North Slope elders recall drumming’s origins. Seeing that humans were lonely, Eagle Mother told one hunter to prepare the first kivgiq or Messenger Feast. Then she taught him how to build a wooden box-drum that sounded like her metronome heart. The faint beat heard from a distance on one such occasion near Old Shishmaref spelled out an invitation: those who heard it passed on word about the festivities to those who had not.

For centuries, drums underscored action in curing rites, divination, and trance journeys to other worlds, where shamans appeasing spirits rectified breaches of taboos. The kivgiq’s three-day sessions ensured that animals hunted for food would reincarnate. Dancing and singing also honored forebears, interpreted myths and experiences — a shared history — and invited spirits to winter feasts.

In the Bering Strait, December was “Time of the Drum.” The tuning, done by dampening the skin drumhead to keep it from tearing, has its own song. One, borrowing from a missionary who taught some Inupiat his style of music, employs the syllables do-re-mi as part of the lyrics but stripped of all context. After decades of suppression, innovation is flourishing. A modern “Float Coat Song” song mixes a traditional boat dance with promoting life jacket safety for youths. In the same spirit of innovation, odd instruments were requisitioned. In 1944, Eskimo servicemen danced in Fairbanks traditionally, uniformed, but in mukluks and gloves. A bass drum borrowed from Ladd Army Airfield lads urged them on, with the Dive Bombers’ logo blazing on the drumhead.

By the 1930s, many Yup’ik and Inupiaq villages had abandoned masked dancing, certain songs and rituals, and mask and drum manufacture. Epidemics killed shamans and elders; food shortages, wage labor, and boarding schools further frayed the tribal fabric; missionaries discouraged, banned, or inverted practices seen as “devil’s frolic.” A rare image from the 1920s, taken at the Catholic mission in St. Michael, Norton Sound, says it all. Girls aligned in traditional kuspuk tunics and dance poses sway and semaphore next to a man not beating a drum but squeezing a button accordion, a typical sailor’s instrument. As part of a renaissance in the late 1960s, people reclaimed traditional dancing, learning it from ethnographic recordings, luckier neighbors, performing visitors, or through workshops or instructional videos. Tony Keyes from Wales, up the coast, where there had been no singing, no drumming, no dancing for fifty-seven years, rejoiced at the resurrected musical culture of his village: “You should never say something is dead; nothing is ever dead . . . it was sleeping.” Dancing, as portrayed by Sally Carrighar in her memoir Moonlight at Midday, could be an act of defiance. When one Inupiaq Santa in Unalakleet broke character and lapsed into traditional steps, children and parents cheered while the missionary, in a huff, fled the building.

The qilaun’s magic is so strong that it rubbed off on Christian iconography. A naive painting in the small museum at the Inupiaq village of Anaktuvuk Pass shows Jesus clad in white, Inupiaq fur garb, sitting on a bull caribou on the fall tundra. The Savior holds a large frame drum, in effect transformed into a shaman.

Dances and songs, often commemorating events like the first plane to ever land in a village, or a man searching for his snow-covered cabin, can’t be appropriated. Some circulate among kin exclusively. Etiquette requires special permission and that other singers credit a composition’s owner(s). Others were exchanged between villages or trading partners, donated or sold. Drummers could be waterborne, announcing the arrival of traders, as they did in the summer of 1816, while approaching the gunports of Otto von Kotzebue’s brig Rurik, singing “to the accompaniment of a tambourine.” More recently, Inupiaq have danced to welcome individual guests, from Knud Rasmussen at Point Barrow in 1924 to President Obama, who joined merrymaking in Kotzebue’s gym in 2015.

A knack for making the oversize tambourines often runs in families. The craftsman steams or boils two- or three-inch-wide spruce strips for pliability. He bends them and closes a hoop of up to two feet in diameter by drilling holes for tying the ends together. Scraped whale-liver membranes, walrus-stomach linings, caribou hides, or, in the Gulf, bear lungs, seal bladders, or halibut guts, stretched tautly and tied with sinew to a groove around the rim, have provided drumheads, which can be painted with spirit-helper designs. Lastly, a sturdy notched wood, bone, or walrus-ivory handle is lashed to the frame, which formerly consisted of split driftwood cores. Drumsticks were shaped to fit the individual form of a drum and the player’s hand. The handle of one “fine drum” collected in 1906 in Wales was an ivory bird with beads for eyes and the movable legs of a man.

