above:  AKU-MATU performance at the Great Northern Festival, 2023.  Photo by Jayme Halbritter.

It was 1992, I was visiting my grandfather's house in the Arctic.  My cousins and I went to the upstairs, where they proceeded to play NWA out of a little boom box.  I thought it was so odd, hearing these messages up in the Arctic.  A year later, I was at a concert, with a Native rap artist performing.  He was from a tribe very far south, and the performance was in Alaska.  His performance inspired me to become a rapper myself. I wanted a way to tell stories from our unique experience, a way to speak in the language of the youth, and I appreciated the density of the medium. of the ability to send a lot of information in a short amount of time.  It took me 10 solid years to learn how to rap, and around 2002, I started to perform for audiences.

My background is in theatre, so in my rap performances, I would utilize costumes and characters, rapping as a polar bear, a caribou and an Ancestor from the Future.  My performances would morph more into the realm of performance art, and in 2020, I began to sing entire songs, in addition to rap.  I also rap incorporating the Iñupiaq language.

AKU-MATU is the abbreviation of two of my traditional Iñupiaq names, Akootchook and Matumeak.  I have performed as AKU-MATU all over the world, including a concert for over 1000 people in Paris, France during the UN Climate Change Conference in 2015.