Kivgiq 2011, part 1 - Getting there: I back up one week in time to my beard trim with Leah, then get on a jet and fly to Barrow, where Roy feeds the King Island Dancers
Tuesday, February 15, 2011 at 2:47PM 
As recent readers know, one week ago today I flew to Barrow to cover Kivgiq, but did not blog the event as it happened. Not only did I have some terrible computer problems to deal with, but I am finally beginning to learn that it takes too much time away from my shoot to try to live-blog an event that takes place throughout virtually all the waking hours of the day.
It is better to get as many photographs as I can and then blog later.
So that is what I am doing. I now plan to blog each day of Kivgiq, one week to the day later. So everything that you will see on today's post actually happened one week ago. What you will see tomorrow will have taken place pn Wednesday of last week. And so it will be with Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
To get me going, as already posted, I stopped and got a haircut and beard trim from Lean Frankson. I did not say that Leah is a poet and an artist, but she is. She gave me a very artistic beard trim.
I had also made two 13 x 19 inch prints to give away at Kivgiq and I took these to Frames, Etc., in Anchorage and had them framed. I did not want to put them on as baggage because I know from experience that even if you mark something as "fragile" and "glass" the baggage handlers can be very rough.
They seem to like to hurl things - glass included.
So I very carefully carried the wrapped frames across the tarmac and up the metal steps to the back door to the jet. There was snow and ice on those steps and I tried to be careful, but just as I was about to step into the plane with my left foot, my right foot slipped on the ice.
This caused me to drop the framed pictures right into the plane and when I picked up the package, I could hear the tinkle of broken glass. A stewardess witnessed this and was quite horrified and apologetic. She said Alaska Airlines needed to come up with a better system than this, where one must climb snowy, icy. steps just to enter the airplane. She told me to report this to the counter folks after I got and that Alaska Airlines would pay for the damage.
Do you believe this?
Do you think it could possibly prove to be true that Alaska, which, in my opinion, was once the most customer friendly airline in the industry before they changed their philosophy, would actually stand behind a customer in this way?
I was hopeful, but skeptical.
We will see.
Following that little mishap, I entered the plane and took my seat. It was a middle seat. I don't like middle seats, but someone must sit in them. Pretty soon, Maggie Ahmaogak and her grandson, Jacob, came in and took their seats, directly across the aisle from me.
We were all very happy to see each other.
Next, Dr. Edna Ahgeak MacLean took the window seat in the row directly in front of me and right after that, Dr. Chie Sakakibara, who many readers met last spring in New York City, came in and sat down beside her. Just like most Iñupiat people of her age, Dr. MacLean started her education in a BIA village elementary school - Barrow - and then was sent off to boarding school at Mt. Edgecumbe in Southeast Alaska for her high school education.
Along the way, the educational system did all that it could to hammer her Iñupiaq language out of her and to make her a proficient speaker and writer of the English language. As to the later, they succeeded. She speaks and writes English very well. As to the former, they failed - she held fast to her Iñupiaq language. After earning an MA in bilingual education from the University of Washington and her doctorate in education from Stanford, she returned home and played a lead role in creating and developing bilingual education programs for Iñupiat school children.
She also served for many years as President of Ilisagvik College in Barrow.
Her son, Andrew recently made a new film, "On the Ice" which was featured at Sundance and is now about to open at another film festival in Germany.
As for for my good friend Chie, Dr. Sakakibara, she and Dr. Aaron Fox are the ones who have repatriated many Iñupiaq dance songs back to the people of Barrow. You can read about it on this blog right here.
Directly behind them is Allison Akootchook Warden.
My middle seat placed me right beside Allison, but as it happened the aisle seat would not be filled until we got to Fairbanks, so I shifted over to give us both a little more space. During Alice's senior year at Barrow High School, I had rented half of a quonset hut at the Old Naval Arctic Research Center that now houses Ilisagvik College. She and her mom, the Reverend Mary Ann Warden, rented the other half.
One of my earlier neighbors in that hut had been a bootlegger and drug dealer and every now and then life in that hut just got completely out of hand. So Allison and her mom were a great relief. They were excellent neighbors. Allison was into drama, liked to act and to write poetry and create her own plays.
Now she is making a career of it. "Time Immemorial," the play that she created along with Jack Dalton, has been a major success not only in Alaska, but in Outside venues as well, including New York City and, very soon, the west coast.
Allison brought her brand new Macintosh MacBook Air laptop computer onboard. She had personalized it with pictures of her ancestors, including, on this side, Adam and Eve.
Although they had Iñupiaq names as well, the names Adam and Eve were bestowed upon them because they were the earliest members of the family to come into serious contact with people from the Outside world coming into the Arctic.
She had many suggestions for me on how I might raise money to carry out this blog and advance some of my other projects.
The stewardess played with a little girl, whose name I learned, but, I am sorry to say, have now forgotten.
I saw Lorraine "Lolo" Ahmaogak from my Wainwright family, a few rows ahead. As I get into my Kivgiq pictures, you will see Lolo dancing. It will be beautiful.
Then Chie stood up and started to take pictures.
She even took my picture. I then took this picture of her with my picture.
So the other thing that Chie and I always do when we see each other these days is we each take studies of ourselves, in this pose. This is the study I took. These are fun studies to take. I wouldn't mind taking one such study every day, if I could.
Then we could put out a book, jointly: Studies of Dr. Chie Sakakibara and Photographer/Author/Blogger, Bill Hess - Compendium #438, by Dr. Chie Sakakibara and Bill Hess.
