Cultural Week

Towards the end of the school year, our school turned into workshop central with cultural activities in each room. Through the chaos of scheduling fiascoes, the students ended up gaining a taste of some knowledge passed down from Yupik elders. Although there wasn't always an elder present in the workshop, students, classroom aides, volunteers, elders, and people hired from the community combined their skills to have students work on projects such as spears, spear throwers, dance fans, dance belts, fish traps, and manaqs (fishing poles).

I learned the length of a spear should be from the elbow of one arm to the tip of your finger on the other arm.

After it is cut to the proper length, a plane is used to carve the square wood into a cylinder. "Plane and turn, plane and turn, plane and turn." Every one of us was silent, sweating, and concentrating for a few hours steady.

After it is nicely rounded, you can use the wood shavings as sand paper to make it smoother. Then a cut metal pipe is pounded over the front end of the spear as a weight. Lastly, a hemisphere is carved out of the back end and feathers are tied to allow the spear to guide through the air. I used swan feathers dipped in ink that I had found in my classroom. Bummer cut them to be shorter and fancier for my custom spear.One of our other tasks was to create dance fans. Male dance fans are larger and look similar to bear paws while they dance. Female dance fans only have two finger holes and are smaller. When we arrived at the workshop, there were only patterns for male dance fans. I came up with a pattern using a compass for the girls to make dance fans that would comfortably fit their fingers.



They play a game called Lapp Game which is very similar to baseball. It is typically played on the ice with a softball-sized leather/rubbery ball. I had never seen the game, so my class taught the kindergarten class and me how to play. The students decided to split up girls against boys-- one team in the outfield and one team lined up to bat. After they hit the ball, their goal was to make it down to the other side through the outfielders and back without getting hit with the ball. Technically you could imagine it like baseball with a home base and one other base. I liked how many runners can run at the same time and how there is only one out before the sides switch so it tends to be a little more exciting and engaging than baseball.

At the end of the cultural days, a few drummers played for the students and an eskimo dance was held in the gym. It was a fun end to an exhausting, yet enlightening set of days!