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.

Suurimmaanitchuat of Barrow: Another group of Alaskans headed to DC to march in the Inaugural Parade for Barack Obama

I have many pictures of Suurimmaanitchuat dancing, mostly in Barrow at the Kivgiqs that have taken place over the past two decades. Kivgiq, also known as the Messenger Feast, is a great Iñupiat Eskimo celebration of dance, gift-giving and feasting on the real food of the north. Kivgiq was revived in 1988, but its roots are in antiquity.

So I intended to find some of my Kivgiq photos of Suurimmaanitchuat and post them here with this little note about their upcoming trip to Washington, DC where they will march in the Inaugural Parade for Barack Obama. So I typed "Suuri" into my computer's search engine to see what might come up.

None of the Kivgiq pictures appeared - I must have them all stored on disk and out of the computer now - but these five of Suurimmaanitchuat performing at the dedication of the National Museum of the American Indian in September of 2004 did.

This seemed even more appropriate. 

The dancer above is Lia Sakeagak. The temperature at the time was in the 90's - somewhat warmer than it would have been in Barrow.

And this is Alunauq Hepa. 

Darlene Kagak.

This feminine Elvis wearing mukluks is Mae Ahgeak, who spotted the face of the King of Rock 'n' Roll in the mask section of a big store in Anchorage. Now she is the most famous Iñupiat Elvis impersonator in the universe. Dancing to her right is Darlene Kagak and to her left, Molly Pederson and Marie Neakok.

Iñupiat dance always involves invitationals, when all are invited to come and dance with the performers. I am not quite certain how everything will come together in DC, but if they get a chance at any time while they are there, be it immediately after the parade or at some other time, I am certain Suurimmaanitchuat will call up everyone who wants to come up and dance.

So, if any readers happen to be in DC for the Inaugural, keep your eyes and ears open. You will be welcome to join Suurimmaanitchuat in dance. The young man at the forefront is Robert Akpik, Jr.

I'm planning to follow the dancers to shoot some pictures. I will use the images in a Uiñiq magazine that I am working on, but I will also post a few here as well.

Colony Knights Marching Band feeds us spaghetti as part of its quest to march in the Inaugural Parade for Barack Obama

Two of my children, Rex and Lisa, graduated from Colony High, so I was very pleased when I heard that the school's marching band had been invited to march in the inaugural parade for Barack Obama. The fact that Margie, Lisa and I plan to be in DC at that time made me doubly pleased.

Then I learned that this had all happened so fast that the band was still far short of the funds needed to go. They had asked for $15,000 from the Mat-Su school board to help them reach their goal of $50,000, but the board, on a split 3-3 vote, denied the request. Those who opposed it expressed a fear that if they granted the money to the band, then other groups would come along and want special traveling money from them, too.

They made no distinction between an invitation to a Presidential Inauguration and a field trip somewhere.

So, when I learned that the band was holding fundraiser, I decided to go go buy a plate of spaghetti and do at least that little bit to help them get there.

Once I got there, I grabbed a bowl of salad and took a seat at the table right in front of the band. 

As I waited for my spaghetti to arrive, I pointed my camera at the above band members. Not knowing how the evening would turn out, they took a breath and prepared to make music.

They played jazz numbers with with energy and vigor. As they did, more people continued to stream in, to lay down their $10 for a plate of spaghetti to help send the band to DC. It was encouraging, but it would take a lot of spaghetti to make up for the shortfall this band faced.

When they finished the number, they relaxed a bit. Maybe, if there were some really generous people or organizations out there that might go overboard for a plate of spaghetti, they could relax even more.

Among those who had come bearing $10.00 bills was Joy Gifford and her daughter, Dani. Even though her daughter is not a member of the band, Joy wanted to support them because they were her peers and she knew that they would be in for an exceptional, once-in-a-lifetime experience. Dani had participated in another youth program that had taken her into Mediterranean Europe and Joy had saw how it had benefitted her daughter.

Dani came back to Alaska with a broader perspective on life and could better understand world and national affairs. Dani agreed, and noted that she good friends in the band and she wanted to help them get to DC.

Joy also noted that she had not voted for Obama, but that didn't matter. His Inauguration will be a very special moment in American history, she explained, adding that she is happy that the United States has reached a point in its development where a majority of the people could elect an African American.

"These students will witness this first hand. They will remember it for the rest of the their lives," she said.

The fundraiser was held at the Palmer Elk's club, which happens to be located in Wasilla at Barry's Resort on the edge of Finger Lake.

Colony High itself is like that. Some of the students live in Palmer, some in Wasilla.

The room where the fundraiser was held was lined with artwork and various items, part of a "silent auction" to reach beyond the fund-raising limits of spaghetti.

Once their instruments were put away, the Colony Knights Marching Band got an exceptionally pleasant surprise. See the lady holding the check on the left? That is Cheryl Riggs of the Mat-Su Health Foundation. The check is for $10,000 and comes from various pools of discretionary funds within the board's budget.

What could be more healthy for a young person than to march in a Presidential Inauguration parade? Other contributing board members include: Jack Williams, Larry Tallman, Terry Namtvedt, Linda Menard, Paul DuClos, Jr, Stacie Stigar and Deborah Prator.

The second check was presented by the gentleman standing at left, Bill Allen, Palmer City Manager. It is for $1000, from the City of Palmer.

The Rasmuson Foundation donated $2000.

All totaled, adding in spaghetti and silent auction funds, the night brought in about $17,000.

First, I apologize for not naming these girls, members of the band who can also sing. I should have written their names down last night, but I thought that today I would just email the photos to a source who would know and get all the students named.

It didn't work.

But they sang beautifully, and here the song is "Moon River."

To me, one of the most poignant and saddest - perhaps the very saddest - movie moments was in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" when Audrey Hepburn picked up a guitar and sang "Moon River."

But I side-track myself.  

The same scene from a little further back.

The lady in red is the person who headed up the fundraising effort: Lynn Gattis, Secretary of the Knights Music Boosters.

It appears to me that she did a pretty good job.

You can find the Knights Music Boosters website here.

And there is another group of Alaskans who will march in the Inaugural Parade:

Suurimmaanitchuat of Barrow

I will post some pictures of Suurimmaanitchuat tomorrow.