An Alutiiq children's song

Lately I've been reading up on how Alaska Native and Russian Orthodox cultures influenced each other's music, and this weekend I found a sound file for an Alutiiq children's song that sounds to my untrained ear like its melodic contour is European in origin. It's called "Louse Song," and it was sung by Phyllis Peterson, an elder of Akhiok Native Village of Kodiak Island, at their Alutiiq Week in 2003. I like it because I see in it a mixture of Native and Russian cultural influences, but most of all I think it's a delightful little song and elder Peterson clearly enjoys singing it so much in the video clip.

The lyrics, in Alutiiq and English, are:

Neresta taarimallria
The Louse whisked himself
taaripiaguarluni
He whisked himself long and hard (showing off)
Ingqim yaamaat ciqiluki,
The baby louse (nit) splashed water on the rocks
neresta atunguarualuki
And the louse sang to his little self (for the heck of it)
Ru-ru-ru-ru, Uqnartuq!
Hoo-hoo-hoo, It's Hot!

Transcription and translation is by staff of the Alutiiq Museum and Archaelogical Repository in Kodiak.

I can't help loving the humor of a louse joining the people in the banya, a traditional Russian steam bath very much like a Scandinavian sauna or a Native American sweat lodge. The museum staff explain:

Villagers in the past were often bothered by lice from the many furs they kept in their homes; at that time there was little effective relief. Rather than ignore the problem, they made fun of their own discomfort with lively songs like this one, where even the louse gets to banya.

The museum's website is an excellent source of information about the Alutiiq people (also known as Aleut), and the National Museum of the American Indian has a fascinating profile of the people of Akhiok village and their culture with text by Alutiiq museum staff and lots of photographs.

A footnote.Lice have been with us across cultures as long as we've had cultures -- at least as long as we've had languages. Somewhere I've read that "louse" is one of the words we get from the Indo-European language, and it has had the same plural "lice" since the fifth millennium (in very round numbers) BCE.

LATER: I don't think I want to base a grand narrative on this, so I'll let it be another footnote. Reading Billington's Icon and the Axe, I came across this reference in his discussion of how life in the forests of 13th- and 14th-century Muscovy influenced Russian culture:

The very process by which the body generated warmth within its clothing attracted the louse to venture forth from the clothing to feast upon its human prey; and the very communal baths by which Russians sought to cleanse themselves provided a unique opportunity for the louse to migrate from one garment to the other. ... The peasant's wooded hut, which provided rudimentary protection against the larger beasts of the forest, served more as a lure to its insects and rodents. They hungrily sought entrance to his dwelling place, his food supply, and -- eventually -- his still warm body. (22)

This follows a discussion of the bears that also lived in the forest (21-22), including this: "Legend had it that that the bear was originally a man who had been denied the traditional bread and salt of human friendship, and had in revenge assumed an awesome new shape and retreated to the forest to guard it against the intrusions of his former species" (21). Again, I don't want to make too much of it, but the legend has counterparts in Athabascan (not to mention Cherokee and other Native American peoples') mythologies.

Billington, James H. The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf-Borzoi, 1967.