The Historicity of Health: Environmental Hazards and Epidemics in Northwest Greenland

Early Encounters: New People and Old World Germs

The people of Avanersuaq became truly known to the outside world, including the rest of Greenland, only in the 19th century, yet they have remained on the edge of vision until far more recently. The first to report on their existence was Captain John Ross, who had been sent out by the British admiralty to find the Northwest Passage in 1818. He did not find any passage, but did encounter a small group of fur-clad hunters, whom he affectionately named “Arctic Highlanders,” and of whom he said that they “believed themselves to be the only inhabitants of the universe” (Ross, 1819, p. 124).

What they really believed is of course debatable, given the brevity of the encounter and the limited number of people, 12 to 15 and only men, that Ross actually met (Bravo, 1998). As mentioned above, all of Greenland had become populated from the North Eastern corner of the American Arctic Archipelago, where Inuit from North America had crossed Smith Sound in several waves of migration and moved south once in Greenland. During the centuries of alleged isolation and invisibility, there may still have been occasional contacts in the southerly parts of Melville Bay where hunters from both north and south would go polar bear hunting. Besides such possible, yet sparse encounters over two or three centuries, there were persistent rumors or tales about “the others” in both north and south (e.g., Rasmussen, 1925).

“Contact” may also take place more or less behind people’s backs, sneaking in from unknown neighbors in the form of germs. As McGhee (1997b) writes, “Sixteenth-to-18th-century contact along the coasts of Greenland, Labrador, Baffin Island, and even Hudson Bay may have been sufficient to allow for repeated transmission of Old World disease to local Inuit groups” (p. 570). We know that the prehistoric Thule Inuit were engaged in far-reaching trading networks of metals—incorporating groups on both sides of the northern parts of Baffin Bay (Schledermann & McCullough, 2003), and it stands to reason that even the remotest parts of this network could have been exposed to diseases from elsewhere that would have kept population numbers down. However, McGhee’s hypothesis about the dire consequences of disease in nonresistant High Arctic populations has been questioned on the basis of (a lack of) archeological evidence (e.g., Gulløv, 1997; Wenzel, 1997). Regardless, we must pay attention to the nearly imperceptible network of contacts that certainly would have linked the Inughuit up with the Old World prior to their initial European “discovery.”

Returning to historical accounts, John Ross was the first one to report a meeting with a so far unknown (to Europeans) tribe. William Baffin had reached the shores in 1616, but saw no people—who may have been somewhere else in the region at the time. Since then the passage had been impenetrable due to the pack ice in Melville Bay (so named by Ross). In Ross’s wake, whalers and explorers soon followed. The presence of Europeans in the region became such a regular occurrence that each summer the newly “discovered” people—or at least a number of them—would congregate at Cape York, a promontory in the southern part of the region, hoping for opportunities for barter. The harsh environment, where the Little Ice Age held its grip longer than anywhere else in the North Atlantic region, gave people hard times hunting, mainly for technological reasons that made access to prey difficult. This was to a large extent owed to the lack of driftwood, because the West Greenland Current no longer reached their shores. Marcel Mauss (1906/1979) writes,

The expansion of inland ice and the persistence of drifting ice throughout most of the year not only put an end to the arrival of driftwood but obstructed large whales, and made it impossible to hunt whales, walruses and seals in open waters. The bow, the kayak, the umiak [the women’s boat] and most of the sleds disappeared because of a lack of wood. These unfortunate Eskimo were reduced to such circumstances that they retained merely the memory of their former technology. (pp. 42-43)

When waters opened again, sailors from outside provided a vital resource of wood, guns, and utensils in exchange for furs. Guns came with the price of germs, however, as we may infer from population numbers and other sources from the 19th century until more factual evidence emerges in the 20th century. We shall return to this in the next section. Here we shall proceed with the explorers’ estimations.

