i. The Messenger Feast (Kivġiq) and the Eagle-Wolf Dance

 

–Cannelle Bruschini

1. Origins

The Messenger Feast found its origins in the history of the Eagle Mother.  The story varies from a village to another. In Barrow, the most popular version told that long ago, Eagle Mother discovered that human beings were lonely. Indeed, they did not know neither how to dance nor to sing. She decided to remedy this situation by intrusting her own son to kidnap a young hunter. She taught him how to construct a “large qargi, a qilaun (round drum), and a kalukaq (box drum).”  (Ikuta 2007, 346) The word kalukaq means ‘box drum’ but it also refers to the dance accompanied by the playing of the box drum. Then, Eagle Mother showed the hunter how to dance, drum and sing, and she told him to prepare a Kivgiq, which means Messenger Feast, in order to host his guests. However, there were no people living near the hunter, so Eagle Mother sent animals as the first guests and she turned them into people. After the feast was over, “Eagle Mother was happy and became young again.” (Ikuta 2007, 347)

A different version is told by Kingston in her article.  According to her, human beings did not know how to feast, sing and dance, and they lived in different communities that were enemies. One day, a hunter kills a giant eagle. Another giant eagle comes to see him and tells him that he just killed his brother. He proposes him to go to see the eagle mother. When they arrive at the eagles’ house, the hunter hears a regular pounding and he learns that it is the eagle mother’s heartbeat. She is “mourning because her dead son cannot return home.” (Kingston 2001, 265) She explains him how to dance, sing, and how to send messengers to a neighboring village so they can exchange goods. She also teaches him how to construct a box drum that sounds like her beating heart. The hunter returned home and prepared the feast. After it was over, the spirit of the dead eagle could finally return home.

2. Performance

According to Ikuta, the earlier versions of the Messenger Feast had been practiced since ancient times throughout the Central Yup’ik and the Iñupiaq/Inupiaq regions of Alaska. (Ikuta 2007, 347) In the Iñupiaq/Inupiaq region, mostly on the coastal villages, the festival was sponsored by an umialik. Indeed, after a successful whale-hunting season, the captain kept the meat of the whales that have been killed in order to feed the community. He invited a neighboring village to join a feast in his qargi. Each village had a qargi headed by the umialik and organized around a crew. (Fogel-Chance 2002, 797) The whaling captain sent two kivgaq, or messengers, in nearby villages with invitations. If the villagers wanted to participate and to join the “Great Trade Feast,” they had to tell the messengers what they would like to have in return.

For the Inupiat, the festival of the Messenger Feast was thus a way to facilitate the trade and the economic exchanges between two communities. It could be interested for coastal and inland villages, because people could exchange local specialties, different products they did not possess in their own village, such as coastal and inland products. The items that were exchanged were generally furs and skins of hunted animals, ivory, as well as food for feasting. (Riccio 1993, 126)  Information was also exchanged. It was a very important festival because it enabled the Inupiat to gather and to trade, exchange gifts, reaffirm trading partnerships, increase individual social prestige and enjoy dancing and story telling, as well as engage in athletic competitions.  (Fogel-Chance 2002, 796) A central event was the race to the kazghi that marked the beginning of the ceremonial.  (Riccio 1993, 130)

3. The Wolf Dance

 Photo courtesy of the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, B85.27.2375.

Different dances were performed within the Messenger Feast, such as the kalukaq and the Eagle-Wolf Dance or Wolf Dance. Kalukaq is a word used to refer to the Box Drum, but it also refers to the dance accompanied by the playing of the box drum. Thus, it means “Box Drum Dance.” There is also the Eagle-Wolf Dance or Wolf Dance. It varies and is not the same from a village to another. Some scholars think that the Wolf Dance and the Messenger Feast were interchangeable whereas others state that the Wolf Dance was an element of the Messenger Feast. (Fair 2000, 475)

