The movement behind the blanket is animated and spirited. The singing and drumming fills the room. The audience is as involved as the dancers with excitement and joy.

The spirit dance is just one of the dances performed at Celebration 2006, a three-day event, beginning June 1 at Centennial Hall. The event brings together Native groups from Alaska, Canada and Washington to share songs, dancing, Native foods, friends and family.

"It's a joyous occasion. Everybody is just so happy," said Rosita Worl, president of Sealaska Heritage Institute and one of the planners of the event. She emphasized that Celebration is open for everyone in the community.

More than 40 dance groups will perform at this year's event, including groups from Juneau, Sitka, Hoonah, Angoon, Klawock, Craig, Kake, Wrangell, Petersburg, Yakutat and Anchorage. Canadian groups will be in town from Atlin, Teslin and Whitehorse.

The first Celebration came about after a call from Native elders asking Southeast Alaska Native communities to come together and focus on restoring local traditions and customs.

"They didn't want our children and our grandchildren and our great-grand children to be walking on our land like tourists, not knowing the name of Dzantik'i Heeni, Angoon, or Kake, or Tenakee, or Skagway or Yakutat, or other names of Southeast communities," said David Katzeek, a traditional Native leader of the Thunderbird clan and one of the organizers of the original Celebration. "It was a call for everyone to begin working on the culture, on the history of our people, by community."

Clans and dance groups have a chance to perform their own songs and dances for the audience.

"The Haidas will have theirs. The Tsimshians will have theirs. And the Tlingits have theirs as well," Worl said. "Northwest Coast songs are like property. They're owned by clans."

Worl emphasized that in Northwest Native cultures, most songs and dances are not freely performed as entertainment for the general public. They belong to a clan and the owner determines who can use them and when. One exception is lullabies, she said.

The performances at Celebration usually begin in the wings of the stage as the dancers, dressed in a variety of regalia, prepare themselves for the first dance.

"We start off with dressing up songs and generally those songs are (sung) as they're dressing up, before you see them coming onto the stage," Worl said.

This is followed by an entry song as the dancers come into the hall and to the stage dressed in Chilkat blankets of yellow, black and beige; button blankets; animal masks and skins.

"We also have interior songs," Worl said about songs that were traded with the neighboring interior Native tribes.

"Love songs are songs that are sung to children of our clan who are of the opposite moiety. You don't sing to your clan. Like, I'm a Thunderbird, I wouldn't sing to Thunderbirds, but I would sing to children of Thunderbirds," she said.

Katzeek emphasizes, "when we say children of the Thunderbirds, we're not talking about 2-year-olds, 3-year olds and 4-year olds. We could be talking about 60- or 70-year old people. So these individuals would stand up and acknowledge their father's kinsmen by standing up and dancing as we sing for them."

"And then there's one that they do that's kind of like a roll call song, a song that basically acknowledges all the clans and their children and their kinsmen," Katzeek said.

Spirit dances, the ones danced behind a blanket, acknowledge the spiritual relationship between humans and animals, Worl said.

ÒItÕs religious in nature. I mean, to understand our songs you have to understand our culture and our belief system,Ó she said. ÒWe believe that animals have spirits...We didn't make the same kinds of distinction other folks do between humans and animals. We consider them our kin. The spirit dance is acknowledging that spiritual relationship."

There are sorrow songs, or grieving songs, sung after someone dies or in memory of someone who has died. They were not traditionally sung in public.

Worl recalled a dance group in the 1960s that started performing the traditional songs in non-ceremonial settings. Some elders didn't approve. Others "viewed it as a way to bring our culture out of the closet," she said. "Remember that up until the '60s our culture was repressed. It wasn't honored. It wasn't celebrated. So the dancers had to convince the elders that it was OK for us to do this in public."

Dance groups were then formed to perform in nonceremonial settings.

When Celebration comes to a close, the dancers gather on the stage and on the floor of Centennial Hall dressed in regalia. To the accompaniment of drums and rattles and singing, the groups begin the Grand Exit Dance.

"It's so powerful when you're dancing," Worl recalled. "I just watch our people and it's just really that unity, you know, when they come in and they're dancing together and it's like fish. You know how fish, when they return home and they're coming up the stream? That's the way the last dance is, like we're coming home and we're all coming together. It's that real sense of unity, you're part of a group. You don't feel like an individual. You feel like you're in communion with all your other relatives."