How The Alaska Tour Came To Be

From 1883 to 1978, the United States used something called ‘The Code of Indian Offenses’ to suppress Indigenous culture and force assimilation. Under this code, traditional indigenous dance was banned until the ‘American Indian Religious Freedom Act’ was passed in 1978, protecting Native Americans’ rights to practice their traditional culture. Slowly but surely, Indigenous dance in America is coming back to life. 

In 2023, our Managing Director, and former Assistant Artistic Director, Summer Smith, moved from Chicago to Nome, Alaska, with her indigenous Alaskan husband. Nome is home to a range of Inuit peoples, including the Inupiaq and Yupik. In Alaska, she met a burgeoning new dance group - ‘Unalakleet Comes To Life’, an indigenous Alaskan dance group reviving traditional Iñupiaq/Yupik dance and song after decades of prohibition. Together she and Artistic Director Winifred Haun were inspired to apply for an NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) grant to bring Winifred Haun & Dancers to Nome to learn from indigenous Alaskan dancers. 

In 2025, we received a partial grant for this project from the National Endowment for the Arts. The grant for less than we needed, so we began additional fundraising and planned for the 2026 Alaska Tour. Our residency in Nome, the Nome Dance Project, will be an exchange of knowledge and culture; during our Spring Campaign, we raised enough funds to fly Unalakleet Comes to Life from Unalakleet to Nome - so that they could lead Indigenous Alaskan Dance workshops for the general community, which our company would participate in. Our tour in Alaska looks a lot like our Community Dancer Project - engaging the community through teaching dance to youth, teens & adults, as well as building work collaboratively in workshop sessions.

Our Nome Dance Project will culminate in a joint showing - ‘Dancing with the Midnight Sun’ which will present the works we build collaboratively with Unalakleet and the community, traditional dances by Unalakleet Comes to Life, as well as the works we are bringing on tour. We will be taking a quartet from ‘I am not this body, a duet from ‘Trashed’, a solo from ‘Don’t Linger Too Long’, and a solo by Assistant Choreographer Vernon Gooden. This showing will be free and open to the Nome community. 

Before leaving Alaska we will be making a stop in Anchorage to work with local dance communities there, teaching technique classes and leading community workshops for groups such as Anchorage Classical Ballet Academy. Hosted at Alaska Dance Theatre we will produce a single day version of our residency in collaboration with Momentum Dance Collective and Anchorage Concert Association culminating in a community sharing as well. 

As we prepare to leave for Alaska we are excited for the exchange ahead, learning indigenous dance as well as offering our expertise in choreography and contemporary / modern dance. We look forward to building an ongoing relationship with Unalakleet, Nome, & Anchorage learning from one another, and taking the initiative to help revitalize indigenous dance in whatever ways we can. We expect the impact of our time in Alaska to extend past the end of our residency, as the work we build in collaboration will serve as inspiration for further developed choreography when we return to Chicago. Winifred Haun & Dancers leaves for our Alaska Tour on July 26th - check out our Alaska page for more details.