Creating a Native Space in the City: An Inupiaq Community in Song and Dance

Building on oral histories and primary sources that document early Inupiaq music and dance activities, as well as documenting current activities of an urban Inupiaq dance group, this dissertation presents the author's insider's view of how urban Inupiat privilege Native ways of knowing through music and dance to maintain relationships with their ancestors. Since the late nineteenth century, Arctic explorers, missionaries, and administrators have described Inupiaq music and dance in documents ranging from government reports to memoirs. In addition to portrayals of ceremonial dance events held in traditional community houses, called qazgit, these early accounts describe how Inupiat traveled to festivals and trade fairs, where they would construct temporary qazgit to hold ceremonial dances wherever they went. Today, following guidance provided by elders, an urban Inupiaq dance community emulates their ancestors’ habits as they live and practice their village’s style of performing arts within an Americanized city in Alaska. Instead of creating a traditional qazgi structure in the city, these practical people carved out space to practice in an office building where they cultivate the essence of a village qazgi by continuing and extending the ways of their ancestors in how they practice song accompanied by drumming and dance, resulting in an Inupiaq acoustemology that reflects an egalitarian society. The traditional Inupiaq ways of the qazgi are extended