Letter from the Editor

TUSAAYAKSAT UPINARAAMI – Tusaayaksat in the Summer

As Mary K. Okheena puts it, every culture has a drum. Music and dance are some of the oldest ways humans have expressed themselves.

But music is more than entertainment: it parallels our own existence. We find music beautiful when the vocals, instruments and sounds combine in such a way to seem just right, the melodies perfect and everything in flow. This isn’t limited to music, but is the sense of alignment that we seek in all aspects of our lives.

When you are doing the right thing, living the right way, achieving what you want to and existing according to your principles, you find yourself in alignment with the universe. That is where we get our sense of meaning. You feel the strength of that alignment, which is so necessary to hold a person up, the same way the foundation of a bridge holds it up.

When our world is out of alignment, it is like a bungled song and gives you the same reaction as nails on a chalkboard. It is our bridge collapsing into the sea. This is where despair, depression and negativity breed. This is why our cultural and traditional foundation is so important: it is the support off which we can build.

This issue is all about drum dancing, in celebration of the 35th anniversary of the Inuvialuit Final Agreement. We talked to drummers and dancers across the region to find out why they love the cultural tradition, and it’s hard not to be moved when you hear how drum dance can speak to a person’s heart.

We go much deeper into the subject throughout this magazine, but for now, we would like to thank the drum dance groups and Inuvialuit Regional Corporation for making this issue happen.

Regretfully, not everyone in each group has been captured in this issue. Not every name of every person who has been instrumental in preserving the culture has been mentioned. It is impossible to be fully complete, as much of a bother as that is to my obsessive tendencies. Certainly, no one was purposefully left out. Scheduling and the logistics of putting out a magazine in under three months are the limits to our scope.

For anyone missed, we thank you for your involvement with this art form and hope you continue it. To watch a drum dance is beautiful enough. I can only imagine the sense of alignment when you sing with your ancestors.

QUYANAINNI THANK YOU,

Stewart Burnett, Editor-in-Chief