Sitting on the floor of a classroom watching students practice Yupik dance, you wouldn’t expect to hear the old graduation classic “Pomp & Circumstance” anytime soon. But at the First Annual Bering Straight School District Arts & Culture Expo in St. Michael, held from April 28-April 30, the song was an unexpected addition to an event focused on tradition.
Over the course of several days, students from not only St. Michael, but villages across the region, participated in various workshops and artistic demonstrations culminating in a celebration of performances and projects Thursday, April 30. Teaching history through creativity, and how these traditions stay relevant to students today, were themes that ran deep in the first of what many hope will become an annual event.
Jack Dalton, a story teller from Anchorage, ran a workshop teaching Yupik Dance.
“When I’m teaching dance now, I like the idea instead of teaching them dances that already exist, helping them create their own dances based on what they know,” Dalton said. “Because what is the tradition for them now, things like graduation, things like playing video games, are things that people of the future will want to know about.”
Jack worked with students to write two original songs in English and translate them into Yupik. One song about high school graduation, and another was about hunting through the context of video games. Each song was also accompanied by an original dance.
“When masks were danced, people would come together and find community, and they’d find healing. And that ritual of coming together was a big part of that healing,” Michael said.
“So I had each student think about their own personal stories. And maybe … it could have been something like one item in their life that they thought was important, or it could have been the whole story of their life. And they ended up creating images of those important things that they found dear to them, and they created these mask designs.”
The students who participated in the workshop each left with a palm size, wooden carved mask, handmade and inspired by their own individual story.
Down the hall, Artist in Residence Jen Jolliff—a mural painter known for large projects—was living up to her reputation with a three part painting project focused on maps.
“My hope was that we could talk about communities and extended communities and the way that we look at our world differently depending on how we’re traveling,” Jolliff said. “The first map was intended to be an ‘I can walk there’ scale of map, so thinking about the things you see … at a walking scale, which could be houses and roads.”
The second map showed the whole peninsula surrounding St. Michael, and features the neighboring village of Stebbins. The third map zoomed out farther, to incorporate most of the Bering Straight School District.
“I wanted it to be focused on places that people would know and hopefully instigate discussion about the places, how the places have changed over the last years since the elders were children, and how peoples ability to travel to different places has changed.”
Back in Dalton’s workshop, the group continued to practice their new video game song, before their big debut. Translated, the last verse read: “Out on the flats, looking left and right. Choosing the safe way, going around. A wolverine nearby attacks. Game Over. Restart game. You can’t eat something that’s not there.”
At the First Annual Bering Straight School District Arts & Culture Expo, artists were teaching values of the past, so they connect and relate to the now. It’s a new tradition in and of itself that many at the expo hope continues for many years to come.