Elisha K. Kane, who visited the region from 1853-1855 and made a census of the population, suggested that there were about 140 people at the time. Kane observed that the people were suffering from famine and saw themselves as doomed. Still, their sense of community was remarkable, as was their keeping track of each other. Kane (1856) writes:

The narrow belt subjected to their nomadic range cannot be less than six hundred miles long; and throughout this extent of country every man knows every man. There is not a marriage or a birth or a death that is not talked over and mentally registered by all. I have a census, exactly confirmed by three separate informants, which enables me to count by name about one hundred and forty souls, scattered along from Kosoak, the Great River at the base of a glacier near Cape Melville, to the wind-loved hut of Anoatok. (Vol. II, p. 211)

Within this region, and when the sea ice makes travel possible, Kane (1856) writes that people move about and exchange news and sympathies and “diffuse through the darkness a knowledge of the resources and condition of all” (p. 211). Their limited numbers and vulnerability in itself made people alert to one another, and to the conditions for hunting across the region.

Even though outsiders were now part of the picture, there was a distinct sense of local communion and of the need to share the resources. Few years after Kane’s report, the scene had changed. Isaac I. Hayes (1866), the next to report on this people, has a less romantic view of their interrelations, suggesting that when sickness, death, or ill-luck strikes, people never offer assistance—but also never refuse it. Hayes believed this to express only half-heartedness toward people in need. In contrast, I suggest that by not victimizing people and instead accepting them to one’s “table,” the local community kept up the spirit of sharing. No less significant in the present context is that Hayes (1866) suggests the population being now close to barely 100 people. While numbers are always slightly uncertain, Hayes’s estimate is a hint about the price paid by the Inughuit for eagerly awaiting the arrival of foreigners and goods and being exposed to epidemics that would toll considerably in a nonresistant population. Even if we cannot document a specific disease pattern or the composite causes of population decline, we have evidence of their social impacts. Hayes (1866) cites a man as saying to him, when he was about to leave, that he should come back soon “or there will be none here to welcome you” (p. 386). It seems that hunger, epidemics, and deteriorating technologies all contributed to the decline and not least to the local people’s fear of extinction.

In the words of Le Roy Ladurie (1978), the globe had become unified by disease in the 14th to 17th centuries. While germs spread before (and after) this period, their circulation intensified with the new patterns of trade and later with the conquest of the Americas. This unification or “the creation—first in Eurasia, and subsequently in the Atlantic area—of a ‘common market’ of microbes, passed through a particularly intense, rapid, dramatic, one might even say apocalyptic phase, during the period roughly 1300-1600” (Ladurie 1978, p. 30). Looking at the early historical sources on the Inughuit shows that they were not only victims of the Little Ice Age and its impact on their mobility (Hastrup, 2016) but also indirectly or directly prey to a “common market” of discovery and disease.

Stability in the Making: Old Health Hazards and New Materials

On the basis of available sources, Rolf Gilberg (1976) has charted the occurrence of epidemics in the Thule region since the 1880s, when a major (unknown) epidemic spread from Cape York in the wake of the arrival of whalers. When the people tried to flee it—sensing its contagiousness—they only carried it further. Many people died attempting to outrun the contagion on the ice of the fjord to the Northeast of the Cape York peninsula. The fjord is still known as the Fjord of the Dead People. We have no numbers of victims or the scale of the calamity, but the local recollection of the event, written down by Knud Rasmussen in 1903, as well as the place-name itself, remind us of this first historically confirmed epidemic in the region (Rasmussen, 1925).

It has also been ascertained that during the winter of 1895-1896, 29 people died of an unknown disease. Robert Peary (1898)—who is the source of this number—notes that in the same period, 10 children were actually born (Vol. I, p. 514). This in turn testifies to a time of relative food security—partly owed to Peary’s provision of rifles and other goods. In the winter 1901-1902, a total of 36 people died of an infectious typhoid fever that in all likelihood also arrived with whalers. Considering that the entire indigenous population in the region numbered c. 250 people at the turn of the century, this toll was remarkable (Peary, 1898, Vol. I, pp. 511-514).

That at this time people did not succumb to a sense of imminent doom, as they did when Hayes reported on them, is probably owed to the fact that famine was now at least kept in check, much due to the influx of guns and ammunition on one hand, and of wood and metal utensils on the other. The effects of these materials were profound: Guns significantly expanded hunters’ abilities to take prey at range, increased access to wood and metal extended the range of travel provided by more solid sledges and allowed for the reinvention of kayaks. This reinvention, or actually rediscovery, was due to an in-migration into the region by a small group of Iglulik Eskimos from northern Baffin Island in the 1860s. One of them, who still lived in 1903, when Knud Rasmussen first arrived, told him,

We taught these people many things. We showed them how to build snow-huts with long tunnel passages . . .

