Music of the Gwich'in Indians of Alaska

Craig Mishler is a folklorist and cultural anthropologist based in Anchorage, Alaska. From 1989 until 1999 he was a subsistence resource specialist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. He is also the author of The Crooked Stovepipe (University of Illinois Press, 1993), a book on Alaskan fiddle music and square dancing. The following essay is derived from notes Mishler wrote to accompany a 1974 album he recorded and produced entitled Music of the Kutchin Indians of Alaska (Smithsonian Folkways 4070). He subsequently revised his essay for publication in American Musical Traditions.

The Gwich'in Indians are a relatively small Athabaskan tribal group of about 2,500 people occupying a vast area in northeastern interior Alaska and northwestern Canada. Like all northern Athabaskans, they are of the same racial and linguistic stock as their more widely known southern kinsmen, the Navajo and Apache, though with the passage of many centuries, their respective cultures have diverged widely in nearly all respects.

The Alaskan or western Gwich'in are today divided linguistically, socially, and geographically into two main groups. The Gwich'yaa Gwich'in—"People of the Flat Lands"—are comprised of the residents of Chalkyitsik, Circle, Birch Creek, and Fort Yukon; and the Neets'ee Gwich'in—"People of the Mountains"—are those who reside in Venetie and Arctic Village on the Chandalar River. At one time, the people in the flatlands were isolated into small bands and had more specialized names, but in modern times the outboard motor, airplane, and snow machine have broken down this isolation, and widespread intermarriage has all but erased these former distinctions.

In aboriginal times, the Gwich'in were a nomadic people who followed the game and lived together in large numbers only in the warm summer months when the salmon were running up the Yukon and its tributaries. Indeed, the name "Yukon River" appears to have come from nyukwanjik, a Gwich'in word meaning "river where there are moss-covered summer houses." Somewhere along the way, the -njik ending, which corresponds to "river," was either dropped entirely or translated directly into English, and nyukwan was transformed into "Yukon." The case for this interpretation becomes even more convincing when we discover that the Gwich'in name for Fort Yukon is Gwich'yaa Zhe—"Flat-Lands House," and two other early white settlements on the Porcupine River are still referred to as "Rampant House" and "Shuman House."

Fort Yukon, founded in 1847 by Alexander Hunter Murray of the Hudson's Bay Company, is in many ways the hub of a whole network of rivers whose watersheds define the western territory of the aboriginal Gwich'in. In addition to the Yukon, the Porcupine, the Chandalar, for example, the Black River, and Birch Creek also continue to be occupied by Gwich'in-speaking people, and three other important rivers, the Christian River, Marten Creek, and the Sheenjek ("Dog Salmon River"), were not abandoned until the 1950s and 1960s, although all three are still used occasionally for hunting and trapping. Now a log-cabin community of 583 people with daily scheduled air service from Fairbanks, Fort Yukon has become an important communications, transportation, and supply center for everyone who lives along these river systems.

Though they are in the swirl of rapid acculturation and social change, the Gwich'in are a proud and happy people who still maintain many of their fine traditions. The beadwork sewn by Gwich'in women cannot be matched anywhere in Alaska today—moose hide mitts, slippers, belts, knife and gun sheaths, Bible covers, and mukluks are richly ornamented and colorfully decorated with a dominant four-petaled flower pattern. Twelve of these flowers, symbolizing the twelve disciples, are stitched to the church altar cloths on a background of white bleached moose hide, consummating the art.

Equally impressive are the oral talents of Gwich'in storytellers, who seem to flourish in the more remote outlying villages of Chalkyitsik, Venetie, and Arctic Village, where there is no radio station actively competing for the Indian ear. The Episcopal missionaries, who made many converts well before the turn of the twentieth century, seem to have convinced the people that their animal creation stories were pagan and heathen (probably more for their frank sexuality than for their theological content), so that today the old stories are denigrated by some Indians as being "just like fairy tales."

The stories that are openly encouraged are more on the order of what folklorists like to classify as legends. Popular Gwich'in legends can be roughly divided into tales about famous warriors, tales of survival under extreme conditions, tales about the feats of famous medicine men, and humorous tall tales pregnant with exaggeration.

Still, the most beautiful part of traditional Gwich'in culture is the music. All of the aboriginal ceremonies have now completely disappeared, yet there are still many of the older people around who can sing—and sing well. The style is always solo a cappella, and the old-timers say that even before the coming of the whites, no drums or other musical instruments were used for accompaniment, except occasionally a couple of sticks of wood that were beat against one another for rhythm. Any public group singing outside of the church is a great rarity now, and individuals perform only upon demand, though elsewhere in Alaska, as

with the Koyukon Athabaskans farther downriver, songleaders and public group singing still predominate in a style strikingly similar to the western Apache and Navajo.

