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Northern Lights

Inuit Teens Make Their Own Scenes

By Eva-marie Rødbro

PHOTOS BY EVA-MARIE RØDBRO

Photographer Eva-Marie Rødbro, it would seem at first glance, is a bona fide lover of misery. Fresh off an assignment documenting young girls working as prostitutes in the Czech Republic, she returned to her native Denmark eager to investigate the suicide epidemic plaguing teenage Inuits in the last Danish colony, Greenland (a problem we covered in our Global Sadness Report in January). Not long after she set foot on the frozen soil of each of the two major cities—Aasiaat, up north, and Nuuk, the capital, in the south—Eva-Marie was beset by groups of super-duper-intense Eskimo kids. Intense not for their despair, but for their love of smiling, partying, hugging, giving and receiving high fives, making out, dancing… and just generally good-timing their cold little asses off. Greenland, it turns out, is the personification of the get-busy-living-or-get-busy-dying maxim. Either you’re killing yourself by walking off across the frozen sea into oblivion or you’re spending every waking hour jamming the fuck out with your best friends. There is no in between. So which would you prefer?