In the 1988 film “Uksuum Cauyai: The Drums of Winter,” Cakicenaq Stanley Waska holds a small child in his arms as he sits in his kitchen in the Yukon Delta community of Emmonak, singing in Yup’ik. He taps his foot to the beat in place of the typical beat of a cauyaq frame drum.
Inside the qasgiq, the communal house and spiritual center of the village, the film follows Waska as he leads dances and tells stories that have survived through the centuries – through disease, famine, and the forces of cultural assimilation.
As Waska says in the film, “On good nights, on some evenings, the drummers and singers are at their sharpest. Everyone is together and right on key. Those nights make you want to dance from way inside, to sing from way inside.”
The majority of “Drums of Winter” was shot in Emmonak in 1977. Since its release, it has racked up awards across the world and established itself as an authentic portrait of Yup’ik dance and potlatch tradition on the Yukon Delta.
The film was screened at this year’s Cama’i Dance Festival in Bethel, which was also dedicated to Waska, who died in 1986. Today, both the culture of sharing and dance tradition remain strong in Emmonak. Waska’s son Raymond leads the community’s dance group – made up of the direct descendants of many who appear in the film.
In shooting “Drums of Winter,” filmmakers Sarah Elder and Leonard Kamerling wanted to break new ground using a collaborative community approach. It steered clear of narrative voiceover and gave the film’s subjects a direct say in the production process.
Part of this collaboration meant bringing on Waska’s nephew, Walkie Charles, to work with translating and interpreting footage. At this year’s Cama’i festival, Charles hosted the film screenings and offered context about the outsiders who sought to capture daily life in Emmonak.
"These two folks were kass’aq, and yet they came in silently and said nothing, but recorded," Charles said.
Charles grew up in Emmonak and is now a professor of Yup’ik language at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He said that his ties to his community’s rich dance tradition were severed at the age of 12 when he was sent far away for schooling at the Wrangell Institute in Southeast Alaska.
"When I should have learned, I was taken away to boarding school," Charles said. "Instead of coming home after boarding school, I went to college. I wanted to give back to my people through English the story that they themselves cannot express."
"The new and the old"
Charles said that he fondly remembers weeks spent on the mouth of the Yukon River with his uncle at fish camp. He said that there was nothing pretentious about his uncle, despite his status as a community leader.
"He grew up with very, very humble beginnings, and he died humbly. And what kept him to be the person that he is is that he had that spiritual connection between the new and the old," Charles said.
Waska was also a longtime Catholic deacon, and “Drums of Winter” is peppered with the historical writings of early Jesuit missionaries who called the foundations of Yup’ik belief into question after arriving in Western Alaska in the late 1800s.
Some of the passages in the film are shocking in their scorn. In an excerpt written in 1894, a priest that was stationed near modern-day St. Mary's on the lower Yukon River describes a famine that struck the area.
"I consider this starvation as a blessing of God for the mission; the help I am obliged to give will be remembered. Calamities have always been a special time of grace and the means to obtain conversion of sinners," a voice actor read.
But the film also includes contemporary footage of a Jesuit priest who spent more than five decades in the region, Fr. Rene Astruc. He speaks about the suffering that occurred at the hands of missionaries, and the resilience of dance tradition.
"When I first arrived in the villages, there was no more dancing. It was very hard to find the drum, even. And over the years, somehow I've seen that start again, and there is no stopping it now, that's for sure," Astruc said in the film.
Upon his death in 2002, Astruc was praised as an advocate of Yup’ik culture. But in 2018, his name appeared on a list released by a Jesuit organization of dozens of priests accused of sexual abuse in communities across Western Alaska going back to the 1950s.
Waska passed away decades before the allegations came to light. Charles remembers his uncle as both a culture-bearer and a devout Catholic.
"He prayed, and prayed, and prayed all the time. And there are times when at night we'd be so tired, and yet he wanted to pray," Charles said.
Watching “Drums of Winter,” one gets the sense that just as often, Waska’s mind was in the qasqik thinking about yuraq.
As Waska explains at the end of the film, “I don’t enjoy other things like movies, white people’s dances, basketball games, or bingo. Even if they have Yup’ik dancing day after day I don’t think I will ever get tired of it. I came into my awareness with this dancing. I grew into consciousness with it.”
Just like the qasqik seen in the film, many Yup’ik traditions have faded into the past. But were he alive today at the Cama’i Dance Festival dedicated to his memory, Waska might be proud to know that there are many who will also never tire of dancing.
