Travel

Sittin' On Top Of The World!

Life, Death, and Narwhal Tail: A Greenland Scene Report

By Camilla Stephan

PHOTOS AND TEXT BY CAMILLA STEPHAN

y grandmother Arnaluak was born in Greenland in 1933. She grew up in a small arctic Eskimo society with her mom, stepdad, and three older brothers. They lived in houses made of stones and soil, and hunted seals and polar bears for food and clothing. There was no such thing as running water or electricity.

As a young girl she met a Danish man who was employed at the international weather station near her village. Despite his employer’s laws against mingling with the locals and their vastly different cultural backgrounds, the two of them fell in love. At just 16 years of age, she boarded a small vessel heading for Denmark with him. About 50 rough days at sea later they arrived ashore to discover she was pregnant.

Despite my gran not being able to speak Danish, the two of them decided to settle there, get married, and raise my mother. A couple of decades later came a little bundle of joy known as “me.” While I grew up in Denmark, my grandmother’s three brothers stayed in Greenland and established their own families there.

At the end of last year I went back to Qaanaaq, Greenland, to visit them all and find out a bit more about my roots. I discovered a few important things during the trip, but chief among them was that a) it’s fucking freezing in Greenland, b) they eat some gross stuff, and c) I love my family.

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The day I got to Greenland, I hung out with some of my relatives, including Alika and Marianna Og Genoveva Petersen. Here they are outside a party where the main meal served was something called “little auk.” In order to prepare this treat, they kill some auks (a cute swimming bird native to the island), bury them in the soil, and leave them there for about six months. Then they dig them up and eat them raw. It tastes like really, really strong blue cheese. In this photo they’re offering me some more, but I had to turn it down. It’s nasty!

On my second day in Greenland, I went to Karen’s kid’s birthday party. She’s three years old and this photo shows the highlight of the day. Everybody is eating raw seal and preserved narwhal tail off the kitchen floor, cutting chunks of the flesh away with knives and chowing down with their bare hands, covered in gore. It’s quite a sight. They eat the meat off the floor because it’s easier than putting the carcass of the seal or the tail on the table. Narwhal tails are absolutely gigantic and have been known to snap kitchen tables into splinters.

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Irene Danielsen lives at her grandparents’ house because her mother gave birth to her at a very young age and couldn’t take care of her. Her mother now lives in another little town, called Siorapaluk, with three kids and her husband. I hung out with her for a day and she was a lot of fun.

All the trash from Qaanaaq ends up outside the village at a place creatively known as the Dump. Everything from cars to plastic containers to soda cans to kitchen garbage to dead dogs is thrown away here. A lot of people have dogs but they don’t treat them like pets. They’re more like slaves. There definitely isn’t the same sentimentality for a dog’s life here as there is in Europe or America. Sometimes you’ll see a whole pack of dead dogs lying at the Dump for weeks, slowly decomposing until somebody sets fire to the trash and it all goes up in black smoke.

After the party, birthday girl Maja Petersen took a nap in her parents’ bed. Eating raw seal flesh with your bare hands off the floor can really tucker you out.

In the winter, the temperature in Qaanaaq goes down to -40º Celsius and there’s so much snow that vehicles often get totally stranded. In the summertime all the snow melts and temperatures soar up to 12º.

I came across this frozen blood while walking to the hospital to see my dead uncle Jakob. I think it was from either a seal or a reindeer.

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This guy looks like he’s working at a meat-processing factory but he actually just got married and this is his wedding feast. This is pretty much one of the main reasons for my trip. His name is Ole Peter Nielsen and he’s wearing the traditional Greenlandic wedding outfit, complete with white anorak, pants made of polar bear fur, and sealskin boots. Pants like this are hard to come by. Polar bears are extremely dangerous and if you meet one you have to shoot it before it kills you. Here, Ole is eating raw reindeer flavored with Knorr seasoning. The day after this photo was taken, his wife’s grandfather, my uncle Jakob, died.

Before we left Jakob’s wife, Miviskuk, alone with her dead husband, she asked me to take a photo of them together.

My uncle was taken to the hospital because he had problems breathing. He was my grandmother’s older brother. I got to the hospital a short time after he died, and found him lying in a small room, still wearing his sealskin boots. He was surrounded by his whole family and everybody was crying a lot. As soon as I entered the room I started to cry as well. Even though I didn’t know him well it was still really sad.

A few days later they held the funeral. The churchyard was situated a little bit away from the village and we traveled there on foot behind the coffin. The dead man’s grandson carried the cross and placed it on the grave.

Due to the frozen soil, the grave could only be dug by a jackhammer. Four men covered the coffin with soil and a small bunch of colorful plastic flowers was placed on top. Real flowers would die almost instantly in the intense cold of the Greenlandic air.

By Camilla Stephan 5 years ago More from this issue Like · Comment · Share Tags: Camilla Stephan, Sittin', on, Top, of, The, World!, life, death, and, Narwal, Tail, A, Greeland, scene, report