We taught them to shoot with bows and arrows. Before our arrival they did not hunt the many reindeer that are in their country . . .

We taught them to spear salmon in the streams . . .

And we taught them to build kayaks, and to hunt and catch from kayaks. Before they had only hunted on the ice, and had been obliged during the spring to catch as many seals, walruses, and narwhals as they would want for the summer, when the ice had gone . . . They told us that their forefathers had known the use of the kayak, but that an evil disease had once ravaged their land, and carried off the old people. The young ones did not know how to build new kayaks, and the old people’s kayaks they had buried with their owners. This was how it had come about that kayak hunting had been forgotten.

But we adopted their type of sledge, for it was better than ours, and had uprights on it. (Rasmussen, 1908, pp. 32-33)

From around 1909 to 1910, when Knud Rasmussen established the Thule Trading Station and foreign (Danish) presence became permanent, we have fairly well established records on health and death tolls by epidemics, which were analyzed by Gilberg (1976). I shall excerpt some of his findings, reminding us that the numbers should be seen against a background of a population numbering 250 people in total. The very first year of the trading station, 13 people died of typhus at the station itself. Later, a very serious onslaught of the Spanish Flu took 40 lives in 1920 to 1921, having ravaged Europe a few years earlier and now arrived by way of West Greenland. A few years later, tuberculosis made itself felt, taking the lives of 12 persons between 1928 and 1929. In the following years, tuberculosis, in tandem with pneumonia, would lead to numerous deaths (Gilberg 1976). Both of these diseases had actually been endemic to the Greenlandic population in (Danish) West Greenland for a couple of centuries (Saxtorph, 1950). The epidemics at Thule did not stop there, but gradually their direst consequences abated thanks to more efficient treatment and vaccination programs that came with the hospital and the permanent presence of a doctor at the Thule Station since 1929, as well as a gradually built-up resistance.

In addition to externally introduced diseases, people in Avanersuaq were also subjected to a number of other hazards—more or less occupational. Gilberg, again, collected all available records for the period 1927-1973 and found that in addition to 156 deaths from epidemic diseases, there were another 52 deaths from disasters of various kinds. In all, 29 people had drowned. Eight had disappeared through the ice. Two people had been accidentally shot. Five had died from poisoning; three from dog-bites; three had committed suicide, and two very young children had suffocated in the snow. Adding to this rather grim picture were 26 stillborn infants, 10 premature babies, four women dying in childbirth, and six dying of old age. Another 72 deaths in the period are reported with no indication of cause. These likely included natural deaths to old age that went unspecified in settlements far away from the church register, and probably some younger children disposed of if the mother had died.

The profundity of these numbers is in their implicit message. They speak to the demanding life on the edge of the livable world. It is a small wonder that the early European explorers were amazed even at finding humans here, and not least of their being of a rather merry and generous disposition (Peary, 1898, Vol. I, p. 479ff). Worth noting is a remark made by the Norwegian Eivind Astrup (1898), who was a member of the two first Peary Expeditions to the Smith Sound Eskimos in the early 1890s, who wrote,

Our small merry brethern in the Arctic regions represent an extremity of the human race; an insignificant section of it, who take up the battle of existence in regions which to our eyes offer poor prospects for life’s sustenance, and where icy death would seem to reign supreme. (p. 48)

Southerners always felt that life in the region was next-to-unlivable given the chronic challenges of climate and isolation.

While presently we cannot make a similar claim to isolation, we can still testify to the challenge of living in this region. Obviously, there are new medical treatments for many diseases, but the hazards of Arctic life are still many when one lives off the icy waters. For example, one spring a few years back when I was in region, there were two casualties related to walrus hunting. One hunter was killed by a walrus attacking and destroying his kayak, while another drowned due to an overturning of his kayak while harpooning a walrus and getting entangled in the harpoon line. Also, tragically, a few winters back a young girl was attacked and killed by dogs. Dogs are offered minimum feed when the catch is low and may go hungry for a long time during winter when the ice, and consequently the hunt, is far less stable than it used to be, due to the warming of the sea. In principle dogs must be tied up, but sometimes they escape their braces, hungry and violent (Hastrup, 2018b). In sum, health hazards are deeply embedded in the Arctic way of life.

