Pavva Inupiaq Dancers: Away From the Sea and Into the Mountains

Winter 2024-25, FORUM Magazine

PAVVA IÑUPIAQ DANCERS is a Fairbanks-based group with a history that spans more than twenty years, first gathering in 1999 and becoming incorporated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit in 2002. Pavva is an Iñupiaq word that roughly means "away from the sea and into the mountains," an apt description of our interior Alaska landscape. According to the Pavva founders, Amy Topkok and Sean Asikłuk Topkok, the dances "celebrate the traditions and heritage of our Iñupiaq people - to teach, and to learn." Anyone of any heritage, Iñupiaq or not, is welcome to join - membership is open to anyone in the community who wants to share and preserve the tradition of Iñupiaq dance.

The group’s makeup has always been intergenerational. Pavva's current members include three generations of Topkoks: Amy and Sean, their sons Joseph and Christopher, and Christopher's son Terry, who has attended practices his whole life. At one point in time, the group included a family whose members spanned four generations.

Matia Wartes, now a UAF student, has been a member of Pavva since she was five. On the top, she is pictured performing at the grand opening of the Fairbanks Children's Museum in 2015; on the bottom, she is pictured performing a portion of the same dance to her grandmother’s drumming at a September 2024 practice.

As performers, the group has been invited all over the world. At home, Pavva dances at local events and also visits classrooms and other organizations to speak about the legacy of Iñupiaq values passed on through traditional dance. Last July, the Topkoks taught a week-long summer camp on Alaska Native Dance for the first time, sharing the tradition of dance with a new generation.

Though no strangers to teaching through direct instruction, the Pavva philosophy closer to home is far from it. Attending the group’s fall practices revealed a whole different side of their pedagogy, and it took me back to a story I heard a friend tell a few months earlier.

Now retired, this friend likes to tell a story about a visit she made to a village as an extroverted young teacher, fresh from the East Coast and beyond excited to be in Alaska. The day she arrived, she spotted an elder preparing a moosehide and sidled up to her immediately, her natural curiosity piqued, and peppered her with questions. The elder dutifully answered her questions without taking her eyes away from her work. As the story goes, this went on for about twenty minutes before the elder stopped and turned to her. “You know,” the elder said earnestly, “my people learn by watching."

It’s a lesson and a value she still holds close decades later, and I saw it in action on a Saturday in October as Pavva gathered for practice. Younger kids played on the bleachers and in the background as the group began dancing. Notably, the kids were never instructed or pressured to join, or even asked in a literal sense; everyone who was there watched or participated as their comfort level (or interest) permitted. One grade-schooler galloped her stuffed unicorn across the gymnasium floor a few times before ducking into a recessed doorway to sit and watch the dancers. She watched for a while. Then she stood up and, facing the group, began to dance a mirror image - still tucked away in the alcove, unicorn still in hand. This was not her first time seeing this dance; she knew it, and she had learned it by watching.

They had free range of the gym, yet virtually every child chose to dance at one point or another. A sleepy toddler bobbed his foot along with the beat of the drumming while finishing a bottle on a lap in the bleachers before making his way down to stand before the dancers, completely rapt; after a few moments, he began mimicking their moves himself. Teenagers shyly donned mittens and joined in at the back of the group, and as a unit, they began to dance. ■

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