Agoodik, Muktuk, Salmon and Seal: Hungrily Composing the Stolen History of King Island Christmas

• In Event: Indigenous Histories and Futures at the Edge of Empire

Abstract

In December 1999, librettist Deborah Brevoort and composer David Friedman premiered their award-winning theatrical oratorio King Island Christmas to great acclaim. The piece recounts an event that purportedly happened on Ugiuvak (King Island, Alaska) at Christmas 1951 involving Indigenous Iñupiaq community members now deceased. Brevoort hoped to secure the post-hoc imprimatur of the now displaced Ugiuvangmiut who instead vehemently protested the musical’s “Disneyfied” and racist representation of their culture. Community leader and advisor on this project Ted Mayac Sr. penned a searing response titled “How It Feels to Have Your History Stolen,” which this paper builds upon to interrogate the unabated colonial mechanisms that afford the capture of Indigenous stories and lifeways for the benefit of the theatrical industrial complex. To demonstrate the multivalent operation of those mechanisms, I employ the analytical frameworks developed by Dylan Robinson (Stó꞉lō) in Hungry Listening (2020) to offer a close listening of the King Island Christmas earworm “Agoodik, Muktuk, Salmon, and Seal.” Ostensibly representing the Christmas feast, the number portrays “King Island Eskimos” gorging themselves on their “unusual foods” to a calypso beat. I disrupt this bowdlerized bacchanalia by contrasting the gluttonous scene with an autochthonous theatrical winter feast of the Iñupiat, the Wolf Dance. Since time immemorial, the Wolf Dance has sonified a reciprocal ecological relationship between the Ugiuvangmiut and the more-than-humans who sustain them. Brevoort and Friedman, however, negate the artistic and ceremonial sovereignty of First Alaskans by extracting Iñupiat foodways, traditions, and histories to assimilate into settler heritage. This paper exposes these blasé-cum-nefarious settler modes of creation and consumption that have caused “lasting and unforgettable harm” (Mayac) to First Alaskans and works to repatriate this stolen history.

Biographical Information

Zachary Milliman is a musicologist and faculty member with the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Alaska Native Studies Program. Zachary is a PhD candidate in musicology at McGill University with a dissertation titled “Opera and Goulash Communism” focusing on opera culture under Hungarian state socialism. He has presented his research at many international conferences including the annual conferences of American Musicological Society and the Society for American Music and has published in the Journal of the International Alliance of Women in Music and in the forthcoming book Music and Antifascism. Zachary holds degrees in vocal performance and in 2015-2016 was a Fulbright Fellow at the Hungarian Musicological Institute. He was born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska where he currently resides with his husband, artist Matt Klinn.

Author

• Zachary Milliman, University of Alaska Anchorage