deeper, raising questions about whether the federal government has done enough to help some of the country’s most destitute citizens.

Even as Obama has sought to improve conditions for Native Americans in recent years, Alaska Natives have received less attention.