Gwich'in songs address a great variety of subjects and tend to fall into the following categories: dance songs, love songs, medicine songs, story songs, songs of tribute and farewell, and New Year's songs. Gwich'in songsters, like Gwich'in storytellers, seem to be remarkably free from taboos or restrictions of any kind. Songs can be performed by women as well as by the men, by day as well as by night, in summer as well as winter.

The old-time fiddle dance music that flourishes so well in Gwich'in villages undoubtedly owes its origin to Hudson Bay traders and voyageurs of the mid-nineteenth century. In his journal for the year 1860, Robert Kennicott, an important early explorer and naturalist, describes "a Christmas ball" held at La Pierre's House, on the Upper Porcupine River. The principal trader and postmaster at La Pierre's House was one James Flett, an Orkneyman and an old voyageur who had acquired an Indian wife. Also present to celebrate the holidays were a large number of whites and "a dozen or so" Indians. In this earliest account of the Gwich'in dancing to square dance tunes, Kennicott writes:

The dancing was, I may say without vulgarity, decidedly 'stunning.' I should hardly call it remarkably graceful. The figures, if they may be called such, were only Scotch reels of four, and jigs; and … the music consisted of a very bad performance of one vile, unvarying tune, upon a worse old fiddle, accompanied by a brilliant accompaniment upon a large tin pan. (Kennicott 1942)

Thus, the introduction of Scottish and Orcadian folk music and folk dances to the Gwich'in can probably be attributed to James Flett and his friends. The Flett surname still enjoys a fairly wide popularity among the Gwich'in living in Fort Yukon, and the explorer William Dall, visiting Fort Yukon in the spring of 1867, noted that most of the inhabitants there "are from the Orkney Islands and the north of Scotland, while a few are French Canadians, with a mixture of Indian blood." (Dall 1870)

The late Charlie Peter (1902-1985), recalled that this kind of music was already going strong when he was just a boy, and he remembers such old-time Indian fiddlers as Jacob Luke, Alexander John, and Artie Linklater. So although it was originally a white man's art, this music has been so well incorporated into Gwich'in tradition that many of the tunes are popularly known by their Indian names, and they survive quite independently from the commercial country music played and heard in Alaska's white communities.

As I first saw it performed in the 1970s, the music for Gwich'in dances was provided by a fiddler and a rhythm guitarist, and both used small electric amplifiers for their instruments. Today, larger ensembles are common, including electric bass and snare drums, along with the fiddle and guitar. Usually, when there is an all-night dance, there will be two fiddlers and two guitar players—two teams of partners—who spell each other every two hours or so, for many of the dances take ten or twelve minutes to complete, and at a fast tempo in a crowded hall, this can be hot and exhausting work.

In the 1970s male callers were often used, but sometimes there was not enough sound equipment on hand, and the amplified music completely drowned out the caller's voice. Nearly everyone knows the basic steps anyway, and the caller only seldomly interjects a variation on the standard patterns. The people are fond of one-steps, two-steps, foxtrots, waltzes, jigs, schottisches, round dances, line dances, and running sets; and this wide variety generates continuous interest over many hours at a time.

The enormous popularity of this dance music can be measured by the regularity of its public performances. Dances are customarily held on every major holiday of the year: New Year's Day, Easter, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, as well as for special occasions like weddings, for the ordination of Native priests into the Episcopal clergy, and especially for the annual spring carnivals, when dances are held every night for a week and go full steam until four or five o'clock in the morning.

The geographic extent of Indian square-dance culture in the far north is still relatively unknown. Upriver, it is still possible to observe some of the dances at Eagle, among the Han Athabaskans, and the Han fiddlers claim they hear this music played live on radio CHAK in Inuvik, N.W.T., Canada. There is even good reason to believe that many of the

same tunes heard on this album, like the "Red River Jig," are played all the way down into northern Alberta.

Yupik Dancing

Yupik Dance and Culture Still Thriving

Ann Fienup-Riordan is an independent scholar who has published many books on Yupik Eskimo history and oral tradition, including Eskimo Essays: Yupik Lives and How We See Them and Boundaries and Passages. She has lived with and written about the Yupik people for twenty-five years, and she reports that a revival of their old traditions was under way in 2001. The following originally appeared in the program guide for the 1984 Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife. Fienup-Riordan has also published a book, The Living Tradition of Yupik Masks that includes more information about Yupik traditions, including dancing.