Knowing what we now know about epidemics and health in Thule, it is striking that archeologist and ethnographer Erik Holtved, who worked intensively in this region in 1935-1937 and 1946-1947, does not mention any externally derived diseases at all in his section on illness. He takes note of local illnesses having occurred after the breaking of a taboo, bouts of “arctic hysteria” or drum-dance fits, snow blindness, and a few other local challenges (Holtved, 1967, pp. 150-51). It is as if, in his view, the infectious diseases were not really part of local reality; they did not belong. Maybe they did not, but they took people’s lives all the same, and became important testimonies to the unification of the world through disease, of which Ladurie spoke.

Momentous Invasions: From Stability to Disequilibrium

As already mentioned, in 1909 to 1910 a permanent trading post was built in the region. This replaced the annual barters at Cape York, which had begun to shrink anyway having been replaced by Robert Peary’s more or less continuous presence in the district since 1891. It was seen by Knud Rasmussen and others to be in the interest of the Danish state to have a more permanent presence in the region. This would avert other intensifying international interests in the territory—notably American (lead by Peary) and Norwegian (in the wake of Sverdrup’s travels). In both cases it had to do with national interests in gaining control over unclaimed lands and sea-passages that might give access to future riches. Northwest Greenland—Thule—was not (yet) truly claimed by any state; it was only in 1933 that Denmark was granted supremacy over the entire island including Thule, at the International Court in the Hague, in contest with Norway who claimed part of the east coast, where Norwegian whalers had worked for centuries. Yet, in the early 20th century, the Danish state was not interested in the far North, partly fearing American reactions, but allowed Knud Rasmussen (and his powerful associates, notably in church circles) to build a mission and a trade station with private funds. This was the Thule Station, being built by the ancient site of Uummannaq on a headland in mid-district.

For many years, the trade of fur, mainly from polar fox, was quite profitable, and annual provision ships met the new needs of the people who soon gathered at Uummannaq, leaving other places behind, at least for part of the year. The social situation had changed. When the expedition turns into a station, the relations between the newcomers and the local community radically change (Fabian, 2000). The composition of the community, which now for the first time had a proper center, a stable supply of necessities, school education, and from 1929 a small hospital staffed by a permanent doctor and a nurse was also altered. Being hunters, the local people and families still moved about, particularly during summer, but the widely dispersed community of which Kane had spoken so warmly, now had a distinct center, contributing to a new sense of stability and security. Some of the elderly inhabitants of Thule still refer back to their childhood in the 1930s and 1940s as wonderful, although there are also reminiscences of years of starvation and recurrent epidemics, not least tuberculosis.

The sense of stability and economic surplus was not to last. The establishment of an American Airbase in the early 1950s—neighboring Thule and Uummannaq at the heart of the entire community—was to have long-lasting repercussions on local health and certainly on people’s sense of identity. The trading station and the entire population on the headland were relocated to present day Qaanaaq or to other localities of their choice, known either as hunting grounds or as more or less permanent settlements. In three places around Inglefield Fjord (Kangerlussuaq), they were offered new houses, if they would go there.

While World War II as such did not have any serious impact in Thule, the ensuing Cold War was to scar social life deeply. While Danish sovereignty over the entirety of Greenland had been acknowledged since 1933, the Thule region was still effectively outside of any serious Danish interest, even though the state had formally bought the Thule Station from Knud Rasmussen’s widow in 1936. The district was actually governed by its own local Thule law and the Hunters’ Council until 1963. This marginal position in relation to the state made the region particularly vulnerable to the Cold War plans of the United States. The region remained too remote and too thinly populated to be a serious international or national issue. It was not really seen as somebody’s lived space of multiple affordances. It looked empty on any map, and 250 people did not count for much.

The heavy transport vessels, aeroplanes, and the thousands of military personnel that descended on Thule disturbed the animals and destroyed some of the most important hunting grounds in the vicinity of the station. We have an eyewitness to the military arrival in human geographer Jean Malaurie, who spent the year 1950-1951 in the region, and who on coming back to Thule from an almost yearlong sojourn further North could not believe his eyes when he and some travel companions from up there looked down on the plain from the mountain from where the sledge route went down to Uummannaq. He saw a spectacle that he thought to be a mirage, and continues,

A city of hangars and tents, of sheet metal and aluminium rose dazzling in the sun among smoke and dust on a plain that yesterday had been empty. The most fantastic of legends took form beneath our eyes.

“Takou. Look.”

Like eruptive pustules risen from the depths of the earth the shapes of containers were lined up along the mountain. Their organ colour made the vision seem even more absurd. We descended the snow slope, which shone before us. Our astonishment became stupor. As far as we could see there were lines of lorries, lifting gear, and mountains of cases. Steel framework raised its great arms to the sky. Along the slopes excavators with enormous jaws scraped away in smoke and steam, removing earth and rubbish, which were vomited into the sea by continuously moving buckets. The noisy breathing of this town reached us. It was a dull rumbling of ceaselessly turning motors. In the greyness dozens of aeroplanes were circling. One of them, nearer to us, came and went like a great bumble-bee, mixing its personal solemn note with the mounting hubbub. This irruption of civilization, seen from the glacier, was sinister. Our dogs howled like death. Two of them threw themselves on one another. We intervened, but without energy. This return to men was a failure. (Malaurie 1956, pp. 255-256)

This invasion became the pretext for a relocation of the entire population of the Thule settlement, including the trading station, the hospital, the church, and the village, in 1953 (Brøsted & Fægteborg, 1987). People could move freely elsewhere in the district; they were used to moving about, hunting in the vast landscape, and knew the affordances of each place on the coast, including the presence of house structures that could be put to use. Now, Qaanaaq was chosen as the new center for the “official” buildings and installations; up until then it had only been a temporary hunting site. Compounding the difficulties of the move, people only had a couple of days to pack up and leave because the sea ice, across which they had to travel with their gear and family on sledges, was on the brink of melting. For the locals, Thule (including the old Uummannaq settlement) had been the center of community life since 1910; this was where the meetings of the hunters’ council took place, and where they could exchange their fox furs for other goods. It had gradually become the largest settlement ever in the region. Yet, foreign authorities treated it as a no-man’s land. To them, Thule may have been used but had never been really claimed by any state.

The break-up not only regrouped people but also destroyed the integrity of their community. At Thule, the community was connected to extensive hunting grounds both north and south that offered a variety of game. When the center was cut out, it made hunting grounds in mid-district inaccessible and created a deep sense among local people of being alienated from the past and from significant places, which is a contention that still lingers today (Walsøe, 2003). Holtved, who had worked extensively in the region up until and during the early days of American presence, describes the establishment of the airbase as possibly the most severe turning point in the eventful existence of the Polar Eskimos. He notes that their “minds had lost their former equilibrium due to a feeling of uncertainty regarding the future” (Holtved, 1967, p. 11). Even hunting in the fjord close to the old Thule station, which had been rich in walrus, thick-billed murre, and eider duck, became impossible. First, because game was heavily disturbed by the immense transport vessels that brought building materials and other equipment to the newly established airbase, and later because of an increasing problem of pollution due to military waste. The forced displacement was accompanied by a wider sense of dislocation.

Invisible Threats: Science and Mounting Distrust

Adding to the sense of dislocation soon came an increasing disquiet about the technological experiments being undertaken at the base in the wake of the international Geophysical Year, GPY, in 1957-1958 (Collis & Dodds, 2008). At the airbase, geophysical experiments were made big-scale. The epitome was the Camp Century project, a nuclear-powered, scientific-military camp to be built under the ice cap launched in 1960, and secretly designed also to house nuclear missiles (Martin-Nielsen, 2012; Nielsen, Nielsen, & Martin-Nielsen, 2014). It turned out that the Americans had underestimated the force, and not least the plasticity and movement of the ice cap, and Camp Century was abandoned in 1966.

The nuclear threat persisted, albeit in a changed form in the shape of armed planes. In 1968, a B52 plane carrying plutonium bombs crashed and went through the sea ice right outside of old Thule. Allegedly, all the bombs were retrieved from the bottom of the sea (Christensen, 2009). Three were definitely retrieved, but rumors of a fourth bomb persist, even though an official investigation has not found any traces of such bomb. People from the new settlements in the region were asked to help clean up efforts. Only later was it revealed that the fjord by the old Thule Station was contaminated by nuclear radiation, and ever since, people who had worked there felt that they were at risk. Consequently, both the relocation and the plane crash linger in people’s sense of living in a disturbed landscape even today.

This stands out in a health assessment in the region, documenting a pervasive sense of ill health and fear (Bjerregaard & Dahl-Petersen, 2010). This assessment was based both on qualitative and quantitative data, and reported that people in Qaanaaq generally felt more exposed to contamination and subjectively considered themselves to be more afflicted by illness than people further south. Epidemiologically, there were no indications that people were in fact more affected by either radiation or diseases related to earlier exposures than their compatriots further south (Den Individuelle Helbredsundersøgelse, 2011).

Despite official findings, the inhabitants of Avanersuaq perceive themselves as more vulnerable than their compatriots. Results of the assessment suggest that locals evaluated their own health negatively, and they worried about the prevalence of infected, and therefore inedible, game. They linked the malformation of fish and game to the presence of the U.S. airbase, particularly to the plane crash. As one respondent said,

We have not caused this radiation and personally and as a citizen here, I am much affected by the fact that the people, who have caused the pollution, will not work towards its removal. This depresses me. I feel that they see us, who live in the region, as without any value. Despite their knowing how dangerous this pollution is, they seem to consider us inconsequential. (Bjerregaard & Dahl-Petersen, 2010, p. 32; author’s translation)

The age-old wound of not being heard or seen by the powers that be once again surfaces as part of the problem. Even though it cannot be scientifically verified that people have been physiologically affected by radiation, the fear remains and is underwritten by other memories about administrative secrecy, as transpires from another interview:

I get angry with the Americans for not having taken it seriously and informed us properly. I have listened to the people who helped clean up, and sometimes I get angry that they have not been informed about, what it is now said that they (the Americans) have kept hidden. (Bjerregaard & Dahl-Petersen, pp. 32-33; author’s translation)

Almost one third of the people interviewed for the follow-up examination believed that they suffered from diseases that were owed to radiation. As indicated above, this could not be sustained epidemiologically. Included into the general sense of unease was also a remarkable fear of the general pollution of the environment. First, it was only the immediate environment of the Air Base, and its waste dump full of all sorts of chemicals, half-broken shells, organic pollutants, and bombs, that had to be avoided. Later, it was the entire landscape around Wolstenholme Fjord, the main haunt for hunters in Old Thule. Even today, malformed game occurs from time to time, and the Americans are blamed for this (Bjerregaard & Dahl-Petersen, 2010, passim). Many recent deaths from cancer are similarly linked to the contamination, as people in Qaanaaq tell me. Official investigations show only a minor increase in radiation in the immediate vicinity of the drop, but the fear is all over the place.

These feelings implicitly refer to the old wound of relocation from 1953, and the two events get mixed up. Apart from mentioning the waste material at the dump, participants in the health assessment also referred to the airbase:

We have also had atomic weapons up there [on the ice cap]. Small reactors on the inland ice and atomic reactors that produce electricity. They have been shipped via the Thule Air Base. Whether they are still up there in the ice, or where they are, I do not know. (Bjerregaard and Dahl-Petersen, 2010, p. 22)

What at least some of them know and have told me is that the glacier within which Camp Century was eventually buried is nearing the sea, and they ponder what will happen when the glaciers break off. Will there be leftover tokens of radiation? One gets a sense of the deep roots of present worries and not least the historical implications of this massive “contact” on local concerns of health and well-being. To the Inughuit, their health has been invaded in the deepest sense of this term, and when asked, they find it difficult to not voice their anxieties, however unfounded in epidemiology.

