Sunday, November 17, 2013 at 11:11PM 
Dinner with Leroy Oenga Jr. and family, part 4 of 7: appetizers. Tiny cuts of caribou and bowhead blubber - eaten together.
Very tasty!
Text added at 11:26 PM. The Squarespace nightmare continues - day 57 and counting.
Sunday, November 17, 2013 at 10:26PM 
As all this had been going on, Clara had been busy cooking the tuttu (caribou) soup Leroy had helped to prepare, cutting the maktak we would eat and was rolling out and shaping Eskimo donuts, with raisins. I was getting hungry.
Text added at 10:31. The Squarespace nightmare continues - day 57 and counting.
Barrow, Claraoenga, Eskimodonuts in Alaska, Dining, cooking Sunday, November 17, 2013 at 10:06PM 
Both Leroy and wife Clara are from Point Hope and keep their ties to the village strong. Leroy put on a DVD of the 1993 Kivgiq and soon The Tikigaq Traditional Dancers of Point Hope were dancing on the screen. I had been there and had photographed it, but as we watched Tikigaq dance Leroy told me things about what they were doing I had not known.
His boys, Gevin Ryan Tigluk and Devean Bryan Tingook, heard the drumming and singing, came over and performed one dance with Tikigaq of 1993, their relatives and ancestors. These were the people and this was the dance group Leroy himself learned to drum, sing, and dance with, who he went to Kivgig with. In fact, I got to see him dancing with them on the screen, looking very much like his sons do now.
Text added at 10:09 PM. The Squarespace nightmare continues - day 57 and counting.
Sunday, November 17, 2013 at 9:30PM 
On Thursday, those who read my blog met Leroy Oenga Jr. and learned how his mother refused to pull the plug on him when the doctors told her it was time, but prayed and sang hymns for him instead. Leroy invited me over for dinner with his family this afternoon. He had heard his mother, Caroline Cannon, call me, "my brother," so now he calls me "uncle" and I call him "nephew," and her, "sister." Leroy is a Dallas Cowboys fan and was catching up on the day's football scores when I arrived.
Very shortly, he pulled out a new drum Joe Sage had made for him. The skin cover came from the liver membrane of a bowhead whale landed this fall by Edward Itta and crew. When you hear Iñupiat people singing and dancing to the beat of traditional drums made in this way you literally hear the sound of the bowhead whale.
Barrow, Leroy Oenga in Alaska, Dining, Hunting and fishing, dance, whaling Sunday, November 17, 2013 at 3:15PM 
Once again, this being Sunday, I have not seen any schoolbuses rolling through the streets. So I fall back to a school bus image I shot Tuesday afternoon but held back until today. There is a chapel it, the Cornerstone Community Church, which makes it kind of appropriate for Sunday even though it was shot on Tuesday.
Text added at 3:18 PM. The Squarespace nightmare continues - day 57 and counting.
