Benboyd, 81

Alaska Native American Video Productions Looking to share Native American Videos that I have produced for my company Boyd
Communications.
www.benboydalaska.com
and my employer, Doyon Tourism, Their Site I work on: www.seedenali.com

Through out his life his primary talents have been in the fields of Art, Dance and Music. Upon coming to Alaska in 1975 he added to those talents by living a Traditional Native Subsistence way of life which expanded his talents to Dog Mushing, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing and Arctic Survival Skills. Received a MA Degree in Video Production from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2001 at age 58.

Perhaps,his best talent is Indian Dancing.
He started dancing at age 6 and was a professional dancer at age 13. There are two types of dance he specialize in, Fancy Dance and Hoop Dancing. Both of them are considered the most difficult forms of Inter-Tribal Dancing and are usually done by young men and women up to their mid thirties. He is in his sixties and still does these dances like he did when he was a teenager. He is one of the oldest performing Hoop Dancers in North America and uses 28 hoops. When he was sixty he started Hoop Dancing again, after a thirty year break, so that his daughter Hanna, then 3 years old, could learn the dance. Hanna is now 8 and uses 11 hoops.

Ben is a descendent of the Trail of Tears. His family escaped into the Ozark Mountains of Missouri and that is where he grew up and spent summers in Oklahoma dancing at Powwows. These days, Ben is a Lead Dancer for Powwows in Alaska.

Ben has been a professional musician since age thirteen and preformed all over the western states. He has played in groups with hit recordings and worked in recording studios in Hollywood California. He continued to work there as a recording and video producer. He played in clubs in Fairbanks during the pipeline era and helped start some of the first native bands in the Indian villages above the Yukon River where he was an Itinerant Music Teacher in seven Villages.