The 7 p.m. concert will be preceded by a silent auction featuring Alaskan arts and crafts with salmon hors d'oeuves starting at 6 p.m.

Bearfoot features harmony singing, twin fiddles, mandolin and guitar solos and solid bass playing bluegrass, blues, jazz, old-time and folk music. This young Alaskan band started when the members were between 14 and 17 years old and were 4H Music Camp counselors. The band won the Telluride Band Competition at the Bluegrass Festival a year later in 2001, joining such other notable winners as The Dixie Chicks and Nickel Creek. The band has gone on to travel the United States, Canada, and Ireland -- and has done 65 bluegrass camps for kids along with their concerts. They have 3 CDs to their credit.
   
The concert will benefit Dancing with the Spirit, a new bluegrass music program for kids in Native villages in Alaska and Canada. Through camps and school programs, young people take classes in fiddle, guitar, banjo, mandolin, and bass -- plus sing, dance, and form bands.

"In the old days we fought tribal wars with arrowheads," The Rev. Trimble Gilbert from Arctic Village said in a news release about the concert. "It's a different type of war now -- against drugs and alcohol. I believe we can win with music."

The Dancing with the Spirit program hopes to get instruments in the hands of young Natives, teach them to play, train village musicians as teachers, write a music curriculum, and package the program so that it can be easily duplicated nationally and
internationally.

Bishop Mark MacDonald, former Episcopal Bishop of Alaska and now bishop of the Navajoland Area Mission in the Episcopal Church and the first National Indigenous Bishop in the Anglican Church of Canada, will be at the concert along with the Rev. Belle Mickelson, director of Dancing with the Spirit. Mickelson will be teaching music to Kingston youth at St. John's Episcopal Church January 3-6.

Tickets for the concert are $10; K-12 students are free. For more information on these events, call the Rev. Duncan Burns at St. John's Episcopal, 845-338-3731 or email the Rev. Mickelson at bellemickelson@gmail.com.