Caiyugluku

The Yup’ik drum song Caiyugluku or “To Pull” has become a touchstone for Pamyua, a contemporary dance and vocal group that showcases Indigenous knowledge and history through performance. The lyrics, sung in Yup’ik, are about looking for ground squirrels while on a hunt, but are also understood to be part-and-parcel of a prayer for strength. “The way my mom (Yup’ik professor and tradition bearer Marie Meade) would always explain it was it is a song about pulling strength from within,” explained Phillip Blanchett, one of the group’s founders. ¹ Caiyugluku is especially relevant for understanding how Yup’ik in the Arctic conceptualize the challenges they face as they lean on their own personal and collective experiences – whether from climate, colonialism, or other societal stressors. Caiyugluku describes problems and problem-solving by drawing on one’s strength whether it be physical (need to pull a sled or seal) or drawing from the strength of one’s values that center on pulling from the generational mental, spiritual, and emotional relationships of their lived experience. This chapter seeks to reframe the climate crisis as a aaqsunarqelriitin (crisis) in the frameworks and systems of today’s institutions and organizations that lack the deep values-based relationships that lay at the center of Indigenous ways of knowing and being. These systems were designed at a time that did not value emergent approaches to address complex challenges we face today. They were not designed from the value of equity and they often prevent us from taking the time to build genuine trust and understanding – both of which are prerequisites for advancing new governance and management regimes rooted more in ciungani atullruaqa (peoples’ lived experience) and that embrace multiple ways of knowing and being in a rapidly changing climate. In this chapter, we explore efforts underway to rebuild, repair and renew those relationships in ways that exercise localized cultural values and governance in their own right and with allied organizations and institutions.