In the early 1970s, Nuuk, the world’s northernmost capital, had a population of just over 7,000. Today there are almost 20,000, a third of Greenland’s total population. In this same time span, “non-Greenlanders” have only increased from 2,000 to 4,000.
Most of Nuuk’s new inhabitants are in fact Inuit – the natives of the Arctic island, who are still its main ethnic group. In a process that began to be imposed in the 1950s by the Kingdom of Denmark, the Inuit were forcibly relocated from the villages to the city. The aim was twofold: to make the Inuit more “Danish” and to transform the economy from subsistence to industry.
The Danish colonisation of Greenland was both political and industrial. It officially began in 1721, with the mission of a priest supported by the Church and the Danish Crown. Since then, ties with Copenhagen have never been severed, apart from a brief interlude during the Nazi occupation of Denmark, from which Greenland escaped.
Since the 1960s, the Inuit who inhabit the Arctic island have demanded more freedom. In 1979 they formed their own parliament, which kick-started the “post-colonial” period, and in 2009 they were granted the basis for full independence, for example through the autonomous management of their own natural resources.
At present, however, the island still remains a territory under the administration of the Danish Crown.
Against this historical backdrop, the left-wing independence party Inuit Ataqatigiit won the 2021 general election with a programme that aims for full independence from Denmark and strict control of mining licences granted to foreign companies.
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These Greenlandic politicians are confident that they will be able to defend their resources from the appetites of China, Russia, the United States and the European Union, all potential new colonisers, while at the same time gaining more autonomy from Copenhagen.
What they have failed to protect over the past sixty years, however, is their cultural identity, which is increasingly at risk of extinction.
Depopulating villages
After World War II, Denmark decided it was time to develop Greenland’s local economy. The large icy island offered prime opportunities for commercial fishing, particularly for shrimp and halibut, a large flatfish caught by the Inuit by dropping a line with hundreds of hooks through a hole in the ice.
Denmark introduced commercial enterprises that performed the same operation on an industrial scale and added fleets of fishing boats that started a process of profound transformation not only of the local economy, but also of the lifestyle of traditional villagers.
Those who were once hunters and fishermen began to look for work as labourers in the new fish-processing factories in the larger settlements.
The Danish government justified the disappearance of several settlements from the map by arguing that maintaining services such as schools and clinics everywhere was too difficult and expensive and would be easier if the Inuit moved to the larger towns, where the infrastructure also already existed.
Many indigenous families thus found themselves living in large concrete buildings in Nuuk, built specifically to accommodate those who were relocated from the small settlements, completely abandoning their traditional and natural lifestyle.
Some Inuit traditions have already been lost in Nuuk, such as fishing practised by drilling holes in the ice.
In the town’s harbour, one can see both the large fishing boats of Royal Greenland – Greenland’s largest fishing company, controlled by the Greenlandic government bureau – and the small boats of local fishermen. The spoils of the latter are at least partly sold at the meat and fish market stalls from which only other Inuit buy.
The hunters, on the other hand, continue to catch their prey one by one, venturing into the mountains that cover the entire Arctic island.
Leave or return
While the industrialisation of fishing has generated economic benefits in both Greenland and Denmark, it has also limited the possibilities for small businesses and local fishermen to actively participate in the market, reducing the economic autonomy of communities and creating new social difficulties.
Narsaq, an agglomeration of less than 1,500 souls resting on a fjord more than 450 kilometres south of the capital Nuuk, has been one of the main victims of this process. Here, fifty years after opening, Royal Greenland closed its fish processing plants, condemning the village to dramatic economic and social decline.
The shrimp processing plant, opened in the 1970s as part of the Danish development plan for the fish industry in Greenland, guaranteed economic growth and stable employment for a large part of the population for several decades.
However, in 2010, problems with fish stocks – due to the fact that fewer and fewer shrimp were being caught as the species moved northward due to climate change – and the resulting higher operating costs led to the closure of the plant, leaving more than 100 people (almost 10% of the population), many of them the sole breadwinners, without work.
Many families were thus forced to leave the settlement in southern Greenland in search of new opportunities in the capital. Since 2010, Narsaq has lost 20% of its population and suffers the highest unemployment rate in Greenland.
Ole Møller is Narsaq’s electrician. He left the capital Nuuk to return to his home village. This was a political choice: “My wife and I have Danish names and were born in the years when being Danish was considered better than being Greenlandic,” he says. For his daughters – Qupanuk and Iluna, one and a half years and nine months old – he wanted a different situation.
