The Culture That Almost Got Away : Dance: The King Islanders from Alaska rescued a way of life that almost vanished in the ‘60s, performing songs that originated with their ancestors thousands of years ago.

Paul Tiulana was sitting at his kitchen table in the city, reaching into the past.

“Back there on King Island,” he said, recalling the tiny Bering Sea settlement on which he was born, “back there, you need some kind of entertainment. Long winters. We danced.”

It’s been 24 years now since the government moved Tiulana, his family and their neighbors off King Island--24 years since they scattered to Anchorage and Nome and other points south, places with better schools, better housing, less dangerous weather.

One thing has kept the community alive in the years since--Eskimo song and dance.

Tiulana, 68, is the founder and leader of the King Island Inupiat Singers and Dancers, one of Alaska’s better-known native performance troupes. In a state where traditional song and dance remain an important, living part of culture in many Eskimo and Indian settlements, the King Island group has become one of the most traveled, performing in Washington, London, Siberia and throughout their home state.

Today, the King Islanders arrive in Southern California for the Los Angeles Festival, which officially opens Saturday at Angel’s Gate and Point Fermin Park. They will be among native performers from throughout the Pacific who are scheduled to participate in opening ceremonies at a variety of venues through Sept. 17.

With pulsing rhythms from walrus-skin drums, the 20-member King Island group performs songs that originated with their ancestors thousands of years ago. Songs celebrate successful hunts, relate myths, pass on information. In the Inupiat world, without a written language, songs and dance were how history and values were passed on from one generation to the next.

For the King Islanders, especially Tiulana, his wife and the two other older couples that form the group’s core, the leap from aboriginal villagers to performers sometimes seems like a journey across millennia.

King Island is a mountaintop poking out of the icy waters 35 miles off the western Alaska coast. The 200-or-so residents lived off the land and the sea with little contact with the white world until earlier this century. They lived in tiny, ramshackle houses on stilts clinging to a steep hillside above the water.

The dances evolved within the limits of the cramped environment--crouches with intense hand and arm movement that became more frenetic as the intensity of the music grew, but which needed almost no floor space.

Tiulana was raised to be a polar-bear hunter. He used some of the Stone Age tools of his ancestors. He stored his game in a cave. He grew to be a man on a King Island diet of walrus, bearded seal, puffin soup and wild greens.

Then World War II came along and Tiulana was drafted into the Army and simultaneously catapulted into 20th-Century American society. He visited the mainland for the first time.

Eventually, he returned to the island, married and raised seven children. But by the 1960s, King Island was becoming a ghost town. People began drifting away to easier lives elsewhere. A tuberculosis epidemic hit. The Department of the Interior finally closed the school and the Tiulanas were relocated in Nome, 90 miles away. Paul went to work as a janitor in a bank. The Inupiat culture began to slip away.

“We almost lost it,” Tiulana said recently. But then, a few years ago, he had an idea: Why not get the King Islanders together and dance, like the old days? They rented a community hall and everyone had a blast. They started getting together regularly until the dance group became a sort of government-in-exile for the villagers without a village, a way to remember who they were in a changing world.

Tiulana and other islanders traveled to Anchorage, performing their dances and selling ivory carvings. Business was good. The family decided to stay and the King Island troupe was born.

“It was just like starting a new life,” he said.

Nothing on King Island prepared the Tiulanas for their new life in the city. Paul learned to drive a truck in Nome, but recalls the terror of pulling his car into city traffic in those days. His wife, Clara, always sat next to him with a big road map unfolded, navigating their course through town.

“There were many more rules and regulations living in the city,” he said. “Out at King Island, we were more independent.”

But the Tiulanas adapted. Paul made a living as an artist. Eventually the National Endowment for the Arts honored him with a Heritage Award, and two years ago he published his autobiography.

The Tiulanas are a study in cultural contrasts. Clara sits in the living room of their modest Anchorage home watching a game show on television while sewing a pair of boots out of the hide of a bearded seal, hunted by a son earlier this year. The rich, fishy aroma of seal oil, a staple of the Eskimo diet, fills the house.

Paul and Clara occasionally break into Inupiat, one of three major Eskimo dialects still spoken here. Their children speak the language, too, although the grandchildren understand little of what they say.

The Tiulana grandchildren have recently become more involved with the dance group to learn about their roots, he said. His daughter, Lillian, a computer programmer for an oil company, points out that they have done so with the help of videocassettes and a VCR.

The Tiulana daughters are all college graduates who have gone on to professional careers. The sons became ivory carvers and followed their father’s path. Each spring, some of them return to Alaska’s western coast to purchase ivory and join the hunts for walrus and seal. Sometimes, on a rare calm day, they take a skiff out into the sea to visit the island they were born.

Even for the grandchildren, who never lived on the island, the songs and dances are threads connecting them to a past they otherwise have trouble comprehending. It’s a thread more native people in Alaska are looking to as a way to make sense of dizzying cultural change.

Paul Tiulana is particularly proud of his 14-year-old grandson, Edward, an up-and-coming star of the King Island group. During the performances, he dons a hand-carved wooden masks of a walrus and the raven and breaks into urgent, confident dances.

“I remember he asked me, ‘How am I going to dance? I can’t dance,’ ” Tiulana said. “But he never resisted. He learned and he graduated into the Eskimo world.”