Each year, the Arctic city of Nuuk is host to the Suialaa Arts Festival, spotlighting contemporary Indigenous visual art, film, literature, music, and other cultural performances and community conversations from across the circumpolar region. Forefronting this year’s cultural landscape was the once-endangered Inuit cultural practice known as drum dancing, thanks to culture-bearer Nuka Alice (Inuk). For Alice, drum dancing is not just an art; it’s a journey between the physical, mental, and spiritual worlds of Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland). Cristina Verán spoke with Alice about her trajectory from an early sense of cultural disconnection to becoming a transmitter of this vital expression that has helped her Peoples survive and thrive in an environment that is as perilous and harsh as it is beautiful.
Cristina Verán: What does being a drum dancer mean for you?
Nuka Alice: This term in English doesn’t cover all of what I do, but we use it for someone who uses the qilaat, my drum. I beat this drum to follow my heartbeat, using my voice to create a melody and my body to dance. I have to bring out the emotion of the song to tell its story with a spiritual intention, aiming not only to make music, but to travel between dimensions.
CV: How do you define these dimensions—are they physical? Metaphysical?
NA: As an Inuk, I recognize three elements that together make up the whole person: a physical part, a mental part, and a spiritual part. When I can embody them all at once, that’s when the goosebumps appear. There’s an energy coming out of our bodies beyond the limitations of where our skin ends. We feel it whenever we pass by another— something I’ve noticed whenever I’ve met other Indigenous people. When I perform, I try to beam this energy out to whoever I share my drumming with, surrendering myself to the song.
CV: While traditions of this performance were developed communally, you also write your own songs. How do you reconcile the personal and the collective?
NA: The concept of “owning” a song is not really a part of my culture. I’m just a channel for something that is bigger than us as people. I may have written a particular song, but I understand as an Inuk that it ultimately belongs to what we call Sila—the universal force that connects all living beings of this world with life and energy as part of one consciousness. It’s not so much me, Nuka Alice, performing; rather, it’s me as a channel for Sila.
Nuka Alice performs a drum song with Ingiulik, a music project and performance group of which she’s a featured member, at GUX venue in Nuuk, Greenland. Photo by Cristina Verán.
CV: How does this relate with your ancestors’ understandings?
NA: I follow the same principles when performing my songs as you’ll hear in our older, traditional ones. While sharing the song in a physical setting, where living, physical beings are listening, I believe that the souls of my ancestors are [listening] as well, helping me to bring out the soul in each song.
CV: How does this inter-realm interconnectedness speak to the broader experience and ways of living Inuit Peoples share across Kalaallit Nunaat?
NA: As with many other Indigenous cultures, the individual ego isn’t viewed as something great. Instead, the well being of the group is most important. A person cannot survive alone in the harsh environment of the Arctic. You have to be part of a group. I want to always create, through my performances, a space where everyone in the audience can truly feel a sense of belonging.
CV: How was the tradition of drum dancing passed on to you?
NA: I come from the west coast of Greenland, where this almost disappeared with colonization. Unlike my ancestors, I did not directly inherit any of my community’s traditional songs—I had to reclaim them. I had grown up around my mother’s singing choir, so I had an idea of what beautiful music sounded like, but back in the 1980s, as a child, I heard an east Greenland drum song on the radio whose beauty was something different. The singer, Miilikka Kuitse, from a village called Kulusuk, was recorded at a gathering a decade earlier when there was a revitalization movement for Inuit culture. Sometime after, I saw a drum dancer on TV, singing with a choir. Though I could see with my eyes that he was physically there, I could also sense that he was somewhere else, not completely there.
The first time I actually experienced someone performing the music in the same room as me was in 1997 when Katuaq (the Greenlandic culture house in Nuuk) opened, and a group of drum dancers, including Miilikka’s daughter, Nagui (Anna Kuitse), would perform. The singers spoke a different dialect from my own, so I couldn’t fully understand the words. I felt both disconnected and somehow still connected, all at once.
CV: How did the experience of invasion and colonization impact intergenerational knowledge transmission in Greenland?
NA: It starts with Christianity, which arrived here in 1721. The first missionary, Hans Egede—a Lutheran priest from Norway—came here looking for Vikings. When he realized there weren’t any left, he looked to convert the Inuit People. Because our drum dancing contains a spiritual element, they frowned upon it and didn’t see it as compatible with what they wanted to plant here. It took an Indigenous Greenlandic priest to change things. For him, the practice wasn’t inherently threatening to Christianity. He saw the cultural value of drum dancing, and actually encouraged the people there to preserve it.
CV: How did your personal journey of reclamation begin?
NA: Since I didn’t inherit any traditional songs from my own community, I had to learn them elsewhere. My teacher, Paulina Lumholdt, from the west coast of Greenland, met with the Elders, who told her fewer and fewer members of those communities were carrying on the tradition. She could see then how important it was to make sure the songs did not disappear.
In her class, she’d spend so much time telling us about the meaning of the songs and their stories. I was young and very impatient back then, and was like, ‘Come on, let’s just take the drum and do this!’ But she’d tell us, ‘No, not yet. You have to first understand what it means.’ In that way, she also taught me patience.
CV: Did you have any prior experience in music or performance?
NA: I was actually in a rock band and performed music from outside of my own culture. I was still assimilated into a western mindset and value system and had to unlearn many things. Having been part of a contemporary choir, I had a very technical approach to my learning process. But you can’t think of this kind of music in terms of technical perfection—my teacher taught me to go so much deeper than that. A favorite thing I perform now is called an Aqaat, a charm song, which is like a love song but for a child, created for just one person. It’s like an ego booster that will give that person a lot of confidence.
CV: How does your teaching experience compare with your student days?
NA: When I teach my own workshops now, the participants get impatient—just as I used to feel. But I say to them: The Inuit survived for generations in Greenland because through our drum songs, each generation passed its knowledge on to the next. This is knowledge our people had lost, and we are here to regain it together.
Cristina Verán is an international Indigenous Peoples- focused specialist researcher, educator, advocacy strategist, network weaver, and mediamaker, as well as adjunct faculty at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Main photo: Nuka Alice. Photo by Angu Motzfeldt.
