More than 500 kids convened in Anchorage this weekend for the 45th annual Native Youth Olympics. They came from all the corners and crevices of America’s largest state, stitched together by dint of history and commerce, from Unalaska in the Aleutian chain, the Arctic shore-ice of Barrow, the river villages of the Kuskokwim where it meets the Bering Sea, and for the first time in decades from abroad. A small delegation from White Horse in Canada’s Yukon Territory gave an international accent to an event that is, by nature of Alaska’s patchwork of native cultures, already cosmopolitan.
NYO is the tournament-style home to a competition comprised of 10 events, with different ones occasionally swapped in and out from year to year. It’s the younger sibling to the adult World Eskimo-Indian Olympics and Arctic Winter Games, with many of the seventh-12th graders from NYO graduating into a community of athletes ringing around the circumpolar North.
As NYO continues to grow in popularity across Alaska, it is solidifying into a refuge for the indigenous value systems eroded by decades of economic and cultural encroachment.
“People are a lot more concerned about preserving the culture now,” said Nicole Johnston, one of the tournament’s chief officials, and a former athlete renowned for holding the women’s two-foot high kick record for 25 years. Johnston has seen the tournament triple in size since her youth, and attributes it to more deliberate efforts across the state to preserve indigenous values. “The games have actually grown because of that,” Johnston adds, “and it’s great.”
The games are adaptations of traditional exercises practiced to hone the physical and mental skills necessary to thrive within traditional subsistence economies.
“Seal-Hop is an endurance game,” explains Marjorie Tahbone, 26, a coach and former NYO champion from Nome. The Seal-Hop is a lively by grimace-inducing prone-body bounce on knuckles and toes across the lacquered gym floor, with athletes collapsing in pained heaps when they can go no further. This year’s winner in the boys division was SigFurd Dock of the Lower Kuskokwim School District: 188ft, a new record for a high schooler.
“If you can imagine a long time ago, the young hunters would have to go out and they’d have to stalk the seal,” Tahbone said, keeping an eye on tournament floor. “They’d have to get as close as possible to the seal to harpoon it.”
Like the athletes, the games are pulled from all over the state. The spectacular and oft-photographed high-kicks require athletes hitting a seal-skin ball with their toes at increasingly radical and perplexing heights, bending into jack-knives during the one-foot kick, or folding wildly seven feet off the ground in the two foot version, then sticking the landing. These originated as signal kicks out on the sea-ice during whale and walrus hunts. Whether one-foot or two-foot signified success, Tahbone says, is a matter of who you ask. These are games from coastal Inupiaq communities, where to this day the subsistence harvest relies on marine mammals. The Indian Stick Pull, by contrast, is an Athabascan game to get one’s wrists and dexterity in shape for grabbing salmon by the tail and tossing them to shore.
The physicality is one part of the games, but it is dwarfed by mental virtues and moral values cultivated. As Tahbone studies a girl missing her mark on a one-foot kick at 84in she attributes the errors to a lapse in focus, “Which was and is still so important to surviving out in the Arctic when you’re hunting, and when you’re waiting for that seal patiently and trying to stay focused.”
Hunting and fishing in subsistence communities across Alaska have changed dramatically in their tools and methods, but the organizers and coaches at NYO insist that the values have not.
“Now we hunt with boats and guns instead of ice-hopping,” said Nick Hanson, 27, who coaches NYO in Unalakleet, a community of around 700 in the Bering Strait Region, “but we still want the other hunter in the boat to be just as strong as we are, we still want to share what we catch with our community, and that’s what the games are all about.”
Hanson is a phenomenal athlete – he’s a WEIO champion, tried out for the TV show American Ninja Warrior, he even landed a slow, crowd-pleasing backflip when thrown skyward during the blanket-toss demonstration. But for him the cultural connections engendered through the games trump any tertiary aerobic benefits, and that’s why he coaches. There is a gestalt euphoria to the games, an interest in collective excellence that separates NYO from its structurally similar gymnastic meets or track-and-field tournaments in what Alaskans call the Lower-48. Coaches wander up to athletes that don’t belong to them to offer advice, competitors cheer for one another even when it goes against their self-interest. You’re psyching each other up, not out.
This was on full display in the final round of the boys’ high-kick, as one of Hanson’s athletes, Makiyan Ivanoff of Unalakleet, conference with – nominally – his direct rival, Kim Gumera of Unalaska. The ball hung at 108in, a height most of us would be pleased to reach with our fingers, nevermind toes. They were trading pointers for when to snap at the knee, thrust arms downward, crack forward the foot to graze the target. For Ivanoff that camaraderie is not just a polite nicety: it’s the point of the games, separate them from basketball.
“It doesn’t even feel like a very competitive sport,” Ivanoff said afterwards, “I mean, we’re competing against each other, but everybody is trying to max out, and everybody wants each other to max out and do their best.”
Both boys made their kicks at 108in. But Gumera used all three of his tries not quite connecting at 110in. Ivanoff hit it first try. He also took home the boys’ Sportsmanship Award (Gumera got best Overall Male Athlete). Hanson received the Healthiest Coach award, which elides physical prowess with a holistic interpretation of health and wellness. One might also presume it was because of his perfect back-flipping abilities.
The award ceremony put on full display the vexing cultural landscape laid across Alaska as indigenous communities struggle to rebuilt and reaffirm what works in subsistence systems amid the pernicious pressures from the cash economy. Sitting on the floor were youths decked out in a kaleidoscope of cultural signifiers, a boy with a red Mohawk and leather jacket near another with a traditional kuspuk; t-shirts (multiple) in homage to punk heroes The Misfits next to letters spelling out the names of traditional villages: Kivgiq, Anuktuvak Pass, Tatitlek; fat Nike sneakers near fur mukluks. From a distance this can read as a youth culture lost to the intrusive schizophrenia of Late Capitalism (Alaska style). But when SigFord Dock mounted the podium to take his Seal-Hop award the crowd of youths sitting on the floor leapt to their feet in applauding recognition of the achievement. The top tier of the podium was too high for Dock to scale alone, he ascended with aid from the second- and fourth-place athletes on his side during his climb upward.
