Country and Rock guitarist Dr. Aaron Fox, who, with help from Chie Sakakibara, has returned Iñupiaq songs to the people of Barrow; Tagiugmiut and Suurimmaanitchuat, at Kivgiq

This is Dr. Aaron Fox, Associate Professor of Music, Chairman of the Department of Music at Columbia University and repatriator of Iñupiat song and dance to the people of Barrow, as seen through my iPhone. I met him for breakfast at the Hudson Diner - a place that he recommended both because it was right around the corner from where the Alaska House and Alice Rogoff had put me up, and because he said it was one of the few cafes left in the area that cater to the working class.

Shortly after we sat down, I saw the potential for a good picture of Aaron in the foreground as two adults accompanied by a young girl paused in the background outside the window. I framed it in my pocket camera and shot. The image that flashed up on my my LCD looked good, but I shot a second and third frame to give me a couple more options. As they flashed across the LCD, they, too, looked good.

Afterwards, I tried to pull them back up so that I could show them to Aaron - but instead of images, the camera gave me this stark message: "No Memory Card."

Yes - no memory card. I had already downloaded the pictures that I took earlier that morning for my Easter Sunday post and had forgotten to put the card back into the camera.

Once again, I had to turn to my iPhone. 

So here is my portrait of Aaron Fox, shot with my iPhone.

Fox's title sounds pretty high-brow, but he is a country and rock guitarist and a former DJ. His favorite artists are are Stevie Ray Vaughan, Buddy Guy, John Lee Hooker, Aerosmith, Willie Nelson, and Merle Haggard.

He earned his PhD in Social Anthropology from University of Texas at Austin and an AB in Music from Harvard and holds a deep love for the traditional music of Native peoples worldwide. Columbia has a large collection of films and recordings of Native music.

The Columbia collection includes the work of Laura Boulton, who, from the 1920's through the 1970's, traveled the world to record the work of traditional and tribal peoples. She visited Barrow for one week in October of 1946 and recorded 120 drum-dance songs and oral narratives, performed by seven adult male performers and at least three children.

When Fox became the Director of the Center for Ethnomusicology in 2003, a position now held by his colleague Anna Maria Ochoa, he also became curator of the Boulton collection. By this time, the matter of who owned Native song and dance - the non-Natives who recorded them or the Natives who created and performed them - had become a public issue, and the understanding had grown that the ownership rights of Native people were as important to them as they are to any artists who create music.

While by law the publication rights to Boulton's recordings were held by Columbia, Fox launched a process both "to clarify the cultural ownership" of the works and to set up a process to repatriate the rights back to the people who had created them. Although he had been impressed with the Barrow recordings, he began this work with the Hopi and other Southwest tribes, thinking that sometime in the future he would turn his attention to the Barrow recordings.

Yet almost immediately, he was contacted by Dr. Chie Sakakibara, then a graduate student in Cultural Geography, who had begun a National Science Foundation project to do her doctoral research on the whaling cultures and climate change in Barrow and Point Hope.

Sakakibara had become aware of the Boulton recordings and wanted to learn more about them. 

Aaron then asked Chie if she would help him locate living descendants of the singers Boulton had recorded. She eagerly agreed and set about to do so immediately. As she identified descendants and other interested Barrow Iñupiat, she sent their names and contact information to Aaron. He, in turn, sent CD's of the recordings to all who requested them.

Fox had anticipated that the process would be a slow one that would only develop into something sometime in the distant future, but as soon as the people of Barrow began to see the recordings, they took enthusiastic action themselves. Vernon Elavgak, a descendant of one of the seven drummers, his wife, Isabell, and Riley Sikvayugak, another descendent, organized a new dance group, the Tagiugmiut Dancers.

They listened to and learned the songs recorded in 1946 and began to practice motion dances put to those songs. The women designed beautiful, blue, outfits for their members, sewed them and then they began to perform in public, where they quickly proved popular. In 2007, Tagiugmiut won the Eskimo Dance category at the World Eskimon-Indian Olympics in Fairbanks and were invited to perform at the 2008 Gathering of Nations inter-tribal pow-wow in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Fox and Sakakibara traveled together to Barrow and did many extensive interviews with descendants and other Iñupiat who love dance. They gathered information not only on the performances that had been filmed, but also on a collection of photographs gathered at the time by Boulton, photos which now belong to the Indiana University Archive of Traditional Music. Many of the photos are believe to have been taken by Marvin Peter, a noted Iñupiaq photographer of that time.