Bowhead whales killed lingered postmortem in Inupiaq qilaun hand drums; musicians periodically fed the instruments water to maintain them physically and spiritually. Humanoid faces on the butt ends of drum handles carved sometimes with grips to fit the fingers of a hand may have represented a whale’s inua — its spirit or soul. Plastic membranes, more durable and easier to obtain than whale-liver lining, do not yield the same rich, authentic sound or vital connection.

Drummers chant in unison, with soaring, nasal voices. Filler syllables replaced long-lost lyrics. Each village cultivates a unique style and repertoire. Percussionists, holding drums like they would hand mirrors, dipping them lightly, hit the rim, drumhead, or both, with a supple willow wand, producing clicking taps or deep, rich, often sharp, resonances. The tone changes with the drumhead’s tension, affected by moisture. Yup’ik drummers strike its face, Inupiat the underside. “The men” in the qargi — a burrow-like community chamber-workshop — Joseph Senungetuk remembered, “would visibly perspire and strain to keep the dance at a frenzied pace, once the opening stanzas were cautiously elaborated upon.” Nowadays, women may drum but do so rarely.

The one-time Alaska resident and composer John Luther Adams described Eskimo “angular melodic contours” and “explosive drums.” He deemed this asymmetrical throbbing “more sophisticated and more energizing than the steady 4/4 backbeat of rock ’n’ roll.” “After a strong dance group from the Arctic coast,” he writes, “even the best rock bands sound rhythmically square.” Listening to Eskimo drum songs at their full volume sends all your blood rushing to the head and feet, with a new hammering filling the torso’s middle. Good vibrations, indeed.

Drummers cue in the dancers, picking up or slowing the pace, a dynamic that Cordelia Qiġñaaq Kellie describes as “entwined.” The drumming subtly builds up to its final beat, getting “a little bit more intense and elevated and emphasized,” which tells the dancers exactly when to stop. To outsiders, this looks a lot like telepathy. Kellie thinks that dancers formerly faced the drummers, moving toward them, an arrangement that new settings changed. Unlike in the qargi dancing no longer occupies sacred, ritualistic space. “We have performances now. We have performances to external audiences and a stage,” Kellie says. “Where do we dance now? We dance on stages, we dance in convention centers, we dance in gyms, in front of so many people.”

Dance styles reflect the limited space of communal quarters, the Inupiaq qargi or Yup’ik qasgiq, men’s houses operating as workshops and ceremonial chambers. Yup’ik male dancers mostly kneel, twisting arms and upper torsos like frantic, fluid traffic cops; women stand rooted, spell-weaving, knees flexing, “willows bending in the current of the stream,” communicating by hands. At social dances in Wales, men sometimes danced with their back to the crowd, heads hanging low, and women disguised by their long hair, while spectators guessed their identity based on their style. At winter dances in the qargi, snowballs from buckets were were used to cool the faces of infants and “to refresh parched drum skins.”

Sewing, harpooning, butchering, sled hauling, paddling, and courting all have been translated into kinetic shorthand. Snowy owl feathers raying Yup’ik men’s dance fans stress sweeping movements; caribou throat-fur tufts in the women’s highlight restraint. On sepia photos, bare-chested male dancers wear skin gloves, out of respect for paraphernalia they handled, or from a fear of evil-spirit contagion; the gates to the shaman’s otherworld could swing both ways. In Wales, a white teacher, Susan Bernardi, recorded, gloves were “made of white drill cloth or, in some instances, deerskin wrist-length gloves decorated with fancy stitches.” At one Whale Dance carnivorous thanksgiving (the Nalukataq festival), a shaman drummed while a masked whaling crew of eight cut fine figures, showing off moves. Northwest Alaska’s Inupiat envisioned the whale’s spirit as a maiden, in some stories, a dancer. When she spun, the whale submarined through the sea. When she jumped, the whale breached. When she dipped low, the whale dove. When she stood still, the whale calmly floated. It makes sense that men honored her, and her being kin, by drumming. Dancers today don cotton or work gloves, but elaborate gauntlet gloves may still tinkle with bone, bird beak, or ivory amulets, or with brass shell casings, all for secondary percussive effects. While animal materials also set visual accents on the men’s sharp gestures, they remind dancers and audiences of the interspecies community of which all are a part.

