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UQSUQTUUQ/GJOA HAVEN - Joanni Sallerina is proud to pass on a tradition his ancestors were once forced to practise in secret.

The first time he saw drum dancing, he was a young boy growing up in Taloyoak. At the time, local priests had prohibited drum dancing in the community for fear that it was anti-religious.

Privately, however, Sallerina's grandparents would run their own drum dances out of their home. The dances signified a time of celebration such as the arrival of visitors or a youth's first successful hunt.

Today, Sallerina practises drum dancing with the joy of knowing he is free to do so openly and to pass along the tradition to the next generation. A Grade 3 teacher, he now teaches drum dancing as an after-school program at the local elementary school.

"Knowing that my grandparents had to do it behind doors to keep it alive makes me even happier to show other people the drum dancing," said Sallerina.

As a boy, Sallerina would be lulled to sleep by the sound of the drum.

"It was very soothing, very calming," he recalled. "They were still having a drum dance when I fell asleep, you know, beside my grandmother. Because we didn't have microphone then, they would have the ladies sitting side by side, four five, six of them all singing the same song."

Sallerina was nine years old when he performed his first drum dance. In lieu of telephone conversations, his grandparents would make audio tapes to send to relatives and elders and other communities. During one of these taping sessions, Sallerina's grandmother asked him to do a drum dance while she sang a song.

"I was very embarrassed for the first time," he said. "Nobody was watching - just me and my grandmother. And I felt like there were thousands of eyes looking at me when I was drum dancing ... because I knew that tape recording was going to be heard in another community."

Years later, Sallerina is one of the drum dancers who performs for visitors, particularly tourists and government officials who come to town.

In his community, drummers have their own songs, which are passed down from generation to generation. Sallerina performs his grandfather's travelling song, which describes the different landmarks he would have seen travelling from the west to the east.

"Today when I drum dance, it's more like I'm going through a movie," he said. "Because I've been to all those different landmarks already, it's like a trance when you're drum dancing. You feel like you're in that area."