rewrite this content and keep HTML tags The first episode of the Alaska is the Center of the Universe podcast begins with a dark story told by Iñupiaq Elder Ron Brower Sr. It’s about a creature that goes by different names in different places: the hairy man, the woodsman, Bigfoot. For Ron Brower Sr. and other Iñupiat, it’s known as inuqpisuaq: a being that hunts caribou, makes special rocks and traps people with its powers. “It was dangerous to look into their eyes because they had unusual eyes,” he tells listeners. “If you got enchanted by it looking into their eyes, you would be captured.” A resident of Utqiagvik, the northernmost city in Alaska, Brower Sr. is just one of the many Indigenous Alaskans that listeners hear from in the new six-episode series by Iñupiaq storyteller, musician and podcaster James Dommek Jr. In Alaska is the Center of the Universe, Dommek Jr. shares accounts and anecdotes from communities who have lived with — and lived through — encounters with ancient, haunting and humbling beings. Dommek Jr. is the great-grandson of an Iñupiaq storyteller, and grew up in a family where stories and storytelling are sacred and revered. He also developed an affinity for storytelling through different mediums: he’s been a musician for a number of years while also working in film. He released Midnight Son, his first audiobook, 2020. In it, Dommek Jr. peeled back the curtains on a real-life mystery pitting Native American folklore against the U.S. justice system. After releasing that project, Dommek Jr. says he began exploring what it might mean to bring stories from across Alaska together into a podcast. With Alaska is the Center of the Universe, released last month, he returned to this theme of mythical beings and ancient stories. The motivation behind the name, Dommek Jr. said, is to introduce the rest of the world to the Arctic, “a place that people don’t know much about,” with a history that goes way back in time. While some consider the North to be the dangerous unknown or the last frontier, for Dommek Jr. and other Indigenous northerners, it’s the centre of the universe — rich with stories from families who have lived on the land for thousands of years. “I think that the world is just starting to be ready to hear stories told by Indigenous storytellers, and to know that there’s just a whole different world that they didn’t know existed.” The following Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. IndigiNews: What inspired you to create Alaska is the Center of the Universe? James Dommek Jr.: I base a lot of my work off of storytellers that I admire and I’m a big fan of the Coen Brothers. They’ve made some of my favourite movies of all time and I just liked the way that they tell stories — they have the ability to tell dark stories with some humour naturally peppered in and just expertly share visually crafted stories. And when I was making Midnight Son, I patterned a lot of the feel and vibe and the angles on their work. I got a lot of inspiration from No Country for Old Men and I got a lot of inspiration from the original Fargo. I wanted to make art like that, but for your ears and for the theatre of the mind, and this is more in line with Indigenous oral storytelling tradition. Human beings have been listening to stories longer than we’ve been reading them in books and so telling these stories is a way of getting back to that part of humanity where you would listen to someone talk and tell a story. When I was making Alaska is the Center of the Universe, I wanted to make something that was similar to the Coen brothers’ movie called The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. It’s a movie based off of a book of short stories and you slowly realize that each story doesn’t have anything to do with the next but the only thorough line is that it happened in the American West. And I just love that idea of telling six completely different stories and the only thorough line being that they took place at a certain time in place. What was it like travelling through six communities to tell these stories? With Midnight Son, I was really focused on one part of Alaska — the Northwest Arctic in the village of Kiana, the hub town of Kotzebue — that’s where pretty much the whole story takes place. With Alaska is the Center of the Universe, I was all over the entire state. Alaska is big. It’s the biggest U.S. state and this project had me travelling all over — I was at the very top — at the Arctic Ocean and in the village of Utqiagvik, talking with one of the youngest whaling captains. Then I travelled all the way down to the southeast panhandle of Alaska, getting closer to Seattle — talking with the Tlingit tribe about their totems and about their stories and their traditions. I travelled to Kodiak Island, which is notorious for having the biggest bears in the world. I just wanted to share all these different stories and I thought it’d be fun if each chapter was a different tribe. And I only talked about their stories, their songs, their dances, and their issues in that chapter. Was there a person or story that really surprised you? One of the things that really surprised me was when I went to the southeast of Alaska. It was in Juneau, the Alaska state capital, and I was talking to a Tlingit Elder about a survival story where he survived a shipwreck. He was telling me that whole story and then it turns out, he’s also a Tlingit Elvis impersonator. He goes into the other room and puts on a complete Elvis costume — a white jumpsuit with a cape and he has on the shades, his hair is slicked back in a pompadour, he has gold chains. But on the white jumpsuit, there’s Tlingit totemic images of eagles and thunderbirds and he turns around and the whole cape looks like a totem pole. And it’s covered with this massive thunderbird. He’s the Tlingit Elvis and it just felt so surreal and dreamlike and psychedelic to experience something like that. It felt like a collision of cultures and time — U.S. American culture, pop culture and ancient Alaska Indigenous culture. It was a beautiful moment and that really surprised me. It will always stick with me. What do you hope those listening to Alaska is the Center of the Universe take away from it? I know that each culture in Alaska — each different tribe — has similar stories of things that the Elders had talked about that still show up to this day that Western culture and society either don’t believe or haven’t caught up with or just don’t know. And I figured there would be other people who still want there to be mystery in this world and the unknown. It’s a different way to look at stories and humanity and I believe that’s something very strong that Inuit culture has to offer to the rest of humanity. On the Alaska side, stories have also been really popular in the wintertime because it’s very dark and a good time of year to tell long stories — helps the days go by, keeps your mind active, helps you learn. That’s how these old stories exist and I just feel like I’m a link in the middle of a change — connecting the old to the new. In this hand I’ve got a microphone and a digital recorder, in the other I’ve got my grandfather’s old book and these old stories. Ultimately, what I want is for people to know that in the far west of the Arctic, we’ve got some weird stories. And I want to share these stories using that idea of the theatre of the mind and combining that with modern techniques of podcasting with the ancient oral tradition of Native storytelling. The Alaska is the Center of the Universe podcast is now available to stream through Audible.
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