Bethel Council on the Arts

Nuniwarmiut Kassiyurtait - Mekoryuk Dancers

At four years old, Rueben Richards is not only the youngest traditional dancer on Nunivak Island, to the people of this volcanic Bering Sea island, he is the leader of a timeless custom narrowly saved from the distant memories of their ancestors. "He learned by watching us. People would see him over in the corner just dancing by himself, so they invited him to join," Rueben's mother Jeanie Richards said. "The dancing, the drums got to him."

Music and dance have been developing on the shores of western Alaska since the arrival of the first humans to the New World more than 9,000 years ago. Around the turn of the century, however, Christian missionaries began outlawing the spiritual songs of Alaskan Natives. By the 1920s, only a handful of coastal Cup'ik settlements still practiced their traditional dances. Among the last holdouts were the people of Mekoryuk on Nunivak Island, who did not stop holding their festivals until 1938. Since then, the primeval tradition has been little spoken of in this village of less than 300.

"They were still holding these dances much later than those villages on the coast," explained anthropologist Ann Fienup-Riordan. "Now they are the last place out there to begin again."

Last year, a group of islanders began meeting to develop a dance based on a series of recordings and interviews with Kay Hendrickson, a recently deceased artist and sculptor who was the last to remember the original festivals. While she never saw him dance, Hendrickson's daughter Judy Whitman said many of her best memories are of her father humming and singing the banned Cup'ik songs of his childhood.

“He never sang anywhere but in the house, it was just a pastime. He used to say they were gospel songs,” Whitman said. “He would have been so proud of these dancers if he could have seen them.”

Though the idea to begin dancing again had been brought up several times in recent years, the impetus did not come until about a year ago when Howard Amos, a tribal official, took audio and video recordings of Hendrickson performing the ancient dancing and singing. Whitman said that if Amos had not interviewed her father, the ritual Tem'a dance, or "dance of the body," would have been lost to history."

"It's hard to put into words," Whitman said of the village's rediscovered tradition. "It puts a lump in your throat when you hear those kids singing the same songs dad used to sing sitting in that chair."

Last December, Nunivakers invited their neighbors from across the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta to a Reindeer Messenger Festival, once one of the most important of the island's yearly festivals. Visitors were awed, and the dancers have since been invited to Alaska's largest dance festival to reveal the phenomenon to a wider audience.

Many of the island's most respected elders have not always been as approving, however. When the prospect of reviving the dances was brought up at a meeting several years ago, three lady elders stood and walked out of the community hall. Mekoryuk school teacher Muriel Amos explained that within the confines of Yup'ik etiquette, this was one of the strongest protests they could make.

"There was some rebellion at the beginning," Amos said. "Some of the elders said that Eskimo dancing is evil. Then we compared the modern dances that kids are doing these days to what we wanted to do.”

Despite earlier controversy, the revival of island pride has gone a long way to giving islanders a sense of place and pride in their heritage. Amos said that newfound pride is replacing the aimless self-gratification common to disaffected members of rural Alaskan villages.

"One of the most difficult things facing many people is boredom," Amos said. "This has taken the place of watching TV. We are doing things we've never done before and making things we've never made before."

While they still hope to connect with the culture of their past, the new generation of Nunivak Islanders hopes to make the dance its own by expressing their own unique set of beliefs and values. Mekoryuk native Mona David's father was a pastor in the Covenant Church. David said she was taught that the dances could be used by the people both for summoning spirits or for celebrating and having fun. The new dancing, she said, is for the latter.

"I have sensed a conflict between what we are doing now and the Western world," David said. "I got a call from an elderly lady here in the village; she told me to remember to pray. So far though, I think it's been a good thing."

The revival of drums and dance and the effort to save that tradition for future generations has been accompanied by an awakening of village identity and a renewed interest in the art, history, and language of the island. Dancer John Oscar said the village school's new Nativelanguage immersion program and the rising popularity of traditional works by Mekoryuk artists are the results of an increasing awareness of their own unique heritage. After 65 years of suppression, this island's powerful legacy has been rediscovered as the rightful inheritance of Rueben Richards’s generation.

"It's beginning a sense of unity. It's strengthening our pride," Oscar said. "It's bringing back what was lost before. It's bringing back our heart."

Mekoryuk Dancers will perform Friday at 11:10 p.m., Saturday at 6:10 p.m., and Sunday at 4:00 p.m.