Only the Inupiat perform the Wolf Dance. The Yup’ik knew the Messenger Feast but did not perform this particular dance, which includes religious elements. (Kingston 2001, 263)  Indeed, even if the purpose of the Messenger Feast was the trade, the Wolf Dance itself was performed in order to enable the spirits of the eagles – and later other animals – killed by hunters to return to the spiritual world so they could be reborn. In the Inupiaq culture, animals and humans “existed in equal and reciprocal relationships with each other.” (Kingston 2001, 263)  Their world is based on an exchange: the animals allowed themselves to be killed by hunters and, in return, hunters had to perform certain rituals to enable their spirits to be reborn. The Wolf Dance reenacts the myth of the dead son of the eagle mother and enables the Iñupiat to remember that it was the eagles who taught them how to sing, drum and dance. In some other versions of the Eagle Mother story, the hunter had a vision of “swallows flying quickly into holes in the side of a hill, and just as quickly, the heads of wolves pop out and start dancing.” (Kingston 2001, 265) The Wolf Dance represents this part of the myth. Four of five men wear feather headdresses and they jump into holes, which represent the swallows’ nests and are described by Riccio as “two-foot diameter holes cut out of a sheet of wood covered with stretched walrus or seal skins.” (Riccio 1993, 139)  They come out wearing real wolf head masks and long sealskin mittens, dancing. That is why that dance is called “Wolf Dance”. These four Eagle Wolf dancers are the best and the most influential hunters and leaders. (Riccio 1993, 124)

4. Disruption of the Dance

The Inupiat celebrated the Messenger Feast for many centuries until the 20th century. . In 1911, the people from Barrow invited those from Icy Cape. Three years later, the last Messenger Feast was held in Wainwright, in the winter of 1914-1915. Indeed, hunting during the previous year had been very successful and villagers decided to host a Messenger Feast. (Fair 2000, 282) This time, the villagers of Barrow were the invited guests. After that, there is no record of the Messenger Feast being performed for many decades. The reasons for the abandonment of the festival are unclear and multiple. A lot of factors can be taken into account, such as social, economical and environmental ones.

After 1915, commercial whaling collapsed and “the people in Barrow were nearly destitute.” (Ikuta 2007, 347)  Between 1910 and 1930, the “great death” occurred and decimated entire villages with several diseases brought by Europeans and American whalers, such as cholera, polio and diphteria. Thomas Riccio states that “the Iñupiaq culture that survived, devastated by the loss of its tradition-bearers and shamans, was altered irrevocably.” (Riccio 1993, 117) The Native population had been reduced by half by these epidemics.  As a consequence, many rituals, dances and songs were lost. A lot of people decided to migrate to one region to another, “seeking something to eat, some shelter, and their kinsmen.” (Fair 2000, 284) The demographic and territorial bases of the traditional Inupiaq society were destroyed. Riccio adds: “the survivors of the once complex and ancient Iñupiaq tradition were no match for missionary pressures.” (Riccio 1993, 117) Indeed, the missionaries prompted the Inupiat to abandon their traditional beliefs, customs, language, and ceremonies. The qargi, or community house, disappeared as an institution in the beginning of the 20th century. It was the place where the Messenger Feast was held, so it can also have contributed to its disappearance.

Despite these challenges, Inupiat families preserved and passed down their culture as they could and after a lapse of more than 70 years, the modern Kivgiq was reconstructed in 1988. More than 2,000 participants joined it. It mixed ancient values and the ones from the modern context. Its purpose was to enhance ethnic pride and to inspire each Inupiaq with a stronger collective identity.(Ikuta 2007, 343) Today, many Inupiat communities host Messenger Feasts.

 The Messenger Feast from a Material Culture Perspective

 

Sources for this entry:

Susan W. Fair, “The Inupiaq Eskimo Messenger Feast: Celebration, Demise, and Possibility”, The Journal of American Folklore, 2000, 464-494

Nancy Fogel-Chance, “Fixing History: A Contemporary Examination of an Arctic Journal from the 1850s,” Ethnohistory 49:4 Fall 2002: 789-820.

Hiroko Ikuta, Iñupiaq pride: Kivgiq (Messenger Feast) on the Alaskan North Slope, Études/Inuit/Studies, vol. 31, n° 1-2, 2007, p. 343-364

Deanna M. Kingston, Lucy Tanaqiq Koyuk and Earl Aisana Mayac, “The Story of the King Island Wolf Dance, Then and Now”, Western Folklore, Vol. 60, No. 4 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 263-278

Thomas Riccio, “Message from Eagle Mother: The Messenger’s Feast of the Inupiat Eskimo.” TDR 37 (1993): 115-146.