By Sarah Hansen
Music today is usually categorized by the genre to which it most stylistically relates. A quick scroll through the iTunes genres sections reveals the familiar categories, among them Rock, Pop, R&B/Soul, Country, Classical, and Alternative. Songs or musical compilations today seem to have a readily apparent identity.
For the Inuit people of Alaska, this is not the case. Inuit music is distinguished according to its function rather than style, and most songs serve either a secular, social, or religious purpose. Many religious songs tend to be reserved for traditional ceremonies, while secular songs might be focused on the individual. Secular songs are sung to ease the birth of a child, to locate lost objects, or to cure illnesses.
There are, of course, many sub-categories of songs. For example, the Inuit of St. Lawrence Island, have terms that distinguish between nighttime and daytime singing, while the Inuit of the Northwest region of Alaska categorize songs by whether they are used in games, in stories, for dance, or in traditional ceremonies.
One such traditional ceremony that is still important for Alaskan Inuit culture is the whaling ceremony. All of the stages in the whaling process are celebrated, and there are songs to reinforce the hunting materials, bring forth the whales, and control the weather. Once the captain and crew return with the captured whales, the materials of the animal are distributed at a celebration called Nalukataq, which takes place during the month of June. Nalukataq, literally meaning “to throw and toss up,” refers to the whaler’s skin toss dance, and celebrates the bounty and distribution of Quaq (whale meat) and Muktuk (whale blubber).
Nalukataq Blanket Toss Barrow, 2006 by By Floyd Davidson. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
To celebrate Nalukataq, communities gather to sing songs, dance, and take part in the traditional whale-toss, in which men and women in the community hold a Nalukataq blanket, generally made from seal or walrus skin, and toss the captains and captains’ wives up into the air. Traditionally, the wives of captains would throw out tools and food whilst being thrown into the air to mimic the distribution of whale meat among members of the community, but the tradition has since evolved to be candy thrown out to children.
As can been seen from Nalukataq, aspects of the original ceremony live on, but traditions have changed with the times. Festivals are often associated with US holidays, such as Independence Day, or with special community events. Although music might not still be used as frequently to help cure illnesses or ease childbirth, it still plays an important role in Alaskan Inuit culture, and will certainly continue to do so.
All information from this post is taken from an article on Alaskan Inuit music from Oxford Music Online.
Sarah Hansen is a Publicity Assistant at Oxford University Press.
Oxford Music Online has made several articles available freely to the public, including its entry on Inuit Music. Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
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The post Songs of the Alaskan Inuit appeared first on OUPblog.
I got a bunch of lovely silk remnants (crepe?) from a friend who was leaving Hannover some time ago. I’d never sewn with silk before, but it only took me two years to work up my nerve to actually run it through the sewing machine.
I thought and thought about the best thing to make with it. The remnants are lovely but a little pale for my coloring. I over-dyed some of it, which I’ve been working into a dress. I was planning to use all of it for clothes, but the camel and pale green then turned out to be just right for a throw for our “book nook.”
Ever since reading Handmade Home, I’ve been wanting all sorts of handmade throws to snuggle up with. And natural fibers! But of course natural fibers for a large project get pretty expensive.
But with gifted silk remnants, the decadence could be mine, all mine! And really, was imperfect silk sewing really better than letting all that lovely silk just sit in storage?
My original plan was to quilt the throw. The assembly part went pretty well, not as tricky as I’d feared. I used part of an old sheet for the middle layer. But machine-quilting silk was another story. I liked making crazy lines with the machine, but the silk got all slippy and puckery, but not in a fun way. So I just stopped quilting after a little while and left it at that. I would unpick the quilting, but I think it’d make it worse, and anyway, it’s just for us. The throw is a really nice weight, perfect for a little reading or a quick nap.
And I’m all about celebrating imperfections. Otherwise this throw would still be remnants in the stash box. Hopefully my gifting friend won’t see this and gasp with horror 
Stay tuned for another natural fiber throw of a very different kind. And hopefully that overdyed silk dress will be ready soon. It’s allllllmost finished.
If you, too, have silk-sewing fears, here are some tips I found very helpful from Sunni of a fashionable stitch.
Have a great weekend!
Another “it’s been a while”…
Check out the other entries at Illustration Friday.
Holy toledo things have been busy lately!
Lots of work and lots of family stuff has made it a wee bit difficult to get around to posting on the ol' illustration blog. Add all of that to the fact that I've been having a lot of trouble sleeping and you've got a recipe for disaster more annoying than a weekend long marathon of Ben Affleck movies.
Anyway, hopefully I'm entering a bit of a downspell and hopefully that'll mean throwing something up on here more often.
Hopefully.
I don't like making promises, so we'll just stick with hopefully.
Anyway, my wife has been snapping some pictures of me early in the morning and we think that we've discovered the reason I'm not getting any sleep.
The stupid cats seem to think my head is their bed.
(Don't give me any guff on the black and white stripped quilt. I've had it since I was a kid, it's ugly as sin, it needs to be thrown away, I've heard it all from my wife more than once. I'll tell you the same thing I tell her...it's not going anywhere. That's right, I'm a thirty year old Linus. Deal with it.)
Steve~
This is something I illustrated for the Bright Baby Bunny Kit (Highreach Learning 2006). I also got to design and/or draw the puppets for the kit. I learned that my sewing background came in handy and hope to get to design more puppets, toys or dolls in the future.
I went to the studio with two ideas in mind for this illustration. This is what eventually evolved three hours later. I then came home and "Googled" 'Native American Wisdom + Blanket' and this is the quote that appeared. I feel compelled to share it.
"Before our white brothers arrived to make us civilized men,we didn't have any kind of prison. Because of this, we had no delinquents.Without a prison, there can be no delinquents.We had no locks nor keys and therefore among us there were no thieves.When someone was so poor that he couldn't afford a horse, a tent or a blanket, he would, in that case, receive it all as a gift.We were too uncivilized to give great importance to private property.We didn't know any kind of money and consequently, the value of a human being was not determined by his wealth.We had no written laws laid down, no lawyers, no politicians,therefore we were not able to cheat and swindle one another.We were really in bad shape before the white men arrived and I don't know how to explain how we were able to manage without these fundamental things that (so they tell us) are so necessary for a civilized society. "
John (Fire) Lame Deer Sioux Lakota - 1903-1976
acrylic, Prismacolor pencils, patterned paper
(click to enlarge...and click here to see another blanket!)
My submission for Illustration Friday's "blanket" is from my 2002 HomeMade calendar and the title is "TreeHouse". She often thought her little garden looked like a small brown blanket laying on top of the grass carpet under her umbrella tree.
I am late with my submission today because I went out for an appointment this morning and a young girl crashed into me and my car. I truly felt that my trusty old metal car was a blanket that wrapped me in safety because the impact was so hard it blew all the glass from the window all over me. Sadly my beloved 89 bmw looks bad and I hope it can be fixed... But I'm happy to be back home.
Lord Benito, You Must Listen To Us...