Dancers often mime — the best become — sea mammals or birds, an imitation founded in rites that feted animal spirits before returning bones in awe to the sea. A swaggering King Island mask dance encapsulates bull walrus nature. Creature calls enliven, or inspire, performances: seal barks, wolf howls, bird shrieks, whale song, walrus grunts. An ancient King Island loon song contains the line “I wish I were able to sing just like that bird.” Complex phrases suggest the loon’s bobbing and preening; a wide ascending interval in a blanket-toss song mimics the thrill of being aloft. Grotesque masks, motions, facial expressions, or the replays of comic hunting mishaps defuse conflict within close-knit societies, especially in the dark, housebound months.

Canadian Central Arctic shamans faced off in mocking-song drum duels, gaining prestige in Inuit bouts of Yo Momma or The Dozens. Legendary musical combat could be lethal. A federal physician in Nome in 1910 collected the tale of one between a boy and a cannibal giant. The two took turns playing and throwing a huge drum with a sharp bone rim back and forth, like a razorblade frisbee. This dismembered and finally killed the monster, which had aimed for a birchbark effigy the boy had fastened to his parka hood top, “where it stood up very high and white.” I would not at all be surprised if that boy grew into a powerful shaman.

“The drum will heal your soul,” the Nome musician Bryan Muktoyuk conversely promises. Neuroscience supports what Native peoples have long known about the good vibes. Drums engulfing listeners release endorphins like those from a runner’s high; they reduce stress, lower blood pressure, and enhance immunity. They boost Alpha brainwaves linked to bliss that induce meditative states. Brains ultimately tune in to these cadences. This not only coordinates group behavior but individuals’ thoughts as well. When folks groove with each other, they more likely see harmony in their surroundings. Any immersion in rhythmic group activity — be it work, worship, or play — strengthens cohesion. A known music psychologist has identified human contact, communication, and emotional support as elixirs for mental well-being. These social factors also ground the therapy of a drumming shaman, “one who knows” hypnotic power, in the Tungus term’s meaning.

Additionally, Eskimo quick-stepping fosters nimbleness and keen observation crucial in subsistence pursuits and non-verbal learning environments. Last but not least, singing maintains Native languages, aligning youngsters and elders, past and future generations. “Drums awaken our roots,” they say in Bethel. Regardless of the region, all practitioners dance as if their forebears were watching.

Utqiaġvik (formerly: Barrow), as one example, fields 200-plus dancers and drummers in five formal groups. St. Lawrence Island, Point Hope, Little Diomede, Nome, and Wainwright are further hotbeds. Small villages stretch their resources as they host several visiting troupes at a time. Many tour stateside and a few abroad. You can catch them gaily compete at the World Eskimo–Indian Olympics in Fairbanks, on Alaska campuses, at Bethel’s Cama-i (“Welcome”) festival, or at Alaska Federation of Natives conventions. The tribal funk band Pamyua — a Yup’ik-Greenlandic-African American quartet fusing gospel, Inuit drum-songs, South African a cappella, and Pacific Islander chants — gives the world Arctic jive.

Some pupils start stomp shuffling as toddlers. Isabell Elavgak has taken her kids to rehearsals a few times a week since they were babies—one was only five days old. “Now they know how to sing,” she says. “They find all kinds of toys to use as drums.” A pulse weakened over twilight years has rebounded; vital, steady, booming, assured.