Kivgiq The Eagle Wolf Messenger Feast
MESSAGE FROM THE EAGLE MOTHER: RECONSTRUCTING THE MESSENGER'S FEAST OF THE INUPIAT ESKIMO
In January of 1988 the North Slope Borough of Alaska sponsored a Kivgiq. It was the first such presentation in over 80 years of the Inupiat Eskimo Messenger's Feast which can trace its origins to the beginnings of the Inupiat culture. Participants came together in Barrow, Alaska from all of the eight arctic villages of the North Slope Borough--where the sun sets in mid-November and rises mid-January each winter. The 2,000 plus spectators and participants that gathered in the high school gym for three days represented the largest single gathering of people ever on the North Slope. The revival of the Kivgiq was motivated not by the spiritual necessity of its origins, nor by trade or barter, which it later facilitated, but by renewed interest in the traditional social and cultural values that the Feast encodes.
The 1988 Kivgiq brought together in performance the songs, dances, and events that had laid scattered in cultural memory and threatened with extinction. And with its revival came a reaffirmation of Inupiat values that consoled the present as it re-discovered an ancient past. It was in 1987, when newly elected Borough Mayor, George Ahamaogak, coming to office on the heels of a political scandal and sensing the need for an uplifting community event, decided to sponsor a Kivgiq. He appointed a "special assistant", Rex Okakok, who traveled and met with elders throughout the North Slope Borough to re-construct the Kivgiq from their memories. The elders were more than glad to comply for they had long been concerned with the increased Westernization of their culture; the old ways were being lost and the language forgotten because there were fewer and fewer cultural events to hold it.
"Every time I spoke to someone about it there was a sense of excitement just by mentioning Kivgiq to the elders […] there was a real positive feeling to bring people together" (1992), recalled Okakok as he traveled to the villages of the North Slope.
Starting with oral history records and then personally interviewing elders, Okakok, with the help of a North Slope Borough History and Language Commission (a three person committee) then decided what basic understandings of the Kivgiq would be performed. "We came up with the central events in the Kivgiq and used those as the basis to kind of organize the event" said Okakok in a recent interview, "but the major theme was to get people together for Eskimo dancing and to visit their long lost relatives and sharing the culture."(Okakok 1992)
Inupiaq leader James Nageak, a Kivgiq performer, Presbyterian minister and Assistant Professor of Alaska native language at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, recounted some of the motivation behind reviving the Kivgiq in 1988:
The elders were seeing that we don't use it as much as we need to, the Inupiaq language. And there are some activities that we have lost over the years that get the people together. In the Western world, where we have the (native) corporations and the North Slope Borough and all of these things on a daily basis, we get involved in that. So I guess the elders said let's get those activities back where the values, the Inupiat values and those things that pertain to the activities that they use to do. They tried to think back to the time when it was the last time they had a Messenger's feast. And it was 1910. And a lot of the elders said: "I've never been to one, but my father, my parents and, my grandparents talked about it. A Kivgiq, the Messenger's Feast, and how, and what kind of activities they had and why it was used. (1991)
The Kivgiq was a pathway to the rediscovery of traditions and values that had been challenged by years of near epidemic drug and alcohol abuse that was provoked by the cultural and social trauma wrought by the introduction of Western culture. Yet even in memory, the Kivgiq had remained to serve as an encoder of traditional values. The songs, dances, regalia, and events, though fragmented and incomplete, still provided a doorway to the past. It was a doorway opened by performance, which led directly to the mythological core of the Inupiaq people.
Within the performance of the Kivgiq one can find the echoes of ancient myths, rituals, and performances. Living in the performance of the Kivgiq is the Inupiaq creation myth, the myth of the Great Eagle Mother's Gift of Song and Dance, the shamanistic Eagle-wolf Messenger's Feast, the animistic Wolf Dance, and the secular precursor of the Kivgiq, the Messenger's Feast. [1] The Messenger's Feast will provide the focus of my exploration because of its historical and cultural detail.
But the Messenger's Feast is only a point of departure within a cultural context where past, present, old and new have blurred distinctions, often elusive to the control and relevance of time as the western world knows it. The Messenger's Feast has traveled a path that is as much myth as it is memory, as much mystery as it is fact, and as much of the spiritual as it is of the material world. The Inupiat people could be represented in no other, nor better way.
THE INUPIAT CONTEXT
The traditional philosophy and beliefs of the Inupiat of Northern Alaska--as is with other aboriginal people--is to live with the earth. In keeping with this their scattered ritual records, myths, artifacts, and archeology point to a performance (ritual/ceremony/theatre) based on spirit-human world interaction as to maintain or achieve harmony with the earth. That the ancient Inupiat Messenger's Feast survived to this century intact is as much a consequence of geographic isolation as it is of late contact with Western culture.
The perseverance of the Messenger's Feast is also a testament to the deep cultural roots from which it springs; it remains relevant today because, like the Inupiat, it has developed a bond and relationship with a part of the earth from which it is inseparable. The advent of "civilizing" missionary pressures--which in some cases persecuted and banned the speaking of the Inupiaq language, song, and dance in any form--became most pronounced for Inupiat Alaska during the 1920's.
Overt magico-religious and animistic performances such as the Eagle-Wolf Messenger Feast did exist up until that time, when participants were shamed, pressured, or persecuted into either abandoning or secularizing their traditional culture. When Inupiaq elder and Barrow Dance Group leader Martha Aiken was asked recently if Inupiaq dances held any spiritual significance, she replied:
It keeps our culture alive. That's spiritual. If you mean do we do our shamans, that's another thing. We don't and we've forgotten those parts. Because a shaman cannot be a shaman unless they are taught a ritual song. A shamanistic ritual song. And we have lost those. We don't even know what they sound like. The shamanistic part had faded away, but not the cultural, that's still alive and well yet. That's part of the spirituality...They confused the two. They did not understand how it was. So that's why most of the denominations, when they came to a native village they thought in the Eskimo dancing that they're doing the shamanistic thing, which they were not doing. They were just celebrating getting some catch and they misunderstood that part. They thought everything was for shamans and stuff like that. Which of course was very bad for us who understand our rituals and our culture and traditional ways. (1992)
down load the complete article:
