[2] While the northern and southern tribes have the same general movements for their ordinary dances, they give a very different presentation of the festival dance-songs. The northerners leap and stamp about the kásgi until overcome with exhaustion; while in the south the performers sit or kneel on the floor, adorned with an abundance of streaming furs and feathers, sweep their hands through the air in graceful unison. It is a difference between rude vigor and dramatic art.
Quite often a woman steps into the center of the circle, and goes through her own dance, while the men leap and dance around her. This act has been specialized in the Reindeer and Wolf Pack Dance of the Aithúkaguk, the Inviting-In Festival, where the woman wearing a reindeer crest and belt is surrounded by the men dancers, girt in armlets and fillets of wolf skin. They imitate the pack pulling down a deer, and the din caused by their jumping and howling around her shrinking form is terrific.
There appears to be no restriction against the women taking part in the men's dances. They also act as assistants to the chief actors in the Totem Dances, three particularly expert and richly dressed women dancers ranging themselves behind the mask dancer as a pleasing background of streaming furs and glistening feathers. The only time they are forbidden to enter the kásgi is when the shaman is performing certain secret rites. They also have secret meetings of their own when all men are banished.[3] I happened to stumble on to one of these one time when they were performing certain rites over a pregnant woman, but being a white man, and therefore unaccountable, I was greeted with a good-natured laugh and sent about my business.
[3] This custom appears to be widespread. Low writes of the Hudson Bay Eskimo: "During the absence of the men on hunting expeditions, the women sometimes amuse themselves by a sort of female "angekoking." This amusement is accompanied by a number of very obscene rites...." Low, The Cruise of the Neptune, p. 177.
On the other hand, men are never allowed to take part in the strictly women's dances, although nothing pleases an Eskimo crowd more than an exaggerated imitation by one of their clowns of the movements of the women's dance. The women's dances are practiced during the early winter and given at the Aiyáguk, or Asking Festival, when the men are invited to attend as spectators. They result in offers of temporary marriage to the unmarried women, which is obviously the reason for this rite. Such dances, confined to the women, have not been observed in Alaska outside the islands of Bering Sea, and I have reason to believe are peculiar to this district, which, on account of its isolation, retains the old forms which have died out or been modified on the mainland. But throughout Alaska the women are allowed the utmost freedom in participating in the festivals, either as naskuks[4] or feast givers, as participants or as spectators.