A look at Siberian Yupik dance long ago, through a teacher’s stories

image from: alaskapublic.org

Chris Petu has been teaching a Siberian Yupik and Native dance class for over a year now in Gambell, a village on Saint Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea.

Petu has been a teacher for so long. He’s welcoming and kind to all of us students and he’s so respectful to everybody in the community. He said dance was much more strict in the past. He said in the past, only the composer’s daughter or wife could dance to the song.

“Those were the only ones that danced,” he said.

He said he probably wouldn’t have been a drummer if he had grown up in the old days because his parents weren’t drummers. Petu told us back then, women would practice dance moves, but if a dancer made a wrong move, the older women would throw a shoe at them.

“They had a big pile of shoes,” Petu said. “There were some girls dancing, but once [they made] a little wrong move, they would be thrown. A woman threw [a shoe] at the girl.”

Long ago, the traditions were a lot stronger than today. We would have been so happy to have experienced that. But then we are grateful that we don’t have to be put in that position where we get shoes thrown at us. We would be so scared.

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