Yuraq

I went to a yuraq (dance) festival with M, one of our fellow teachers and neighbors, this past Sunday. Actually the festival was three nights long, but I only went for one night. M was planning to drive over each of the three nights, since the festival was only in The Bay, about 7 miles from us. She did go on Friday, and I planned to go with her on Saturday, but we had major wind gusts all day and that afternoon M came by to tell me that the temperature was dropping as low as -50, and she wasn’t going. So we went on Sunday instead. We left here at about 5:30, and got there very quickly – before 6. The ride over was a little scary, as I’ve only snow-machined to and from the post office and the airport, rides of 5 or 10 minutes each (and when I say “I snowmachined” of course you know I mean “I rode on the back of a snowmachine that someone else was driving.”) This ride was pretty fast, and in parts kind of bumpy (I think it’s especially bumpy when you’re on the back) and I don’t know, I think it being a new experience made it a little extra scary.

When we got to the school in The Bay (which is much bigger than ours, The Bay being a village more than twice our size), it was pretty empty; apparently we’d gotten the starting time wrong and were an hour early. M and I got some good seats in the gym and over the next hour it filled with people from 6 villages. Most of these villages host their own festival, and each one brings a big crowd, with some people traveling up to 5 hours to attend. Lots of kids and families from our school were there. People were getting ready with headdresses and qaspeqs, or buying snacks or raffle tickets. Around 7 things got going. Before each village danced, an elder from the village (or 2 or 3) would give a little talk. I don’t know what the talks were about as they were all in Yup’ik, but from a little translation I was able to squeeze out of the student next to me, one was about loving and taking care of your children, and another was about speaking Yup’ik to prevent it from dying out. I know that one was about religion, as there’s no Yup’ik way to say “Jesus Christ,” but other than that, the talks were lost on me. I like listening to Yup’ik though, so I didn’t mind. It’s got a rhythmic, active sound to it. Anyway, finally the dancing started, and I’m sorry to say that after about an hour I started to get kind of bored. I’m sure that if you know a lot about Eskimo dancing, each dance seems special and unique and interesting, but for the uninformed, after a few they all begin to look and sound alike.

Each village danced for about an hour, and though the evening was decidedly more formal than the impromptu dance that was held here in our village in the late summer, just after a funeral, it was still pretty casual. People from other villages could join in and drop out at any time, and the point seemed to be as much for personal enjoyment as public performance. I don’t say this as a negative thing, on the contrary I like this aspect very much and I wish more performative art were so open.

It was much more interesting for me to watch our village dance. Many of our students joined in, and now that I know a fair number of parents and other adults, I definitely felt more of a connection than I had the last time I was in the audience. Also, M was one of the dancers for our village, which is kind of a neat thing. She was the only qassaq (non-native) dancer to perform all night. I took a lot of pictures and video, which I’ll try to upload at some point, though our Internet connection is prohibitively slow for that kind of thing.

Anyway there were two main things I took away from the experience. One was this real split of emotion. On the one hand, it’s a truly beautiful thing to see an old tradition like this being celebrated and handed down and really loved by everyone – elders, grown-ups, teenagers, down to the littlest kids and babies. It’s particularly sweet to watch a pre-teen or teenage boy or girl, especially if he or she has recently mouthed off to you, completely lose their awkwardness, inhibition and practiced aloofness, and dance. Then on the other hand when I looked around, everywhere I saw the same things I always see at gatherings: everyone chewing tobacco, pounding chips and candy bars, and washing that down with cans of pop. It’s distressing how unhealthy people’s eating habits are, especially when we’re talking about tiny kids, 2 or 3 years old. You know I have never seen a baby breastfeeding the whole time we’re here? Everyone bottle feeds – how crazy is that? I can’t even begin to guess how expensive formula must be here. Anyway, the eating gets me down, and so does the chew, because it seems like a pretty straight path to bringing up a whole generation of unhealthy kids, which, if you’re trying to preserve a culture, doesn’t seem like the right way to go about it. It’s painful to see the culture being so loved and taken care of on the one hand in the form of dancing, and so callously tended to on the other, in the form of the children.

On a completely different note, the second stand-out for me was the insanely terrifying ride home. Please don’t misunderstand me, I’m certain that M is a great snowmachine driver and that my mortal terror had nothing to do with her competence in that realm. I think it was a combination of factors: the extremely late hour (about 1:30 am) and the knowledge that no matter what time I got to bed, the alarm was going off at 7; the darkness (again, 1:30 am); the cold (not terrible, but not pleasant either. Strangely, the part that got the coldest was my thumbs. Is that weird?); the bumps (hard to see coming because of the darkness); the trail (mostly okay, but in some places little more than ice over dead tundra grass); and the speed – yes, I’m a big wimp, but I’m telling you, with all those factors in place 40mph begins to feel more like 80.

Like I said earlier, the dancing did get boring after a while, but I kept reminding myself, “Very soon this will be in the past and you will probably never see anything like it again,” and that helped. In about 2 weeks B, E and I are going to Athol for a district in-service that coincides with a big, international dance festival there, and then in April our village will hold a yuraq festival, and then that’ll probably be it.