Traditional Alaskan Eskimo Theatre: Performing the Spirits of the Earth

Traditional Alaskan Eskimo Theatre: Performing the Spirits of the Earth Thomas Riccio The theatre of the Alaskan Eskimo was a theatre of visions and myths and functioned in a time when the world was a shroud of mystery filled with spirits. It was a theatre tradition that originated in the time before time, a time when humans could easily transform into animals and animals into humans, when myths were formulating the earth's shape and its ways. A millennium before Aristotle's Poetics, this was a theatre of the earth, for those who lived by, off of and with the earth. And like the earth, it was practiced as a dynamically changing medium of performance expression. The theatre of the Alaskan Eskimo was a theatre of the land, its elements and the animals and humans that inhabited that reality. It was a theatre interlinked to its culture as only aboriginal performance can be; separate but inseparable, a part, but of the whole. Generally dismissed or forgotten by the west as satanic, heathen, idolatrous, ritualistic and ceremonial, the theatre of the Alaskan Eskimo, for lack of easy comparison to western theatre models or concepts, was deemed unacceptable and subsequently persecuted along with other Alaskan Eskimo cultural traditional practices. Today, the Alaskan Eskimo theatre tradition in practice exists only in traditional social dancing and in increasingly infrequent and fragmented ceremonial presentations. The theatre tradition of the Alaskan Eskimo has been essentially destroyed after years of missionary colonization, another victim of western culture's inevitable invasion. What does remain of this once vivid and complex theatre of the spirit world has been relegated to anthropological and ethnohistorical record—incomplete bits and pieces of a theatre tradition, marginalized by a materialistic western culture that values the empirical and written over the spiritual and oral traditions of aboriginal people. Not practiced widely since the turn of this century, this orally transmitted theatre tradition still exists in the memory of some living elders, but there too, as only a vague and fragmented memory with incomplete meaning. After years of Christian indoctrination, even those elders who might remember choose to keep their memories hidden. To this day in several Alaskan Eskimo villages, the missionaries still forbid the performance of traditional drums, singing or dancing 13 14 Thomas Riccio even for benign entertainment, denying these villages the slightest continuity with their traditional past. The meaning of Alaskan Eskimo theatre resided and thrived, as do oral traditions, by its living practice. Written Alaskan Eskimo language is only a recent occurrence, and with the written has come a further removal from the living, breathing past/present that only an oral tradition can embody. It was this dynamic reality of a living, oral tradition that made their theatre tradition vital, ephemeral, and, because of discontinuity, nearly lost to today. The fragments of performance records that do exist are scattered about and between the lines of the Alaskan Eskimo cultural history, indicating a profound and highly sophisticated theatre: rich with tradition, song, dance, masks, puppets, costumes, and scenography. It was theatre that developed over a period of nearly three thousand years. It was theatre unlike any other in the world, antithetical to western theatre in purpose, substance, methodology, and execution. Theirs was not a theatre exclusively of human endeavor; theirs was a theatre of the earth and the spirits that inhabit it. Theatre of the Spirit World In the theatre of the Alaskan Eskimo, the spirit was given a voice and a body; the spirit world became incarnate and tangible to the community. The maintenance of the spiritual world was of primary importance. The community and its individuals interacted with the spirit world within their daily lives by observance of taboos, use of amulets, social structuring, and the like. But it was only through ritual and ceremony, i.e., theatre, that the Alaskan Eskimo was able actively to participate with the spiritual world. Performance served as a window to a greater world and within this greater world was the mystery and the transitory essence of the world. It was their theatre that attempted to make visible the invisible that surrounded them. With so little, existing in the most severe and inhospitable environment...