In contrast to the predominance of Danish and English in the schools in Nuuk, he decided to teach them Greenlandic first: “Our fear is that the Greenlandic language will be lost, along with our traditions,” he explains as she juggles cooking and looking after the two girls.
Returning to such a remote area means that getting anything done is more difficult than it should be.
“With the isolation, even the simplest necessities require months of waiting: from medicine to paint for the walls of the house, you have to wait several months,” he says as he looks at the facade of his house, half fuchsia and half red. “Winter is coming and I have run out of paint, I will finish painting it next summer”.
An old fisherman who once worked as a supplier for Royal Greenland now spends his evenings at the Inugssuk Cafe, one of Narsaq’s few pubs.
‘Our fear is that the Greenlandic language will be lost, along with our traditions’ – Ole Møller
He introduces himself as Christian and is intrigued by the presence of foreigners in his village. As he talks, he ends up opening up about personal matters as well.
“The suicide rate in Greenland is so high that it is not an exaggeration to say that everyone has at least one acquaintance who has taken their own life,” he says. He then shows photos of his grandchildren and says that his daughter, the mother of the two children, also took her own life.
As he speaks, he kisses the phone, as if unable to hold back the impulse of affection towards his two motherless grandchildren. His daughter was in her thirties and belonged to that generation that continues to wonder whether there can be a future among the fjords back home.
The Inuit of the younger generation live in a transitional phase: on the one hand, they wish to preserve the hunting tradition of their grandparents, and often also their parents, rooted in a deep connection with nature and their land; on the other, they are confused and disoriented by the expectations of an urban life.
They feel deprived of an identity, distant both from previous generations and from their peers in the globalised world. Those between the ages of 20 and 24 are the most strongly affected.
As with other indigenous populations forced to radically change their way of life, the loss of identity began with the uprooting ordered by law by the Danes.
Along with dwellings, the Danes imposed their own language, religion and education system on the Inuit, forced them to abandon their villages and move to the cities, and discouraged the use of local traditions and language, Kalaallisut, in an attempt to turn them into Danish citizens.
In the 1970s, suicides in Greenland began to precipitate: from 1970 to 1989, the rate rose from 28.7 to 120.5 per 100,000 people. Today, the rate has slowly decreased, but remains one of the highest in the world: about 81 per 100,000 people.
If the ice disappears
Tukumminnguaq Lyberth was born in Qaanaaq, Greenland’s northernmost city. They call this place Thule, the name of the imaginary island that according to ancient chroniclers marked the boundaries of the world.
Like many 30-year-old Inuit, Lyberth moved to Nuuk to work. She is a recent member of Oceans North, the association that works to preserve the rights of the Inuit, especially with regard to fishing and the protection of the marine environment.
Thinking back to her childhood, Lyberth recalls the massive hunts conducted by the men of her village on the ice floe, the floating layer of ice that covers the sea.
“The ice floe was this high,” she says as she raises her arm above her head, her gaze returning with a smile to a distant place stored in her memory, “it was taller than a human being, that’s why we were quiet when we crossed it to go hunting”.
The situation today is different: in the last twenty years, hunting and fishing have become increasingly difficult for the inhabitants of Qaanaaq, among the few communities who still try to practice traditional hunting methods.
This is due to the melting ice.
In the north of the island, in fact, Inuit hunters and fishermen, in order to find their prey, continue to move across the ice for kilometres, until they find the right spot where they can drill a hole from which to fish and hunt marine animals.
“Ice for us is everything,” she says, “which must be difficult for you to understand. But we get everything we need from the ice”. “This deep relationship,” she continues, “has allowed us to develop a culture and lifestyle in close harmony with nature, making the best use of the resources we have available to us”.
The problem is that the sea used to freeze in September, when the light still dominates the long days, and so hunters could go out on sledges in search of seals to stock up for the long winter.
Today it freezes much later, towards the end of October or even November, when darkness now dominates the day. Moreover, the ice shelf remains much thinner, at risk of collapse. The result is that hunting and fishing have become increasingly dangerous: “I know several hunters who have abandoned the activity because they are unable to feed their dogs, and hunting no longer provides enough income to pay the bills. The hunting culture is at risk,” says Lyberth.
Watching the ice melt is like watching the grains of sand in an hourglass running out: “If the ice disappears, we too will disappear from these places sooner or later,” she concludes with certainty.
👉 Original article on IrpiMedia
🤝 This article is published within the Come Together collaborative project
