Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
bright solid color, shorter and with no ruffle around the bottom. Everybody wears
mukluks, the traditional calf-high fur boot of the Alaska Native. The men dance with
feather fans in a wood frame, the women with fur fans in a woven grass handle dyed
bright reds and blues and greens.
The Tooksook Bay Elder Dancers were stunning, the women in bright orange kuspuks
tasseled in white and beautiful bead necklaces. A little Yupik princess, in view only when
she wasn't hiding in her mother's kuspuk ruffle, wore ivory with red and green tassels.
They had eight drums (no, wait, now there's nine) and I thought the roof was going to
cave in. A section of the right-side bleachers was moving their fans in unison—“Audience
participation is the key,” Ossie Kairaiuak says.
An all-woman singing and dancing and drumming group from Alaska Pacific
University, the Nunarpak Dancers, ended one song with head movements stolen from
Steve Martin's King Tut (See what happens when people get satellite television?) and the
audience roared.
When the Tuluksak Dancers came out my first thought was, “I didn't know that many
people lived in Tuluksak,” and my second thought was, “The whole village dances!” One
young man strutted out on stage like he owned the gym; there was a ripple of applause as
the audience spotted him, later fully justified when he practically gave off sparks during
the dance. All the young girls in the audience rushed the stage (including this one, I might
as well confess); I have seen pro baseball players get less attention.
There are definitely audience favorites, such as MaryAnn Sundown, the aforemen-
tioned grandma of Scammon Bay, who not only did the Yupik Macarena to riotous ap-
plause but brought down the house swatting, scratching and finally spitting to the Mos-
quito Song, to which everyone in the room could relate no matter what part of Alaska they
were from. She's eighty-one years old, she looks about four feet tall, she probably weighs
75 pounds wringing wet, she has a dowager's hump and the only time she moves really
fast is when she's dancing; nevertheless, I got the distinct impression she could dance the
youngest member of the group right into the ground if she felt like it. During one of her
dances the singer, a younger man, missed a beat and she whipped around and gave him a
Look. He sat up straight, let me tell you, and he picked up the beat, too, and she turned
back to us and kept on dancing. He didn't make any more mistakes, either.