Aaron showed me a few of the photos on his phone, including the above image of Alfred Koonaloak, one of the seven singers.

As interested as the people were in the recordings of the drummers, Fox found that they were even more captivated by the photos of their relatives and fellow Iñupiat, most of them gone now. Sometimes, a viewer would gaze upon and study a single image for close to an hour at a time.

Among the most popular was this image of eight women and a child, gathered outside Barrow's Utqiagvik Presbyterian church house. 

Aaron shows me a photo taken by Chie in which Mary Ahkivgak, daughter of Otis Ahkivgak, one of the 1946 singers, intently studies one of the photos from the Indiana University collection.

In another incident documented by Chie, the late Martha Aiken, a highly respected Barrow Elder, found a picture of her husband, who had already preceded her in death. She looked lovingly and longingly at the picture and then, through spoke softly through her tears. "That's my Robert," she said.

You can find the picture of Robert Aiken and the one Chie took of Martha viewing it right here.

So a partnership has now developed and is growing between the Iñupiat of Barrow and Columbia's Center for Ethnomusicology. The process of repatriation of ownership to be administer by the Iñupiat through The Iñupiat Heritage Center. While all rights will be held by the tribe, Columbia and the Heritage Center are working on an agreement that would license back usage rights for scholarly and teaching purposes, to be done in respectful ways.

Above is an image of the Tagiugmiut Dancers, that I took at Kivgiq 2009, as they performed a motion dance to a repatriated song.

Tagiugmiut. The woman at front center with the big smile is Isabell Elavgak, who helped her husband Vernon and Riley Sikvayugak to organize Tagiugmiut.

And that's Vernon on the left, during an invitational fun dance. The young man dancing alongside him is Ernest Nageak, son of Roy and Flossie Nageak, who has adopted into their family, as well as Chie as has another Barrow family, that of Jeslie and Julia Kaleak.

Jeslie and Julia have been active participants in the repatriation effort.

Tagiugmiut youth, performing a whale hunting dance at Kivgiq.

Aaron Fox in a fun dance with Tagiuqmiut after they invited him onto the floor.

Aaron is hugged by Josiah Patkotak of Barrow's Suurimmaanitchuat Eskimo Dance Group.

Barrow Elder Warren Matumeak in the midst of Suurimmaanitchuat. Matumeak has taken a strong interest in the project and has provided much information. At this moment, he is undergoing cancer treatment in Anchorage.

Suurimmaanitchuat - that's Mariah Ana Ahgeak-Fotukava and Maaku Matavale, beneath the drums.

On July 12 of last summer, Roy and Flossie Nageak, who have adopted Aaron into the their family and Pk-13 whaling crew as well as Chie, invited me to a 45th birthday dinner that they threw for him at their home in Barrow. I went, ate, and took photographs. I had planned to publish one of those photos in this article, but I must have inadvertently erased them from my card before I downloaded, because when I went to my folder dated July 12, all I found was three photos of the Alaskan husky, Dawson.

Fortunately, Bobby Akpik was there taking pictures as well. This one, of Aaron with Chie and the cake that she spent hours making for him, is posted on Sakakibara's Facebook page.

As can happen in small towns, when people saw Chie and Aaron going about the community together as they did their research, some speculated that perhaps they were a couple. Chie set the record straight on Facebook, as you can read in the photo.

2009 in review - February: Kivgiq - dancers come from across the Arctic; Kalib behind the window

When I arrived in Barrow for Kivgiq, the ambient temperature was in the -40's, and the wind chill, the -70's. I traveled from within the warmth of a jet airplane. Rex Nashookpuk traveled 100 miles on his snowmachine, coming from Wainwright.

I can guarantee you, he did not drive slow. So you can imagine what kind of windchill he experienced.

I doubt that he cared at all.

He just wanted to get to Kivgiq.

I am going to use different pictures than the few that I actually managed to post last February. At that, in the ten months that have since passed, I have so far only found the time to take a close look at a small percentage of my 2009 Kivgiq take and these represent only a tiny smattering of that. I chose them for this, because they were all in one folder and easy to get to.

Now... I know this kid's name... he is from Point Lay and he was three years old... and he was one of the very most popular dancers at the 2009 Kivgiq...

