The Kutchin Indians (more properly pronounced Gwich'in) are relatively small Athabascan tribe of about fifteen hundred people occupying a vast area in northeastern interior Alaska and northwestern Canada. Like all northern Athabascans, they are of the same racial and linguistic stock as their more widely known southern kinsmen, the Navajo and Apache, though with the passage of many centuries, their respective cultures have diverged widely in nearly all respects.
The Alaskan or western Kutchin are today divided linguistically, socially, and geographically into two main groups. The Gwich'yaa Gwich'in --"People of the Flat Lands"-- are comprised of the residents of Chalkyitsik, Circle, Birch Creek, and Fort Yukon; and the Neets'ee Gwich'in--"People of the Mountains"--are those who reside in Venetie and Arctic Village on the Chandalar River. At one time, the people in the flatlands were isolated into small bands and had more specialized names, but in modern times the outboard motor, airplane, and snow machine have broken down this isolation, and widespread intermarriage has all but erased these former distinctions.
In aboriginal times, the Kutchin were a nomadic people who followed the game and lived together in large numbers only in the warm summer months when the salmon were running up the Yukon and its tributaries. Indeed, the name "Yukon River" appears to have come from nyukwanjik, a Kutchin word meaning "River where there are moss-covered summer houses." Somewhere along the way, the -njik ending, which corresponds to "river", was either dropped entirely or translated directly into English, and Nyukwan was transformed into "Yukon". The case for this interpretation becomes even more convincing when we discover that the Kutchin name for Fort Yukon is Gwich'yaa Zhe--"Flat-Lands House", and two other early white settlements on the Porcupine River are still referred to as "Rampant House" and "Shuman House".
Fort Yukon, founded in 1847 by Alexander Hunter Murray of the Hudson's Bay Company, is in many ways the hub of a whole network of rivers whose watersheds define the western territory of the aboriginal Kutchin. In addition to the Yukon, the Porcupine, the Chandalar, for example, the Black River and Birch Creek also continue to be occupied by Kutchin-speaking people, and two other important tributaries, the Christian River and the Sheenjek ("Dog Salmon River"), have only recently been abandoned, although both are still used occasionally for hunting and trapping. Now a log-cabin community of five hundred people with daily scheduled air service from Fairbanks, For Yukon has become an important communications, transportation, and supply center for everyone who lives along these river systems.
Though they are in the swirl of rapid acculturation and social change, the Kutchin are a proud and happy people who still maintain many of their fine traditions. The beadwork sewn by Kutchin women cannot be matched anywhere in Alaska today--moosehide mitts, slippers, belts, knife and gun sheathes, Bible covers and mukluks are rightly ornamented and colorfully decorated with a dominant four-petalled flower pattern. Twelve of these flowers, symbolizing the twelve discipoles, are stitched to the church altar cloths on a background of white bleached moosehide, consummating the art.
Equally impressive are the oral talents of Kutchin story tellers, who seem to flourish in the more remote outlying villages of Chalkyitsik, Venetie, and Arctic Village, where there is no radio station actively competing for the Indian Ear. The Episcopal missionaries, who made many converts well before the turn century, seem to have convinced the people that their animal creation myths were pagan and heathen (probably more for their frank sexuality than for their theological content), so that today the myths are denigrated by some Indians as being "just like fairy tales". The stories which are openly encouraged are more on the order of what folklorists like to classify as legends. Popular Kutchin legends can be roughly divided into: tales about famous warriors, tales of survival under extreme conditions, tales about the feats of famous medicine men, and humorous tall tales pregnant with exaggeration.
Still, the most beautiful part of traditional Kutchin culture is the music. All of the aboriginal ceremonies have now completely disappeared, yet there are still many of the older people around who can sing--and sing well. The style is always solo a cappella, and the old-timers say that even before the coming of the whites, no drums or other musical instruments were used for accompaniment, except occasionally a couple of sticks of wood that were beat against one another for rhythm. Any public group singing outside of the church is a great rarity now, and individuals perform only upon demand, though elsewhere in Alaska, as with the Koyukon Athabascans farther downriver, song leaders and public group singing still predominate in a style strikingly similar to the western Apache and Navajo.
