By: Belle Mickelson
Dancing with the Spirit connects Alaskan youth and elders through school music camps as a way to bring joy, happiness and hope to villages; encourage healthy living; and prevent suicide, alcoholism and drug abuse. We teach guitar, fiddle, mandolin, bass, singing, dancing and culture in week-long trips to remote Native villages with primarily Native staff. Over the past 17 years, we have traveled to 56 villages, most of them many times. We use a color-coded system so that, by the end of the week, students are able to sing and play for a community concert and dance. During the pandemic, we traveled virtually by sending instruments—and providing song videos, curriculum, and Zoom lessons to keep the music going. But at the end of March 2022 we started to travel again—and since then have spent 52 weeks in schools in Native villages with our bluegrass music songs! In late summer 2022 , two of us of European descent–took 11 Gwich’in youth from Yukon Flats Villages plus 6 fluent speaking Gwich’in adults (musicians and storytellers) to the Midway Music Festival in the Northwest Territories for a week long immersion in Gwich’in fiddling, dancing and singing. We gave away one fiddle to a Canadian Gwich’in high school student—and sent all the students on the trip home with a fiddle, guitar, or ukulele of their choice.
We are very grateful to the Arnold Shultz Fund for helping us make bluegrass videos in 2022 with our Native staff—and in 2023 helping us involve and train seven young Native musicians and one Native filmmaker/photographer. Rion Schmidt (Sugpiaq) led trips to three villages in southeast Alaska in the spring and then led trips to Kaltag and Nikolai in November and December. Isaac Ticknor (Deg Hit’an) traveled with us to four villages in the spring of 2023, becoming one of our top staff before taking a full-time job this fall with the Nulato School as their maintenance man. Bertina Titus (Koyukon) taught with us in Minto leading the students in Koyukon singing and helping with the dances. Jessica Roberts (Gwich’in) helped teach the dances in Circle and assisted with the guitar and fiddle classes. Cherist Tackett-Moore (Gwich’in) was one of our dance instructors in Venetie. Brennan Firth (Gwich’in) played fiddle for some of the dances at the Arctic Village School. And Nanieezh Peter (Gwich’in) volunteered her time to teach guitar and help with the dances at Arctic Village School.
Alex Troutman (Haida) traveled with us to Arctic Village and videoed/photographed our program and interviewed the Rev. Dr. Chief Trimble Gilbert (Gwich’in) and other elder Gwich’in musicians for a short fundraising video for our Dancing with the Spirit program.
In other exciting news, the Rev. Dr. Chief Trimble Gilbert, who has contributed so much to the preservation of the Gwitch’in Fiddle and Dance Tradition along with our program, is winning a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Alex Troutman’s photos and film footage will be part of the announcement and can be seen soon on the National Endowment for the Arts web page. One of our Alaskan Senators, Lisa Murkowski, flew up to Arctic Village (a 1.5 hour flight in a small plane from Fairbanks) along with 10 Native leaders in January to let Trimble know that he had won the award! I was so excited for Trimble and his wife Mary that I could hardly sleep for two nights. One of our staff spent several weeks of her time a couple summers ago putting together Trimble’s nomination with letters of support, photos, videos and a biography.
For more info on Dancing with the Spirit—our song and fiddle videos together with the songbooks and fiddle tab are free for downloading—check our website https://www.dancingwiththespirit.org. Thanks so much for your support!
Photo above: Huslia Elementary students are pictured here with their new instruments and their Dancing with the Spirit instructors.
Return to the March 2024 issue of The Cornerstone.
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