I know his name... it's just not popping up in my head... I want to post this right away...

Well, sooner or later, I will add his name back in.

...It's Elmo,,, Elmo Henry.

The man raising the walrus skull and tusks is Eugene Brower. Many gifts are given at Kivgiq. The man dancing to Eugene's right is his son, Frederick. Frederick shot the walrus and gave his father the skull and tusks.

Isaac Killugvik of Point Hope. Dancing comes natural to him. In his motions, there is power, grace and soul. Despite what I do, by nature I am a very shy person. Isaac gave me a gift and brought me onto the floor and I had no choice but to dance, just he and I, with all eyes focused directly upon us.

But after I started I got a feeling for it and it was fun. Then everybody applauded and shouted and we had to dance an encore. Once again, it was fun.

Come next Kivgiq, I must give Isaac a gift. I know just what it will be. After I give it, I will have to dance again. I am not sure I can do it again.

We will see.

Kivgiq only happens every two years on the average, so I still have more than a year to prepare myself.

Barrow High School Whaler dancers, caught in video.

My sister, Mary Ellen Ahmaogak, whose Wainwright family adopted me.

The Barrow Dancers drum.

Rhea Frankson of Atqasuk, who knows how to make a mask of her own face. She makes everybody laugh.

Elvis Presley passes out gifts.

Steven Kaleak, an active National Guardsman who served in Iraq and expects to soon serve in Afghanistan. He is doing a dance in honor of all veterans and servicemen and women.

Young Tagiugmiut dancers paddle in pursuit of a dance bowhead whale.

Kaktovik does a dance where the men and women switch styles - the women stomping and dancing about energetically, the men standing in one place, feet together, trying to mimic feminine grace.

See the beautiful young woman dancing out front? That is Katheryn Aishanna. Once, when she was a little girl, I was in Kaktovik and was staying in the home of her grandparents. Her aunt and uncle wanted to have a night out, and so they asked me if I would babysit their kids and the others hanging out with them.

Katheryn was one of those kids. She was very mischievous. It was a rowdy and fun evening.

Now she is grown and dances beautifully, with exceptional grace.

Lela Ahgook of Anaktuvuk Pass, who makes beautiful caribou skin masks and has fed me caribou at her table.

Four Wainwright girls. 

Mary Ann Sundown, Yup'ik of Scammon Bay, 93 years old. She danced strong and energetic. Towards the end of her performance, someone spontaneously ran up and dropped some money in front of her.

Soon, everybody was dropping money before her.

Barrow dancers doing Kalukaq.

Back home in Wasilla, I found Kalib in Caleb's arms, looking at me through the backdoor window.

I get my work done with a little help from my friend

It is now 1:49 AM. I am in my office. I first came in and sat down to work about 10:00 AM this morning and, except for a couple of small breaks, I have been in here ever since. This is pretty typical for me, so I decided its time to show this side of my life, right here, in Wasilla, Alaska.

I have been printing pictures from Kivgiq that will hang on a wall in the North Slope Borough Mayor's Office in Barrow - not in the room where the mayor sits, but out in the foyer where everybody congregates.

As always, Jim, my good black cat buddy, was here to help.

He did take a break to get a drink, however. For about 7 years, I had a big oscar in that tank, but it died about six weeks ago. I have not decided what to replace it with, but I am changing the decor of the tank. I recently bought a good-sized ceramic pig and a proportionally smaller piglet.

After I soak them for a couple of months to hopefully leech out any toxins that might be in the enamel, they will go into the tank with whatever fish I replace the oscar with. 

It won't be an oscar. It will be a big cichlid, however. Maybe two.

Right now, a giant pleco still lives in this tank, but I will have to find a home for it before I restock, because if I don't, it will eat the new baby fish.

As I continue to work, Jimmy crosses the room and takes a seat in the window sill above another tank. This one has a lively population. Too bad I didn't have the lights on.

Even when Jimmy just sits in the window, it is good to have him here. His presence helps to get me through the day.

Jimmy returns from the window sill and takes a seat on the keyboard. I needed to pause, anyway.

Then he decides to come to me. No matter how busy I am, I never turn him away. I have learned how to keep working when he does this.

He can make it a little difficult to see the screen, however.

Later, as he often does, Jimmy determines that I must take a break and pay attention to him, not my work, and so he digs his claws into my sweatshirt and pulls himself up onto my chest.

