Scraped by poetry, song and stories: A night to remember at the Glenn Massay Theatre

An unforgettable Wednesday night: “Shaped by Wildlife,” hosted by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in collaboration with Arctic Entries. A community storytelling event for everyone: hunters, gatherers, and nature lovers alike.

Seven storytellers took the stage: Christopher Velez, Marian Giannulis, Rachel Kenley Fry, Lauren Cusimano, Meezie Hermansen, Maria Walker and Keely O’Connell.

Art in the lobby came from Palmer High School and Burchell High School students in Onward and Upward’s Outdoor Recreation class.

Breaking up the storytelling of the night was poetry and song.

An Indigenous poet, Melissa Shagioff, took the stage and gave a riveting performance of what she described as a love poem, set to the rhythm of her friend scraping a moose hide on stage.

“My skin is complex...”

The words rippled through the room, each one weighted with emotion, meaning, and healing. Then came the scraping.

Scrape, scrape, scrape.

The work of the scrape: percussion, poem, beat, and prayer. The sound of the scraping filled the auditorium like a drumbeat, from another time, another place, ancient and intimate. Each pull on the tool spoke of persistence, strength, and survival.

Scrape, scrape, scrape.

Her voice rose and fell to the rhythms a lesson about healing, about the softening of a thick rigid hide, making the skin supple, usable, and alive again. Under the stage lights, the moose hide glowed an ethereal whitel.

Was she just talking about the moose, or was there a deeper meaning? Scrape, scrape, scrape.

She wasn’t just scraping the hide; she was learning from it. Her breath and words drew us in. The air shimmered with something secret and sacred. What once had been cold and lifeless had become soft and transformed through the touch of her words.

Then the applause came, wild whooping sounds from her fans in the audience. It wasn’t just another performance; it had evoked something ancient and wild. The sound of the scrapes lingered long after the poem ended. Scrape, scrape, scrape.

The performance of the poem alone was worth the price of admission. And then there was music and seven stories, each one unique and compelling.

Meezie Hermansen had quite a tale to tell about her encounter with a bear. A sow that came out of nowhere and charged her while she sat in her Toyota truck. The bear bit at the bumper, saliva and rage flying everywhere. Her world narrowed to heartbeats as the bear pounded the windshield, the cracked glass threatening to give way. Her truck inched toward a small cliff and then, silence. This was a real cliff hanger.

Stunned that she had lived through it, Meezie had the audience breathless as she described the shot she never took, a picture of the jaws of death, inches from her windshield, dripping saliva. Tales like this set the tone for the night raw, wild, and unforgettable.

Maria Walker followed with another bear story a favorite theme of the evening. What began as an idyllic bike ride turned into a race from hell when she unknowingly pedaled between a sow and her cubs. “Hotel Foxtrot Sierra!” she shouted, turning cursing into an art form. The crowd went wild.

In the end, Maria expressed her gratitude to the bear for letting her go without a scratch. “She was a good bear,” she said, her voice trembling but sure.

The last storyteller, Keely O’Connell, dressed in Carhartts and pigtails, caught me off guard with her opening line about butchering an obscene number of chickens.

“A cold heart,” she began, “never feels guilty with blood on my hands.”

She explored the moral weight of taking an animal’s life, a dilemma many hunters face but rarely articulate. “I am sorry, I am sorry,” she said, as if to justify to herself and to us the act of taking a life, as she told her story of a successful caribou hunt. Her story evoked images of blood-soaked snow pants and the steaming meat of a freshly taken caribou. The audience sat in stillness, chills running down our spines, before slow, reverent applause filled the room honoring her honesty and the macabre ritual she shared.

It ended, fittingly, with gratitude for what was taken and for what was given. A night to remember.