Two men came down to the water and entered the open water in their kayaks with only a drum and a spear. They approached the village at night, waiting until the morning to come close. Then they raised their paddles to make their presence visible. They approached slowly, saying, "We fight, some are afraid of death, but still we fight. But spears are meant for killing animals." And they began to beat the drum, and the women came down to the river dancing. Then they said, "We want to come into the qasgiq [communal men's house]." And they did, and took council there. And now they only fight with dancing. And the men who came went home to their old village and said, "No more war."

—Cyril Chanar, The Origin of Dancing

Half a hundred tiny villages, each populated by between 100 and 500 Yupik Eskimos, lie spread along the coast of western Alaska between the mouths of the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers. First appearances convey isolation and austerity, with man pitted against a cold and inhospitable environment. However, the Yupik area is actually the home of a people committed to harvesting a tremendous natural bounty, including sea and land mammals, birds, and a variety of fish. Thanks to relatively late contact with outsiders and infrequent economic intrusions, it remains one of the most culturally vital areas in Alaska, where English is still the second language of the majority of the residents and Yupik Eskimo the first. As the traditional subsistence activities and language continue to flourish, so do many of the traditional cultural activities, including the lively and rich display we know as Yupik dance.

As in the story above, Yupik dancing is said to have begun where warfare left off. Conversely, one of the more covert battles that western society first waged against Yupik people was the suppression of their dance tradition. During the late 1800s in the delta region, Moravian and Catholic missionaries alike viewed with grave misgiving the agayuluteng (masked dances) along with other embodiments of traditional Yupik cosmology. Overwhelmed by the pagan implications of these traditional representations and the ceremonial cycle in which they were a part, the missionaries did their best to discourage their performance. Informal "recreational" dancing survived in the areas missionized by the Catholics, but along the coast south of Nelson Island and along the Kuskokwim River, where Moravian influence prevailed, dance performances were completely suppressed.

In the Catholic communities of the region, dancing as the primary form of religious expression no longer exists. However, the contemporary Yupik have retained several annual formal dance distributions. The winter season, with all its ceremonial activities, is still referred to as cauyaq (drum), an essential and central element in the dance. Along with these major annual events, informal dancing occurs throughout the year. Although more common on stormy winter evenings than during light summer nights when the fish are running, informal dancing is a vital part of village life whenever time permits or an occasion presents itself.

Between one and two dozen participants, including the drummers, are enough to start off the evening, although the group often grows to ten times its original size as the evening progresses. The older men and women of the community are the chief dancers, along with a group of promising youngsters who have been given some of the simpler dances by their grandparents. Early in the evening, as the group begins to assemble in the community hall, several of the middle-aged men take the drums from the closet where they are kept and begin to play softly, waiting.

The drums are made of a rim of bent wood, approximately two feet in diameter, over which a single piece of plastic (formerly walrus stomach or bladder) is tightly stretched. The only instruments to accompany the dancing, they are struck with a thin willow wand. Two to six drums are used, the drummers rotating during the evening as their voices become weary and their arms grow tired.

Each dance has its own yuayun (song), which the drummers, accompanied by up to a dozen singers, perform to the beat of the music. Each song consists of three parts: two or more apullat (verses) sung to an agenra (chorus) repeated between verses, and a cauyarialnguq, an irregular drum sequence accompanied by motions but without words. Both chorus and verse elicit highly stylized dance gestures that tend to be more abstract and are danced according to a formal pattern, while those of the drum sequence are often realistic imitations of animal and human behavior, and follow no set pattern. Each verse is danced through twice between choruses. The sequence is repeated again and again, becoming faster, louder and more exaggerated with each repetition, until by the end of the dance the preicse syncopation between the drum beats and the movements of the dancers makes it seem as though the dancers themselves were making the sound.

A dance begins as one old mam or woman softly sings the verse, which contains both vocables (lexically meaning syllables) and words descriptive of the action or events the dance will depict. As the singer finishes, the audience begins to generate the dancers, pushing and callin them forth. The heads of older matrons turn around, searching for the appropriate dancers—those who in years past have been given particular dances as their prerogative by the older men and women who have written the songs. A man and his wife or two cousins come from different parts of the seated mass and join together in public, as the drummers tighten their drum heads and prepare to begin. From two to a dozen individuals perform in each dance. The women dancers stand in a line towards the back facing the audience and the drummers, while the male dancers kneel in front of them, also facing the drummers.