He stays a little while, then leaps to the floor and I get back to work.

A bit later, he does it again. He makes it hard to breath. You notice I only have one arm to support him with. Obviously, I man the camera with the other.

When I am not holding a camera, I am pretty skilled at supporting the black cat while simultaneously manipulating my computer.

He steps away from me. Before I can get back to work, he steps onto my keyboard.

I can't believe it! The photo that I was working with disappears right out of Lightroom. I panic for a moment, thinking that he has deleted it and I will have to go find a backup copy. But Jimmy did not delete it; he changed the rating from 3 to 1, and so it vanished from the screen, as I had Lightroom set to display threes and higher. This one popped up in its place.

I had been arguing with myself which of the two to actually print, and had decided on the other.

If you look closely at the picture, you will see also that Jim bumped the rating up from three to four.

For a moment, I thought, "Okay, Jim, if you say so, I will print this one instead."

But then I changed my mind and went back to the other.

I love my black cat, but I can't allow him to become my picture editor.

Now that we are on Daylight Savings Time, it doesn't get dark until nearly 9:00 PM. The sun goes down before that, but in the north, we have long, lingering twilight.

As you can see, the amount of daylight creeping into my office is declining with the hour, causing the screen to appear more pronounced.

Jimmy is still with me. He is that kind of cat.

He sticks with me all the time.

I have to print this picture several times, because ink splotches keep appearing on it. I clean the heads, print again, clean the heads, print again, and still the ink splotches appear.

Finally, I pull out a big pad of ink soaked lint. It looks like it might be made of cat hairs. The printing proceeds just fine, after that.

Now, it is completely dark outside. Jimmy keeps me going.

But wait! This is not Jim! This is not a black cat! This is a tabby cat!

Why, it's Pistol-Yero!

He usually hangs out here with Jim and I, but shortly after we got up this morning, he went to lay back down on the bed and soon fell into a nap.

He napped all day.

But now that it is night, he comes to the office to do his part.

Pistol-Yero!

Yesterday, I was too tired to tell the story of how that cup of coffee came to be set in front of me at IHOP, but I promised that I would tell it later.

So this afternoon, about 4:30, when I was taking one of those little breaks that I mentioned, I drove to Mocha Moose. I figured that I would get a new coffee picture and use that to illustrate the story.

This is Kaylee. At first, she was a little shy about the idea of being in the picture, but then she said, "ok."

But right now, as I type this sentence, it is 2:08 AM.

I have to get an early start tomorrow. I need to get to bed, sometime.

I'm tired.

I really am.

That story will have to wait.

It was not really my intent to blur this picture. I had set the shutter speed at 1/250 of a second, but sometimes the knobs on the pocket camera change without me knowing it. That's what happened. The shutter speed got reset to 1/40 of a second.

I don't really mind, though.

Life's a blur, anyway.

Kivgiq: The gift that made me dance; a happy interruption

Isaac Killigvuk is a whaling captain from Point Hope, and when he came dancing toward me at Kivgiq, extending this watch in my direction, I at first thought that he wanted me to take a picture of it before he gave it as a gift to someone.

Then I realized that he was giving it to me. This meant that I had to go out on the floor and dance with him. Despite what I do to make a living, at heart I am a terribly shy person and I do not know how to dance. Every Kivgiq, I do dance at least once, but I pick a very crowded invitational fun dance and then go hide in the crowd.

Now, I had to dance in front of everybody. Worse yet, Isaac dances with such soul, power and grace, that I knew I would look pitiful and awkward by comparison.

But something happened that I would not have expected. I took the watch and then, as I watched Isaac's movements, I suddenly felt something inside me; it started out in my back and then moved into my arms and legs and then they started to move. I danced. People clapped. They cheered, they shouted.

When the dance ended, Isaac and I embraced. I was about to run off and hide but the crowd shouted, "more! more!" And so I danced again, with Isaac, the whaling captain whose father once drifted away on the ice and then, after an amazing experience in which he found himself not so alone as a person by himself on an ice floe would expect to be, drifted back again.

Now I owe Isaac a gift. All I have to give is photographs and somewhere in my hap-hazard, chaotic, 35 mm film archive there are some of his late father. I think I know what I must give to him.

Always, the women of Wainwright dance with such grace and beauty.

Such beauty.