While 19th century explorers never doubted that the land belonged to the Inughuit—not as property but as a common resource—in the mid–20th century neither the Danish administration nor the U.S. Air Force acknowledged their rights of access and free movement in their traditional homelands (e.g., Harlang, Lynge, & Nielsen, 1999). In the Thule Law effectuated at the trade station (since 1929) and drawing upon the rules laid out by the Hunters’ Council (with representatives from all corners of the region), the Inughuit took for granted that theirs was one land, one space of shared resources. The Thule Airbase broke this shared space apart and left people at a loss that has remained incomprehensible to outsiders who could not or would not understand the sense of community as deeply integrated with the sense of place and an age-old knowledge of hunting grounds. While most of the time the inhabitants of Avanersuaq think of other pressing matters and enjoy the pleasures that their life offer, a deep sense of loss and suffering is still alive at the back of their minds.

Dislocation at Home: Melting Landscapes and Marginal Lives

With the current trends of global warming, affecting the Arctic regions deeply, the concerns of the people of Avanersuaq multiply (Hastrup, 2013, 2016, 2018a). Unable to subsist as hunters, the Inughuit have to consider their future in new ways—and possibly in new places; in fact that is what they have always done given the uncertainty built into the hunt. After a few years of hesitation, partly owing to an uncertain infrastructure, they have now embraced halibut fishing. The advent of halibut of a marketable size is in itself a positive outcome of the warming waters. Another possible source of income is presented by prospected mines in the region; so far these have only materialized in small twin-otter aircrafts taking explorers and mining companies further north, and in a few concessions. This nurses a more distant dream of rare earth metals in the region, and of future mines and work for the young. In short, like the rest of us, the Inughuit live by imaginative horizons beyond the immediately accessible. People’s resilience is closely tied to a remarkable flexibility—both practically and socially (Hastrup, 2009). While waiting for an unknown environmental future, hunters in the region take great pains to monitor game and address the quota system that so far has been based on scientific models rather than experience.

In the midst of melting ice and increasingly difficult access to their traditional subsistence resources, equally affected by rapidly changing climates both in and above water, the Inughuit are hit by yet another invisible threat—that of pollution. The lingering fear was mentioned above, but pollution is not only a matter of Airbase waste and possible radiation; it sources are much more invisible and widely distributed. It has been documented beyond any doubt that pollution from heavy metals and persistent organic pollutants accrue in the much-favored marine mammals, including polar bears, due to their position at the top of the food chain. This affects health in the Arctic generally, and the more so, where these animals are still seen as the basis for social life (Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme [AMAP], 2015). Certainly, Thule is no longer isolated. It is part of a (post-)modern global world, connected by waste and pollution—beyond the diseases that connected the globe in the first place as discussed above. Food safety has become a major global issue, deeply affecting people in Thule, whose stable food is increasingly contaminated (Hastrup, 2016).

This said, it bears emphasizing that people in Avanersuaq are ready to meet the challenges at hand given but a little encouragement from the powers that be. The community would truly appreciate a permanent doctor like they once had, who might be able to diagnose, before it is too late, the cancers that seem to pop up at increasing pace in their estimation. Furthermore, they ask why they must pay double price for fuel to warm their cold houses, compared with towns further south, where temperatures are much higher. The answer, of course, is the expensive transport by ship in the High Arctic waters, open for traffic only in a short period every year, affecting the prices on all goods. But in the face of this knowledge, they reminisce about the time when the Danes were in charge of provisions and kept a uniform price all over Greenland. Their old age pensions are not doubled, and having visited Qaanaaq in deep winter, I know that some people are more or less hibernating in just one room, saving on both electricity and heat. Here they sit wondering how they can pay for the next meal from the shop—having nothing much in stock, because the hunt has been sparse. Dogs cannot be properly fed during such a winter, leaving fewer of them for next spring (Hastrup, 2018b). Such negative spirals are further accentuated because ancient practices of sharing the meat are stopped short when, for instance, a son who used to supply his elderly mother with meat has had to give up hunting due to rheumatism. What is more, the emerging halibut economy is monetary, and one does not share money as one did the game. This fosters another sense of dislocation.

In this sense, Inughuit lives are still marginalized, and hunger is still a hard social fact (Hastrup, 1993)—at least for some. While in the first half on the 20th century the Danish administration deliberately closed off Greenland to foreigners and demanded immaculate health certificates from Danes who went there to work in the explicit attempt at keeping epidemics at bay (Saxtorph, 1950), it is no longer possible to curb the potential health threats from a fluid, borderless environment where even the deep sea has become a site of fear.