Both men and women hold fans while they dance; if no fans are available, they wear gloves, some say out of respect for what they perform. The men use circular wooden fans decorated with five or six large feathers (mallard or snowy owl) extending around the rim. In the Nelson Island area, women's fans are made of grass coils along the edges of which they sew the long and graeful neck hairs of reindeer. On the Yukon delta, women hold small wooden finger masks by means of two holes carved at their bases. The small masks are bordered with a combination of short full feathers and long thin ones, topped with tufts of down. Both the flowing hairs and the stiff feathers serve to accentuate the arm and hand movements of the dancers, rendering the women's movements more fluid and the men's more staccato.

On special occasions, women may also wear broad strings of beads around their necks, as well as beaded crowns topped with wolverine and caribou hair. The beaded fringe of these headdresses often covers the eyes of the performers, studiously cast down as another stylized mark of respect. Both the encircling crowns and the rounded, perforated dance fans, fringed with both fur and feathers, are reminiscent of the mask worn traditionally by the central dancer. The open-work design of the fans held by the men is explicitly compared to the pierced hand found as an appendage to many traditional dance masks. The hole in the hand's center, like the opening in the dance fan, is a symbolic passage through which the spirits of fish and game came to view their treatment by humans; if they found it acceptable, it was believed they would repopulate the world. Although the traditional masked dances have been abandoned, the dancers, with fans and arms extended in the motions of the dance like gigantic transformation masks, call forth many of the traditional meanings, including the continued interrelation between the human and nonhuman worlds.

When the singer has completed the verse once and the dancers have assembled, the drummers and chorus begin to play and sing. They are led by an older man or woman, the official dance director, who encourages and teases the dancers during each verse by calling out directions during the chorus pantomime, such as "Raise the gun!" and "Shoot!" The director's motions may be accompanied by the steady back-and-forth movement of a dance wand, a three-foot-long piece of decorated driftwood. From a quiet beginning, the scene grows more and more raucous, with the audience shouting back and forth, pulling people off and on to the dance floor, and calling for the dancers to begin again, as the performers play up to an audience that continues to egg them on.

During the dances, women stand, feet flat, body swaying with an up-and-down motion and knees bending to the beat, while the men kneel directly in front of them. The dance songs themselves are about everything from winning at cards or war to escaping from a ghost. Since all songs deal with daily experiences, a catalogue of the changes that have come to the area since the mid-1960s can be read from Yupik dance songs: songs about basketball, guitar playing, having fun on the swings at the school playground, or going to Anchorage.

Yupik dancing is as vital today as ever on the Yuko/Kuskokwim delta. Men and women continue to dance to the steady rhythm of the hooped drum traditionally said to represent the beating heart of the spirits as well as the lively movements of the spirits of humans and animals over the thin surface of the earth. Although many traditions have changed or vanished, the drum continues a steady and meaningful beat.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fienup-Riordan, Ann. (1983). The Nelson Island Eskimo: Social Structure and Ritual Distribution. Anchorage: Alaska Pacific University Press.

——. (1983). Nick Charles: Worker in Wood. Fairbanks: Rasmuson Library.

——. (1996). The Living Tradition of Yupik Masks. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Ann Fienup-Riordan

One of the most encouraging things about this dance music is the great number of active practitioners. Among the Neets'ee Gwich'in especially, there are nine or ten young, self-taught fiddlers, and though they do not possess the great repertoire of Charlie Peter, they are usually quite skilled and sometimes technically even more proficient. It is also the young people who take the greatest delight in the dancing, and it can be expected that they will still be kicking their heels to the Neets'ee T'yaa for a long, long time yet to come. That's good news.

Afterword: In November 1983, Athabaskan fiddling received a major boost in recognition when funding from the National Endowment for the Arts made possible the first Athabaskan Old-Time Fiddling Festival at Eagles Hall in Fairbanks, Alaska. Now the social event of the year for interior Indians from Alaska and Canada, this festival has been held annually ever since. It features musicians from two distinct traditions—the fast "upriver style" featuring the Gwich'in and the slower-paced "downriver style" featuring the Lower Tanana and Koyukon. The "upriver style" features the older jigs and contras introduced by Hudson's Bay Company traders, while the "downriver style" is a later development shaped by music of the gold rush era and popular country music of the early 1950s.

MUSIC OF THE GWICH'IN INDIANS OF ALASKA

Yupik Dancing

Yupik Dance and Culture Still Thriving

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY