Halfway through their concert at the 2024 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the band Pamyua paused to throw in an Arctic game demonstration.

Peter Pilak Griggs (Yup’ik and Sugpiaq), a spirited nineteen-year-old, sprawled on the floor, readied himself for a leap. Prompted by the audience’s chant of uh-oh-a, rising and falling like a seal’s wail, he sprang forward on fists and toes, channeling his Indigenous ancestors who sprang across the ice in sync with the seals they sought to harpoon.

The game, known as the “seal hop,” is one of Phillip Blanchett’s favorites. The Pamyua founder and record-setting Arctic sports veteran provided play-by-play commentary while Griggs went on to demonstrate two other events, the scissor jump and the high kick.

“He’s got to keep his balance or he’s going to be in the freezing ocean!” Phillip shouted as Griggs teetered on landing. When Griggs stumbled, Phillip smiled. “Well, we just lost an ancestor.”

A booming drumbeat marked Griggs’s landing on his final leap, the sound of a drum made of cottonwood roaring to life. The band’s leaders—Aassanaaq “Ossie” Kairaiuak, Phillip Blanchett, and his brother Stephen Qacung Blanchett—soon added a layer of gravelly harmonies that tumbled and splashed across the National Mall as if it were the tundra of their Alaskan home. Meanwhile, women danced, waving furry tegumiak fans, stomping in time with the drum’s rising tempo. As the song neared its end and the rhythm slowed, Stephen, his shirt darkened with sweat, led the audience in shouting, “pamyua!”

Meaning “encore!” in Yupik, shouts of “pamyua!” often break out at the end of Indigenous Alaska’s tribal drum-dance sessions, ushering in new rounds of celebration. With dancers, musicians, and athletes, the band brought a taste of life from the icy north to the nation’s sweltering capital. Their songs speak to Indigenous traditions, telling stories that defy centuries of suppression and bring joy and wonder to those who hear them.

[Watch the mini documentary Pamyua: Breaking Trail on the Festival Blog]

A Generational Feat

Pamyua, the band, began on an April evening in 1995, in Wasilla, Alaska. Stephen was a groom-to-be, so Phillip was testing out traditional Yup’ik songs they might sing at the wedding.

As any mischievous older brother might, Stephen didn’t follow Phillip’s lead exactly: he launched in with gospel-like backups. Soon they were locking harmonies, laughing uncontrollably, the music tickling them with its sweet combination of tribal rhythm and ‘90s modernity.

Intrigued by the newness of what they were making, the brothers jumped in the car: “Let’s go see Dad.” They drove ten miles to their father, David Phillip, a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church who often led them in choir and doo-wop rehearsals. Upon arrival, the brothers pulled him downstairs to unveil their latest creation.

“My dad was so motivated with all of these ideas of what we could do with this performance,” Phillip said. “He sees it can be shared in so many different communities in different spaces—church conferences and events with thousands of people attending and colleges all over the nation.”

Phillip, who was already performing with community dance groups around town, was instantly sold on the idea. “If we’re going to do this, we’ll need more,” he decided. Inspiration hit on the forty-mile drive home; he pulled over to the side of the road and wrote his first song.

To round out their innovative take on the traditional Yup’ik song, Phillip asked his mother, Marie Meade, to bring in some elders to drum for them.

Unlike her sons, Meade grew up in the swampy tundra village of Nunapitchuk where, for a century, Christian influence had silenced the ceremonial chants and halted the dances. It wasn’t until Meade turned fifteen that she encountered traditional dance and drumming in Bethel, twenty-four miles away.

“When I heard that drum and the singing, something inside me opened up,” she recalled. “I recognized it. I felt it. I longed for it. But I thought it would never be available to me.”

That wake-up call eventually took her hundreds of miles to the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and she returned in 1970 with the desire to develop the first bilingual school program in her village.

The ‘70s were electric in Alaska, and across Indigenous communities in the United States, as calls for Native unity surged and cultural traditions began to flourish, amplifying demands for land restoration, legal autonomy, and economic independence. Thanks to the 1972 Indian Education Act, tribes reclaimed control over education, finally opening regional high schools to Native children. Meade felt this pulse of revival deeply, determined to let her culture’s voice ring out again. Working alongside anthropologist Irene Reed, she created a phonetic writing system for Yupik languages. With Nunamta (“Of Our Land”), a dance and singing troupe, she brought Yup’ik performances to the international stage for the first time.

“Our mother instilled in us the love, excitement, and comfort in our prayers, expressing who we are without overexplaining, just living it and sharing it,” Phillip said.