Kutchin songs address a great variety of subjects and tend to fall into the following categories: dance songs, love songs, medicine songs, story songs, songs of tribute and farewell, and New Year's songs. Kutchin songsters, like Kutchin storytellers, seem to be remarkably free from taboos or restrictions of any kind. Songs can be performed by women as well as by the men, by day as well as by night, in summer as well as winter.
The old-time fiddle dance music which flourishes so well in Kutchin villages undoubtedly owes its origin to Hudson Bay traders and voyageurs of the mid-19th century. In his journal for the year 1860, Robert Kennicott, an important early explorer and naturalist, describes a "a Christmas ball" held at La Pierre's House, on the Upper Porcupine river. The principal trader and postmaster at La Pierre's House was one James Flett, an Orkneyman and an old voyageur who had acquired an Indian wife. Also present to celebrate the holidays were a large number of whites and "a dozen or so" Indians. In this earliest account of the Kutchin dancing to square dance tunes, Kennicott writes:

The dancing was, I may say without vulgarity, decidedly 'stunning'. I should hardly call it remarkably graceful. The figures, if they may be called such, were only Scotch reels of four, and jigs; and... the music consisted of a very bad performance of one fiddle, accompanied by a brilliant accompaniment upon a large tin pan.

Thus, the introduction of Scottish folk music and folk dances the Kutchin can probably be attributed to James Flett and his friends. The Flett surname still enjoys a fairly wide popularity among the Kutchin living in Fort Yukon, and the explorer William Dall, visiting Fort Yukon in the spring of 1867, noted that most of the inhabitants there "are from the Orkney islands and the north of Scotland, while a few are French Canadians, with a mixture of Indian blood".
Charlie Peter, at seventy-two years the oldest living Kutchin fiddle player, recalls that this kind of music was already going strong when he was just a boy, and he remembers such old-time Indian fiddlers as Jacob Luke, Alexander John, and Artie Linklater. So although it was originally a white man's art, this music has been so well incorporated into Kutchin tradition that many of the tunes are popularly known by their Indian names, and they survive quite independently from the commercial country music played and heard in Alaska's white communities.
As it is performed today by the western Kutchin, the music for the dances is provided by a fiddler and a rhythm guitarist, and both use small electric guitarist, and both use small electric amplifiers for their instruments. Even in the outlying villages there is always at least one gasoline or diesel generator to provide electricity for the community hall when special events such as movies or dances are held. Usually, when there is an all-night dance, there will be two fiddlers and two guitar players--two teams of partners--who spell each other every two hours or so, for many of the dances take ten or twelve minutes to complete, and at a fast tempo in a crowded hall, this can be hot and exhausting work.
Male callers are often used, but sometimes there is not enough sound equipment on hand, and the amplified music completely drowns out the caller's voice. Nearly everyone knows the basic steps anyway, and the caller only seldomly interjects a variation on the standard patterns. The people are fond of one-steps, two-steps, fox trots, waltzes, jigs, schottisches, round dances, line dances, and running set; and this wide variety generates continuous interest over many hours at a time.
The enormous popularity of this dance music can be measured by the regularity of its public performances. Dances are customarily held on every major holiday of the year: New Year's Day, Easter, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, as well as for special occasions like weddings, for the ordination of Native priests into the Episcopal clergy, and especially for the annual spring carnivals, when dances are held every night for a week and go full steam until four or five o-clock in the morning.
The geographic extent of Indian square dance culture in the far north is still relatively unknown. Upriver, it is still relatively unknown. Upriver, it is still possible to observe some of the dances at Eagle, among the Han Athabascans, and the Han fiddlers claim they hear this music played live on radio CHAK in Inuvik, N.W.T. There is even good reason to believe that many of the same tunes heard on this record are played all the way down into northern Alberta.
One of the most encouraging things about this dance music is the great number of active practitioners. Among the Neets'ee Gwich'in especially, there are nine or ten young, self-taught fiddlers, and though they do not possess the great repertoire of Charlie Peter, they are usually quite skilled and sometimes technically even more proficient. It is also the young people who take the greatest delight in the dancing, and it can be expected that they will still be kicking their heels to the Neets'ee T'yaa for a long, long time yet to come. That's good news.