Shows of our portraits would be hung in museums and galleries all over the world and The New Yorker magazine would be all gaga over them. The resources that I need to do this blog and my electronic magazine would flow in and I would buy a new airplane with big fat tires, skis and floats as needed and I would fly it all over Alaska and northern Canada and Russia, too.
But she lives and teaches in North Carolina now, so Chie and I cannot pose for such a portrait every day.
So it isn't going to happen quite this way.
I'm writing too many words, taking up too much time. I've got a whole Kivgiq to edit, which I figure is at least a 20 day job to do right, but I must come up with something workable for this blog each day for the next four days. So I had better drop this verbosity, get right to it and move along.
Here we are, on the ground in Fairbanks, where the Killigmiut Dancers from Anaktuvuk Pass are boarding.
Rachel Riley of AKP puts her bag in the overhead above Chie. The fellow standing by the bulkhead looking wryly at the camera is Andy Mack, who works for North Slope Borough Mayor Edward Itta.
I would write Andy's entire life history, and Rachel's too, but truly, I must move this blog along.
Both histories would be fascinating.
Dr. Aaron Fox of Columbia University in New York City also boarded in Fairbanks.
And so did two of his students - Lauren Amsterdam and Trevor. I'm not a very good student and I have forgotten Trevor's last name.
When Maggie learned that Lauren and Trevor were from New York, she told them how she and her husband, George Ahmaogak Sr., then Mayor of the North Slope Borough, had been in New York City on September 11, 2001. George had been scheduled to attend a morning meeting with people from the financial world, but the airline had lost his luggage. He had no suit to wear to that first of several scheduled meetings and so did not go.
The location where the meeting was taking place?
The 88th floor of Tower 1, World Trade Center.
The time? When the jet crashed into the building.
Once in awhile, when an airline company loses luggage it proves to be a good thing.
My host and friend Roy Ahmaogak picked me up at the airport and brought me home. I unwrapped the pictures, hoping that maybe only one glass pane had broken.
No such luck.
This story will continue.
Then I followed Roy over to the Iñupiat Heritage Center, where a large room has been set aside for the people of Barrow to use for cultural activities, from creating arts and crafts to skinning their umiak whaling boats and food preparation.
On this night, Roy, left, and TJ, right, as well as Billy were cutting up part of the tail from the bowhead that had come to them in the fall for the Kivgiq feast.
In the very next room, the King Island Dancers were practicing. Roy sent Billy over to deliver a bowhead snack to them. As soon as there was a break in the drumming, that snack would be quickly and gratefully devoured and relished.
I stepped out on to the back porch and looked off into the distance, in the general direction of where Kivgiq would begin at 9:15 AM the following morning.
Reader Comments (8)
Thank you, Bill!
I love your blog! It brings me home, thanks so much! I had to laugh out loud to your joint studies with Dr Chie ....thanks for making my day~
I so enjoy your journal. One day I would love to be beside you flying to Barrow, taking photographs of Kivgiq, watching Lola and all the others dance, meeting and talking with the Drs., Chie Sakakibara and Aaron Fox, and with Allison Akootchook Warden, and the Ahmaogak family and eating tail of the bowhead cut up by Roy, TJ and Billy.
Thanks, Bill, for taking me places and introducing me to folks I may never have the opportunity of experiencing and photographing for myself.
Good evening Bill, we enjoyed seeing you in Barrow. Yes, someday in the near future let's work on the project titled Studies of Dr. Chie Sakakibara and Photographer/Author/Blogger, Bill Hess - Compendium #438. Aarigaa, what an awesome idea! Enjoy your time with your family and stay in touch, my friend. Looking forward to seeing you again on the top of the world before too long.
Hey Bill,
Great seeing you at Kivgiq, even if we never got a moment to talk. And great start to what I know will be a wonderful record of an spectacular event I was, as always, honored and privileged to attend with all our Barrow friends, and our friends from other villages.
Trevor's last name is Reed. He is a PhD student in ethnomusicology at Columbia, and working on a similar project to the one we are doing in Barrow, repatriating songs recorded in 1933 and 1940 to his own people, the Hopi of Arizona.
Lauren is an MA student at Columbia, working on issues of race and expressive culture at the intersection of African American and Native American culture, especially music and dance -- she's developing a project on Native American hip hop. She's also a dancer, and put together (and performed in) the background dancing for Allison Warden's concert (as AKU-MATU) at Columbia University last fall, which was amazing.
As ever we were deeply touched by the warmth and generosity of our Barrow friends and families, who took Trevor and Lauren into their homes and lives in that quintessential Iñupiaq way, with open hearts and welcoming arms. Now they're hooked too, and they'll be back again, I'm sure many times. They had a wonderful time.
My experience of visits to Barrow is that they always really start on flight 51. It's the only plane ride I ever take that I positively look forward to taking. You can feel the warmth of the community envelop you as you fasten your seatbelt.
Thanks for your wonderful blog, Bill.
Aaron
Hi Bill,
These photos to a great job of capturing the homecoming atmosphere on the final legs of any flight back into Barrow. I have tried to explain this sense of community on a plane to folks back home. Your photos do it for me. Thanks! J
I am a little behind this week in my blog reading.. I"m 3 blogs down! I'm never 3 blogs down with you!! This is a great start.. I"m so excited to read the other two now.. I hope someday before I leave AK.. I can make it to Barrow.. Just so I can see it.
Your blog makes me excited to want to go..
I really like your blog! Everyone on the plane looks so happy!!