Suddenly, the dance leader's motions are interrupted by the rush of a tiny girl.

The dance continues. You can expect to see the girl in motion in this line in future years. She is Kara and her beautiful mother is Taktuk.

I want to make a good Kivgiq spread, but so far I have still only touched a small percentage of my take, and it is late and I am tired. I will try to get in at least one more sample. Maybe tomorrow, but I don't know. Tomorrow is going to be a busy day, but I am planning to take a break to see if I can get Margie into a a movie theatre in Anchorage.

And here is a bicyclist, right here in Wasilla.

The old, internal, battle that I must always wage: home vs. home; Wasilla/South Central vs. Barrow/Arctic Slope

I have written before about this battle that forever causes turmoil and tumult to boil within my calm exterior - this battle of home vs. home. And now that I have just returned to my wife and family home in Wasilla after having spent nine wonderful days in my communal home of Barrow and the Arctic Slope, that battle rages.

My desire to go back is strong, to live again the life represented by the mask worn in this dance performed by my friend, Steve Oomittuk of Point Hope, during *Kivgiq. It is a life where people dwell with whales, polar bears, seals, walrus, caribou, wolves, ducks, fish and other creatures in the most intimate sort of way; in a land and seascape that is stark, harsh, and so bitterly, bitterly, cold, yet so abundant and all this binds people together in a way that I have seen nowhere else.

I find something there that I can find nowhere else.

So I want to go back to this home.

Yet, look at this! My two daughters, Lisa holding the cat that she just adopted, Melanie kissing that cat, my wife Margie looking on from inside the car. She is healing, yet her injuries still make it difficult for her to get up and walk about. This was the first time that she had been out of the house since February 2, but she felt she had to stay in the car.

This is my family of marriage and creation; my blood and my soul mate. They are never going to live on the Arctic Slope. Each winter now, Margie's longing to return to her Apache homeland in Arizona grows stronger and stronger and even this southerly part of the north bears down harder and harder upon her.

Do you see the dilemma?

I took this picture yesterday. Anyone who wants to know more about how this kitty came into my family can find a more complete account here, on the No Cats Allowed Kracker Cat blog.

Here I am, walking down Momegana Street in Barrow, the night before I left. 

And this is from today, as I headed down Lucas in Wasilla.

Back in Barrow, looking towards Osaka Restaurant. Just beyond that is the Chukchi Sea, frozen, broken, and jumbled. Bowhead whales will soon pass by, swimming through the open lead.

And this is Lucas again, from the other side of the same hill.

Once, maybe 100 years or more ago, an Iñupiat Eskimo who delivered the mail by dog sled all along the Arctic Coast built this house from the timbers of a wrecked, tall-masted, Yankee whaling ship. He raised a daughter here, who grew up to become a school teacher. 

McGee was a gracious Elder when I met her, and she kept her door open to people like me and always there was hot coffee, cake, cookies, and both Eskimo and Taniq (white man's) food waiting behind that door.

She lived with a tuxedo cat and a blue-billed parakeet and if ever I got to feeling lonely, all I had to do was drop in. She is gone, now, and so is the cat and the parakeet.

And this is my neighbor from across the street, right here in Wasilla, earlier today. He is plowing the soft, warm, snow that fell this day.

I do not even know his name.

I knew the name of his dog, though, "Grizz." I have not seen Grizz for several months, at least. I assume he, too, has passed on. There is another dog there, an Irish Setter, just like Grizz, but I do not know that dog's name. And there are two orange cats. I am quite fond of them. They used to come over and visit me, as did Grizz, but then a woman moved into the house and after that the animals were no longer allowed to leave the property. They visit me no more.

*More than 48 hours ago, I wrote that I would post a series of Kivgiq pictures within 48 hours. Maybe I will still post a sample series, maybe I won't. It will take me weeks, maybe a month, spread out over how long, to edit that four day take. I am working on a book on Kivgiq, starting from the first of the modern events, held in 1988, through this one. Plus, although there is no funding for it yet, I will probably get to do a Uiñiq magazine specifically on this year's Kivgiq.

I will post at least one more Kivgiq picture, because one night when i stepped into the Teriyaki House to have dinner, I met a 12 year-old boy who danced at Kivgiq and he had a couple of pretty good stories to tell, about adventures that most 12 year old boys could hardly imagine. So, if nothing else, I will post his picture.