Alaska News

Bethel's Cama-i Dance Festival melds past and present, performers and audience

BETHEL -- A city council member beckoned kids to a Native American hip-hop workshop, and then to one on belly dancing. People waited in line 45 minutes to buy $10 cups of Eskimo ice cream, or akutaq, with tundra berries, halibut and Crisco. On stage, one group of Bethel dancers reached deep to perform, only a year after their leader was killed in a house fire.

The cultural explosion that is Bethel's Cama-i Dance Festival is drawing thousands this weekend for dance and song, Native foods and family, dramatic regalia and live performances by a Yup'ik YouTube sensation.

It's likely the biggest gathering of Yup'ik people in the world, organizers say. The festival is anchored by 27 hours of dance spread over three days in the steamy and packed Bethel Regional High School gymnasium. But it extends from there to dental screenings, a Miss Cama-i cultural pageant, a Native foods potluck with salmon, dried fish and moose stew, dance and theater workshops, arts and crafts vendors, and a wall of memories about those lost to suicide.

The experience, organizers say, takes people outside themselves, sometimes to a place they have never been, sometimes to where they need to go.

"Cama'i means healing," said Peter Atchak, one of the organizers and lead announcers. He is originally from Chevak but has long lived in Bethel. He said he sees the worry on people's faces wash away at the festival. "Just go into it, deep into dancing and drumming and entertainment. You can forget there is a world out there when you are in Cama-i. That's a relief."

People change after Cama-i, he said. They go home and talk about what they saw and learned. They feel pride in who they are, as a people.

"Without ritual, without storytelling, without the drum, without dance, subsistence is only food," the late Andrew Paukan, a dancer from St. Mary's, is quoted by organizers as saying.

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The logistics have been fine-tuned over the years since Cama-i emerged in 1989 as an event under the Bethel Council on the Arts, said Linda Curda, who inherited the festival in 1991 and has been one of the coordinators ever since.

The festival has no paid staff but relies on some 400 volunteers. Theresa Ferguson, one of the dancers, also coordinates airport pickups of dance groups from villages. Agnes Naneng oversees housing. Dance groups sleep in schools, with friends and family and at the Association of Village Council Presidents' Allanivik Hotel. There are eight shifts of concession workers. Every two hours, Curda said, the high school bathrooms are cleaned.

And it all stays close to schedule, thanks in part to volunteers who keep things moving in Cama-i headquarters -- the high school band room -- where dance groups get ready before they head to the stage. There's no intermission, so audience members flow in and out of the gym all day and night.

"Who's the audience? Who's the performers?" Curda said. "It's all one."

That became evident Saturday night during one of the festival highlights, the Heart of the Drums.

Atchak, the announcer, silenced the crowd.

"This one is not going anywhere else in the whole world. You are the chosen," he said. "Very, very powerful medicine is going to come to you."

Drummers from all the groups -- from all over Western Alaska -- ringed the top row of bleachers around the gym. They drummed and they drummed, and the beat ripped through the crowd.

The festival opened Friday with Bethel Traditional Dancers and their song "Cama-i," a way of saying "hello," usually to someone you haven't seen in a long while. The group was small. Women sang and drummed -- a role that usually falls to men in traditional Yup'ik groups. But the group has almost no men.

The dancers are still healing after leader Janis Martha Guest, whose Yup'ik name is "Cangarraq," was killed in a house fire April 29, 2014, just after last year's Cama-i. The circumstances of the fire and her death were suspicious, said dancers and family members.

This year's festival is dedicated to her.

Her husband, Ralph, also a dancer, drowned in 2009, another loss to the Bethel dancers.

Only one man and one boy with the group danced at this year's Cama-i -- Guest's brothers, Keane Guest and little Christian Beaver, who never took his eyes off his older brother.

One of their songs was called "Disjointed," which dancers said was descriptive of how it's been.

Keane said he wasn't sure he could perform, but also didn't see how he could not do it. "I needed to do this for peace and to get comfort. I guess all of us needed to," he said, moments after finishing. "It felt like she was with us in the audience."

Another Bethel dancer, Emma Noatak, was on stage with her small daughters: Jessica, who turns 3 on Sunday, what would have been Janis' 28th birthday, and Cangarraq, 9 months old and named for the late dance leader.

"Someday," Noatak said, holding her baby, "she'll be our leader."

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The Cama-i experience is life-changing for some, celebratory for others, and surreal at times.

An aerialist moved high above the stage along silken cloths. A Crow rapper got the Yup'ik children on their feet, waving their arms in the air. A Bethel hip-hop-style group learned from watching YouTube. Turkish Romani dancers shook their bellies and entire bodies in ways that had Yup'ik elders in the front raw wide-eyed and open-mouthed.

"I want to be like them. Fancy," elder Lucille Alexie said. She is originally from Nunapitchuk and said dancing wasn't allowed when she was young.

Byron Nicholai, a teenager whose improvised songs are a hit on YouTube and Facebook, leads the Toksook Bay dance group. He goes by "I Sing. You Dance," and he drew a huge crowd of teens. After Friday night's show, girls lined up for cellphone pictures. He noticed one who was too shy and made it easy by approaching her.

Cama-i continues through Sunday.

This year's theme is "Generations Celebrating Through Dance," or in Yup'ik, Kinguveqellriit Nunaniryulriit Yurakun.

Lisa Demer

Lisa Demer was a longtime reporter for the Anchorage Daily News and Alaska Dispatch News. Among her many assignments, she spent three years based in Bethel as the newspaper's western Alaska correspondent. She left the ADN in 2018.

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