Meade wove a legacy of teaching into the Pamyua story, leading to the brothers’ triumphant debut at the Native students’ graduation.

“There were so many different people in that room that were involved in the arts in education,” Phillip said. “And they are so excited—like my dad, they saw the possibility.”

Phillip realized they couldn’t keep running elders around for every gig, so they looked to their peers. A tip from Phillip’s college mentor led them to Aassanaaq “Ossie” Kairaiuak. The son of a skilled Yup’ik dancer and drum maker in his village of Cevv’varneq (Chefornak) on the Bering Sea, Kairaiuak was fluent in Yup’ik and rich in tribal song knowledge. Kairaiuak was their age. He could also relate to today’s music fans.

“I was like, man, that was so cool,” Kairaiuak recalled when Phillip called him about the band. He brings a repertoire of age-old Yup’ik drum and dance practices, crediting elders in his village for his knowledge: “Many elders I came across, I owe them for being kind enough to share their wisdom with me.”

The freshly assembled band kicked off with school tours in Matanuska-Susitna, a mostly white school district. Before the tour, teachers warned the band about some rude, “pretty racist” students they had encountered. Used to being the only Native and Black family in their school, the Blanchett brothers know how to deal with distracted kids.

Still, Phillip remains confident: “We start with music. We focus on what the music is about, and it’s about bringing back Indigenous culture, spirituality, and values.” Indeed, their music struck a chord from the beginning, and when they finished, the kids were on their feet, shouting “pamyua!” with pure joy.

From that moment, concert invitations poured in, but the band never expected to meet their final member at the 1996 Arctic Winter Games.

The Pamyua Dream

That year, Greenlandic singer Karina Møller had a strange dream of singing with two brothers. The next day at the Arctic Winter Games in Chugiak Eagle River, Alaska, when Phillip and Stephen stood before her, she didn’t hesitate. “You guys have got to sing with me!” she exclaimed.

Puzzled, Stephen and Phillip shrugged. They had never met her before, but her musical interests spoke to them—her love of soul, funk, and jazz—as did the layer of smoothness her vocals added to their more earthy tones. After a month of touring the Bethel area with Pamyua, Møller went to live in Europe, but she returned the next year.

The lineup finally in place, Pamyua debuted Mengluni (The Beginning), an album with an intoxicating blend of Yup’ik and Greenlandic Inuit songs coupled with the Russian Orthodox hymns of their childhood in Bethel, spiced with doo-wop and gospel influences from their teen years in Anchorage. Their 2001 album Verses (Apallut) opened up their Arctic roots more fully, even as they explored an eclectic mix drawn from Indigenous traditions around the world, from West African djembe to Australian Aboriginal didgeridoo.

It led them to develop the genre “Inuit Soul,” which gave credence to the Inuit culture sprinkled with Americana and the R&B and rap of their African American heritage.

Phillip put it this way: “It represents common values for all people and their wonderful, ancient ways of life. We’re putting in our effort, our ideas, and our spirituality. To me, that’s soul music.”

Pamyua opened their hearts to the world, which opened its doors in return. Their performances took them across the Northern Hemisphere—Russia, China, South Korea, Greenland, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland—delighting audiences from grand Indigenous festivals to intimate village gatherings.

Yet, home always calls them back to the Alaska Native Heritage Center, a living cultural and educational institution in Anchorage. For years, Phillip, Stephen, and Aassanaaq have poured their hearts into teaching traditional dances and Arctic sports at the community center. In their after-school programs, Native students gather, laugh, and learn as they master the steps of ancient dances and the agility and strength needed for Arctic games.

Colette Topkok was one of the dancers who traveled to Washington to perform with Pamyua at the Folklife Festival. Growing up in the Native Village of Teller, she first danced alongside her family and later with an extracurricular program at her high school. Though not Yup’ik, she cherished the opportunity to learn the songs and immerse herself in various Arctic cultures. “I grew up dancing in school since kindergarten, so it felt amazing to get paid to do what I’m passionate about,” Topkok shared, now proudly working at the center.

“We run [the center] ourselves,” Aassanaaq said. “We provide elements that are not available [to other museums] as Native people—the spiritual component.”

After their third album, Caught in the Act, won Record of the Year at the 2003 Native American Music Awards, Pamyua was invited to represent the North at the 2004 opening of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. That September, they performed before 25,000 Native people from diverse nations and tribes across the Western Hemisphere, their colorful regalia overflowing into every corner of the National Mall.

At the museum’s twentieth anniversary celebrations at the Folklife Festival, Stephen reflected on those memories.

“There’s a real level of ‘Holy cow! We’re here! We made it!’” he said, “These are significant milestones for us, being able to share what we do in such a safe and important space that is going to live on forever.”

While the old guards of Pamyua reminisced, they brought along younger Alaska Natives, ready to be proud and share their culture in their own way.

“Blaze the Trail”

One of the new faces of Pamyua dazzled the Festival audience with athletic grace and rhythmic dance moves. Peter Griggs, a student-athlete, first spotted Phillip at the high-kick race at the 2021 World Eskimo-Indian Olympics in Fairbanks (acknowledging the problematic history of these terms, the event also uses an alternate name: World Exhibition of Indigenous Olympics).

When Phillip, a fixture at the games for thirty years, leaped into action, launching himself at a swinging ball, Griggs whipped out his phone to capture a blurry shot. “I was texting my friend, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s Phillip Blanchett! He’s so cool!’”

Griggs’s auntie was a dancer with Meade when they spearheaded the first wave of Alaskan tradition revival. “She wanted us to feel comfortable being Native, instilled a sense of pride in our culture,” he recalled.

Now, Phillip looks out for the young man. “When I looked at Peter, he’s just like a little me.”

Griggs is of Yup’ik and Sugpiaq descent from Kodiak Island. The singing, dancing, and Arctic games, for him, are all part of reclaiming a culture tainted by intrusion: the island was the epicenter of Russian colonization. In 1768, Russian fur traders killed or captured Sugpiaq men at Refuge Rock, enslaving them to hunt sea otters.

“There were some complications with being Native in high school,” Griggs said. “When they talk about Native people, they always use the past tense, making it seem as if we’re no longer here.”

For some time, Griggs stopped dancing, but he sought reconciliation at the Alaska Native Heritage Center, where he danced once more and shared stories with visitors. He took great pride in competing in each Arctic sports category he could. In 2022, he had set a record sixty-four-inch swing kick; in 2023, he claimed the title in the greased pole walk.

“At the heritage center, we tell the tourists, yes, there may have been a period of lesser participation and cultural activity, but we were still there! And we’re still here today,” Griggs said, a hint of defiance in his tone.

For hundreds of years, Inuit people played these Arctic sports to outlive unforgiving cold, biting winds, and unyielding permafrost. Now, they play to outlive the shadows of colonization and cultural loss.

“Songs are our prayers, ways to honor our life, our world, our universe,” Phillip explained. “The games are no different. They highlight our creativity, our identity, and the joy they bring. But some games also test your pain threshold—you’re blocking off the pain to stay focused on the game.”

At the Festival, the audience watched in awe as Griggs executed the foot-high kick, nudging the ball higher with each attempt. Finally, he took a step back and launched into a kick that sent the ball soaring.

Phillip beamed with pride as he watched Griggs land the kick, steady and sure. He still competes in WEIO at age fifty, often twice the age of his fellow athletes.

But as he and his brother recounted their story—full of leaps, dances, and the tales of seals and cranes went into their song—time vanished in an instant: they were back in their father’s basement cracking up, tossing gospel to an ancestral rhythm long muted.

Now, Stephen joked they are “becoming those uncles,” adding, “We’re trying to be there for the younger generation, instilling excitement and a passion for sharing our culture.”

*****

As the sun dipped west and the sweltering D.C. summer cooled with a light breeze, Stephen turned to the audience. “We’ll do a lullaby our mom used to sing to us.” He said with a grin, “I hope it doesn’t put all your kids to sleep!”

On their 2014 double-disc release Side A / Side B, the drum song “Pulling” has Meade whispering in Yupik about chasing ground squirrels, singing her two sons into slumber. But when Stephen pounded the drum and the trio’s voices rumbled like a blizzard, no one in the audience could possibly sleep—many danced beneath the trees while others swayed in their seats. Onstage, three generations danced: Meade, who had once ventured from her quiet hometown in search of lost traditions, twirled while waving her fans, her silver hair catching the last rays of the sun. The brothers, their voices now deepened with age, careened across the stage. Tun’aqi Blanchett, daughter of Phillip and Karina, used to run onstage just to burrow into her mother’s arms. Now, her skin bearing traditional Inuit tattoos, she ran over to dance to the beat of a whole Arctic community.

“All the children come up on stage and represent in continuing other traditions,” Stephen said. “They’re the ones who steal the show. They’re the ones that everybody gets so excited to see.”

At the end of the set, there were cries of “Pamyua! Pamyua!” Giving them all the license to do it again, the dances, song, and games that continue their people’s legacy.

Hope Zhu is a writing intern at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and a student at Wake Forest University, where she studies sociology, statistics, and journalism.