Reykjavík Grapevine - 08.01.2016, Qupperneq 29

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29The Reykjavík Grapevine TRAVEL
capital of Nuuk. The people we pass
smile and wave as they walk the colour-
ful, hilly streets, instead of marching by
heads-down. Ólafur tells us about the
town’s culture, which includes an annu-
al music festival called Arctic Sounds,
now on its third year. He shows us
around the recently completed culture
house, which hosts open mic nights,
workshops, and an international exhi-
bition programme, and takes us to visit
a small independent music school. With
no music on the national curriculum,
the school aims to fill a valuable gap.
We also drop into a Greenlandic
art centre, where a handful of old Inuit
people are showing off their craft skills,
whether knitting or carving from soap-
stone, whale bones, walrus tusks and
bear claws. The most talkative of them
is a funny old Inuit guy called Barse,
whose workspace carries the dentist-
drill smell of burning bone. "I buy my
materials from hunters all over Green-
land,” he says, as Ólafur translates. “I
got this walrus tusk from a Japanese
guy up North, to make these polar
bears.”
He holds one of the finished bears
up to the sawed-off end of the tusk,
showing us the before-and-after. “I
also use polar bear claws,” he says. “I
had twenty, and I'm working on the last
two now. I have to finish them before
December 11.” He hands us various fin-
ished and in-progress objects to look
at, and gives out business cards with a
gummy grin. "You have Facebook?” he
asks, in rough English. "Follow me on
Facebook!"
Around the corner is a workshop
and store called Quiviut, specialising
in clothing made from musk ox wool.
The shelves contain expensive mittens,
socks, and decorative scarves that feel
cashmere-soft. "I buy the musk ox skins
in Greenland,” says Anita, the store’s
Danish owner, who pioneered the use
of this material, which was previously
burned by hunters who thought it use-
less. "They're cleaned and washed
here. But we don't have anywhere to
spin it into wool in Greenland, so I send
it to Denmark and Peru to get the wool
made.”
The tour winds up with a short
walk out into the hills, where most of
Sisimiut’s dogs are kept. The adults
are kept apart in pairs, each one hav-
ing a radius dictated by its chain. Some
of the mothers and their puppies run
free, bounding around our feet. As we
approach, dogs start to howl, and the
sound soon passes through this dog-
town, creating a chilling, discordant
symphony as hundreds of dogs join in.
At one point, a fight breaks out—a
large female picks up a puppy, shaking
it violently until its neck gives a sicken-
ing crack. She carries it off as we stand
watching, stunned. “I thought they were
just playing,” says Ólafur, shocked. “I’ve
“I took some tourists on a trip across the ice cap once, on the dog sled.
It took a month to cross it, and another month to come back.”
–Marius, dog-sled driver
Distance to Nuuk
1,434 km
Flights provided by AirIceland:
www.airiceland.is
Accommodation provided
by Visit Greenland:
www.greenland.com
Kept warm by 66º North’s
Jökla parka: www.66north.is
never seen that happen before.”
It’s a chilling reminder of the animal
nature of the pack.
Seeing stars
When we return to Nuuk the next
morning, the temperature has plunged
down to -25º C, and the city has gone
fully Christmas. Every building in town
seems to have sprouted an illuminated
orange star in its window, a cosy tra-
dition apparently passed down from
German missionaries hundreds of years
ago, and now considered not so much
a custom as a civic duty.
We spend our final day chatting to
locals and checking out museums. The
Nuuk Art Museum houses an excellent
collection of paintings, sculptures and
objects of interest, both contemporary
and historic, and the National Museum,
located in the well-preserved colonial
harbour area, offers a fascinating his-
tory of the Inuit people. The displays
start in pre-colonial times, explaining
the hunting culture, instinctive surviv-
alism, and other aspects of the Thule
culture (the indigenous people known
later as Eskimos and, today, Inuits). It
also explains the traditional Inuit spiri-
tual belief system, which centres on
mythology, shamanism, and maintain-
ing a respectful harmony with the natu-
ral world. I feel a pang of sadness that
this deeply rooted philosophy seems
confined to museums in modern, Dani-
fied Greenland.
Afterwards, we stop off for a chat
with Maliina Abelson—a former UN
representative for Greenland, on the In-
digenous Peoples’ Council, and current
head of the 2016 Arctic Winter Games.
“I’m quite sure that if you went to the
high school here and asked students
‘Do you consider yourself an indig-
enous person?’ they would say ‘No, I’m
just a Greenlander,’” Maliina explains.
“But I think what they fail to see is that
we’re also citizens with a relationship
to the rest of the world. The statement
‘We are an indigenous people’ is im-
portant to me. That’s what got us self-
governance. In 2009, we got the right
to manage our own natural resources—
the right to the soil. I got goosebumps
that day, but a lot of people said: ‘It’s
just soil.’ But for me, the land is a big
part of our identity.”
As the sun sets, we visit a Christmas
fair in a sports hall, meeting a boat-
man from Ilulissat at one of the stalls.
He carves ornamental fish that he sells
at craft fairs, and tells us about his
planned trip to Hafnafjörður next sum-
mer to sell his work at a Viking fair.
We leaf through photo books and
writings by various people who have,
over the years, become curious and
then infatuated with Greenland’s land-
scape and culture. I realise that, in the
space of just seven days, I’ve become
one of them.
A week in Greenland might sound
like a lot, but it serves as just a tanta-
lising glimpse of a wild, immersive and
fascinating country.