To close this article, I shall tell a story that demonstrates how the doom so often attributed to life in the high Arctic does not detract from moments of success and deep satisfaction with being a hunter in the Big North. This in turn lends power to the belief in a “local” future. One spring a few years ago, I was back in the region in time for the spring ice-edge hunt, which in many ways is an adventure, albeit a deeply serious one. Out we went, a hunter, his 16-year-old son, and myself. On our way, a couple of seals basking on the sea ice close to their breathing holes were shot, and the sunshine made it very pleasant to simply sit on the sledge and wait while the hunter approached the seal, against the wind and covered by the shooting sail. We then pressed on to the ice edge, where there was already a campsite, with people waiting for the narwhals that came and went in various packs and did not give themselves up easily.

We arrived at the camp and began waiting for narwhals along with the rest. During the day, a number of packs came into the open water between the ice and the neighboring island and the hunters descended into their kayaks, but in vain. The men were alert, and suddenly the 16-year-old came running past the camp along the ice edge, silently, rapidly and in pursuit of a whale trying to get out of the impasse. I could only look as he sped along, jumping over a couple of ice floes, and finally managed to set the harpoon deep into the whale, and holding on to the line, until his father caught up with him and was able to actually shoot it, and to help fasten it properly. A floater was blown up and secured to the animal, which was then steered back to the camp where all the hunters soon congregated and helped drag it ashore. For this they received part of the mattak, the skin and blubber that is a major delicacy and a rich repository of vitamins.

This was the young man’s “first narwhal,” and the congratulations, handshakes, and high fives that he received, as did his father, were unending. The young man’s delight in his success spread, and it was to continue. Once the whale was cut up, and the meat and mattak silently distributed according to unspoken rules, we returned toward Qaanaaq, sitting on top of the spoils on the heavily packed dog-sledge. Although it was around 4:30 in the morning before we arrived, people came down to the beach to congratulate the young man on his first narwhal. The rumor had already spread by the satellite phone in the camp, which is now part of the necessary gear, given the ice conditions and new disaster patterns as the ice thins in unexpected places, and the ice edge may break up and take the hunters camping there by surprise.

When later in the morning I told my hosts about the feat, they were extremely delighted and repeated again and again that this was a unique experience, and one they had never had. I was heartily congratulated for having been present and experienced a “first catch.” The delight spread further quickly, and my impression was that the entire village talked about it, and about the fact that I had actually been there. I was stopped in mid track over the next few days and congratulated again and again. I was quite pleased myself, first by witnessing the successful hunt, and next by the wider ramifications of pride and pleasure that would unite the inhabitants in a festive atmosphere and in celebrating not only the young man, but the entire community of hunters. The fact that it was a young man for a moment stalled the sense of “dying out”—related to the fact that very few youngsters want to become hunters and choose to leave for bigger towns down south in Greenland or Denmark, which is a trend that reflects conditions everywhere in Greenland.

Although this is of course just an anecdote, it does speak to the larger issue of melting landscapes and marginal lives. The dominant narrative about the High Arctic now is one of catastrophe and cultural loss, owing to a mixture of colonial, climatic, and political threats. This is far too simplistic. After all, people are still there, and they do not live by cultural charters or preconceived roadmaps. The only constant in life in the Big North has been the immanent changes and challenges that have alerted people to catch the moment, any moment of promise, whether in the shape of ships from the south laden with rifles, or of narwhals moving into the fjord and meeting the hunter ready.

The world is unified not only by disease and fear but also by the momentous delights of living and forgetting everything beyond the moment of success. It is also unified by hope, which “penetrates further into the future than expectation” (Crapanzano, 2004, p. 104). Life on the edge need not be frightening and crippling, but can also be liberating and empowering. If the unifying forces suggested by Jared Diamond were guns, germs, and steel, to which we already added human and industrial waste, I would like to end by suggesting that “hope” is yet another force, through which we may unite. This, I believe, connects this particular story with global concerns about environment and health—and the shared sense of dislocation, even when at home.