Through writing and theater, artist promotes Iñupiaq culture and Indigenous wellness

To process pain, one can speak about it — or perform in a play that touches on the painful experience.

A writer, educator, performer and theater director Aaluk Edwardson has been promoting Inupiaq culture and Indigenous wellness through theater performances and practical workshops. Last month, she led a workshop at Ilisagvik College to help students and other Utqiagvik residents use writing as a tool to heal.

A two-day-long Writing to Heal workshop — created in partnership between Ilisagvik and Edwardson’s non-profit Creative Decolonization — focused first on identifying unhealthy narratives, Edwardson said. The second day was about writing: Edwardson shared tools like self-reflective prompts, journaling and poetry that can help change unhealthy narratives.

“Storytelling is not just an entertaining medium, but a very therapeutic medium,” Edwardson said. “Through writing prompts that I have in the Day Two slides, I’m going to have the participants work out new messages so that they add new storylines around who they are and how they want to face pain, how they see themselves as resilient and strong and kind.”

Born and raised in Utqiagvik, Edwardson is one of the seven children of Debby and George Edwardson. As a child, Edwardson said she lived through traumatic experiences that made her acutely open to creativity. Growing up, she played as if she had her DJ show and pretended to be a news anchor. She sang, choreographed dances with her siblings and performed in the Arctic Community Theatre.

“By the time I was five, I was creating out of everything,” she said. “I was using it as a human medium without knowing that I was doing that.”

For Edwardson, movement and performance are outlets to express her feelings, which sometimes work even better than writing.

“We don’t always have to know how to communicate how we feel to each other,” she said. “I think it’s important that we communicate how we feel, and we express how we feel, to ourselves first — whether in writing, verbally or otherwise.”

Edwardson studied at Colorado College in Colorado Springs but ended up coming home after the first semester and giving birth to her son. That’s when she started reevaluating what she wanted to do in life. When her son turned three, Edwardson went back to school at Dartmouth College, where she studied theater and sociology with a focus on performance as a healing medium. She also received a minor in environmental studies, looking at changes in Earth’s cold regions.

Today, Edwardson brings what she has learned together in her creative projects. In 2018, she started her Indigenous-owned business, Creative Decolonization, to use therapeutic creative engagement, self-reflective tools and mindfulness to support others with personal and cultural wellness. She is also an adjunct professor at Ilisagvik and teaches classes for the Inupiat Studies department in creative writing, Inuit history, art and wellness.

In October 2022, Edwardson held a three-workshop series, with the Arts and Climate Initiative, exploring participants’ personal relationships between culture and climate. The workshop took place over three Saturday afternoons and “covered the relationship between culture and climate from indigenous points of view,” participant Claude Shryer said.

Shryer said he was impressed by how Edwardson engaged participants in creative exercises. At one point she asked them to ‘think about the environments they grew up in, and how the land and water influenced who they grew up to be.

“We explored how culture is interlinked with climate and how climate change is as much of a cultural issue as it is a physical one,” Shryer said. “It was fun but also presented the unfiltered truth about the challenges we face with the climate emergency.”

In 2019, Edwardson brought together four groups of Iñuit artists to present traditional legends and narratives in the Sovereignty Stories project. One of the stories is based on the Kotzebue mermaid legend, the Nuyakpalik Unipkaak, and it is told through a puppet video. In it, a woman during a time of famine finds a mermaid entangled in her fishing net, and despite fearing the creature, decides to free her.

“Please stay quiet and let me untangle your dark hair. I am a woman, same as you. If you tip my kayak, we will both drown,” the puppet woman says to the mermaid. “I have a family and they need me.”

In return, the mermaid brings fish to the lagoon.

“It’s a beautiful, beautiful legend about a time of famine and how this relationship between this mermaid and a human helped save the community and bring the white fish to that area,” Edwardson said. “I don’t think art provides any answers. On the contrary, I think art provides questions. I think art provides a space to contemplate and reflect and see what resonates with you.”

Erica Purruq Khan from Utqiaġvik was a co-founder of the Sovereignty Stories project and the creative lead for the Nuyakpalik Unipkaat, the Mermaid Legend. She said she worked on the puppet show for half of a year, and Edwardson helped her and other artists to move the project forward.

“She was a driving force,” Khan said about Edwardson. “She put action to things, she made things flourish. She has such a big passion for being an artist, she has such a big passion for giving back to her people.”

A year earlier, in the ATTA 2019 Production, Edwardson collaborated with Khan and other artists to produce a play about whaling and Iñuit Mother of the Deep. The play was cast, rehearsed, and produced in three weeks from start to finish. The crew built the sod house using real whale bones and used construction lights and donated fabric for costumes.

The first pilot show, all-volunteer, was performed on Aug. 3 and 4, 2019, in Utqiaġvik’s Tuzzy Library. It was also the week of Kivġiq, with the town full of visitors, and 80 people came to see the play, even though there were no raffles or door prizes to attract them, Khan said.

“It was awesome,” Khan said. “My little sister was like, ‘I wish I could be in a play!’”

The play was a suicide postvention project that touched on such themes as suicide and addiction, as well as reconnecting with the land, said Khan who played the Mother of the Deep.

“Why do we have so many young people who are [dying by] suicide? Why do we have so many people who are lost in substance abuse?” Khan said. “Because we can’t relate to things around us anymore. We are not talking about the things we need to heal.”

From a young age, Edwardson said she cared about mental health issues. When she attended the Alaska Federation of Natives conference, she said she fought for a resolution connecting substance addiction to suicide. This is one of the many reasons why as an adult, Edwardson has been focusing on Indigenous wellness.

“A healing journey is surprising and unexpected. It is something you can’t foresee or predict,” she said. “You don’t get to decide it’s done. And you don’t get to decide what route it takes. And so instead of focusing on getting from point A to point B, I think I’d focus on what’s happening right now. Because honestly, that’s where a healing journey happens - in the present moment.”