Dance Mittens, mid-20th century

In Paul Tiulana’s book A Place for Winter, he said that December is dancing month. And of course living in Alaska, we know that December is a very dark month and that’s when a lot of the dancing would take place because there was not a lot of light.

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My name is Maria Williams. I’m Tlingit. I’m of the Raven moiety, and of the Deisitaan clan and a child of the Killer Whale. My ancestral villages are Carcross, which is right outside of Whitehorse in Yukon territories and Atlein, which is Northern British Columbia. So I’m inland Tlingit. So there’s three inland Tlingit villages: Teslin, Atlein, and Carcross. Currently, I am faculty member in Alaska Native studies at the University of Alaska Anchorage in the Departments of Music and Alaska Native Studies. And Anchorage is my hometown. I like the way they say Anchorage in Tlingit.

So the items that we’re looking at today are Dance Gloves or Dance Gauntlets that are probably from the Seward Peninsula. And they’re Iñupiaq in origin. They are primarily worn by the men in ceremony or dance performance.

I’m not an Iñupiaq speaker but I believe their term is aitkatik.

They’re made out of seal skin that’s the main part of the glove and the hair has been dehaired and then, they use an ochre to dye it. At the very top, you see the polar bear fur trim. There’s some bleached seal at the very top with geometric, little boxes. Of course, the rattling part of it, because these are… could be considered instruments as well—there’s ivory. On one of the gloves here you can see the puffin beaks. Puffin is a bird that nests in a lot of areas on cliffs in the Seward Peninsula region. The puffin beaks and or ivory are the rattling device.

The men wear them primarily for one of the few surviving ceremonies, which is called the Wolf Dance from this region. But you’d still see the King Island people in other Iñupiaq villages still dance with these.

The men are moving or dancing. They’re moving their arms. It covers the whole arm. And it creates a rattling sound that enhances the dancing.

I always, of course, think of the women who were the ones who did all the sewing, of course by hand and the perfection that they have and their sewing, and the preparation of the materials, de-hairing of the seal skin, dying it with ochre, and in some parts of the geometric design, of course, has the bleached seal skin with very small geometric squares. Very precise and very beautiful.