Greenland - Summary

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From an Unknown Place – to a Mission

Having grown up in Israel, my only knowledge about Greenland before moving to Denmark was always quite limited, to say the least. I knew there was a place called Greenland and I could almost certainly find it on the map. I probably had some vague idea about people living there in igloos, but not much more. One of the first things I have learnt after coming to Denmark was that it is one of the largest countries in Europe due to its colonization of Greenland - the largest island in the world. With time I’ve heard more and more stories of Greenland – of the summer’s midnight-sun and of the long and dark winter months. I have heard of the biggest national park in the world, of frozen fjords and of gigantic icebergs.
Those stories were often spiced up with charming anecdotes about the friendly and hospitable Greenlanders. Alongside those fascinating stories that lit my imagination I’ve also heard other stories – ones of a hard place and a society that is adjusting from being one of hunters to one based on our western model – a complex model where all those capable are expected to be a part of a system in the form of having functional jobs with more or less fixed conditions, timetables, salaries and so on. The Greenlandic society consisted, I was told, of people whose old values seem to have lost their validity in this new model and are now in the midst of a search after new ones. In the process, they had turned into an alcohol stricken society where phenomena as sex abuse and child molesting are widespread. Some of the stories I’ve heard sounded so far fetched that I began to believe that more than learning about Greenland, I was learning about people’s views, understandings and prejudgments of the Greenlandic society as a whole, and as I later on found out, also of Greenlanders as individuals.

In my years in Denmark I’ve experienced that Greenlanders are often prejudicially labeled as alcoholics with a low working moral. My impression was confirmed by a Greenlandic acquaintance in Denmark – a bright young university student who has told me how she used to get rude and offensive remarks concerning her origin from strangers in the street. More people than I would like to mention commented, my then future trip to Greenland, with reassuring phrases as “You would like it there – lots of beer”, or “Why would you choose Greenland? There is nothing there but alcoholics and sex diseases”. Other, more serious comments, were preparing me to life under hard conditions in a tough society were it would be hard to find the time and space to be myself. All that meant only one thing – I had a new goal in traveling to Greenland. More than just a goal I saw it as a mission- a mission to contest the common prejudice of Greenlanders in Denmark.

For the next five months – this is home

On the days before leaving to Greenland I walked around with butterflies in my stomach of anxiety, nervousness and most of all of fear. Never before have I visited a place, which I felt I knew so little of, for such a long period of time. I was about to work with small children for five months in a small society, which as far as I knew could operate by a totally indecipherable code of behavior, just as well as it could be identical to what I knew from home. On the plane from Copenhagen I sat next to a Dane who has been living in Greenland for over twenty years and was kind enough to explain me that “You don’t have to be totally crazy to move to Greenland, but it does help.” That’s where my fears evaporated and made room for sheer panic.

My destination in Greenland was a small town of 1500 inhabitants, where I only knew one person, who typically enough flew to Denmark for a couple of weeks on the day of my arrival. The first thing I’ve noticed in Greenland, already from the air, was as expected the beautiful nature - Nature that still takes my breath away every single morning. Today I know that at times, it was this marvelous scenery that helped me pull through difficulties. The ocean, the beautiful mountains and the magnificent icebergs are overwhelming. I know of no better way to lift one’s soul than to go for a walk about town. After nearly five months I still cannot avoid noticing this amazing nature whenever I step out the door.

Thanks to my job here as a kindergarten teacher I met a great deal of people already on my first week. Actually, I met so many people in such a short time, that I could hardly keep track of who was who. Not to mention remembering names – I still have difficulties with that. Numerous colleagues, twenty-nine small children, their parents and families, classmates at the Greenlandic language class and my neighbors at the student’s residence – so many new faces, I thought I just couldn’t get more confused. But not to worry, for with time, I did. In such a small place, once you know so many people, they seem to be everywhere – the parent of a girl in the kindergarten is sitting at the cashier in the supermarket. A colleague’s husband works in the post office. The fisherman from the dock is family with my boss and married to the one from class and so on and so on. Pretty quickly I forgot whom I knew from where. On the other hand – it seemed that everybody, including people I have never exchanged a word with, knew who I was, where I came from and why. In such a small place I stick out like a sore thumb - with all the benefits and drawbacks it embraces.

First impression – I am charmed

It did not take me long to see that the famous Greenlandic hospitality lives up to its reputation. There was a case where my boss could not understand how come I never came over to meet the family or just for coffee. The fact that I was never invited seemed completely irrelevant. Here one does not need invitations, arrangements or reasons – If people are home, chances are you will be welcomed with a smile. And if they are not – then run back home, they might be on their way over to you!

Another example is the cozy Greenlandic custom of “Kaffemik”. Kaffemik is a sort of party I would call an “open house party”. On occasion – birthdays, anniversaries, a day off work or any other positive turn of luck, people have a Kaffemik. They serve coffee and tea, cakes, cookies and puddings of different sorts, and their friends walk in and out the door all day long like it was a train station. I have been to a few Kaffemiks celebrating children’s birthdays – The fact that some parents hadn’t even known me yet and others could not speak Danish was of no importance. I was always welcome to join them at the table together with other friends and family. At times the house was almost empty, at others there were not enough chairs for all the guests. People dropped in, said hi and congratulated, grabbed a quick bite and some coffee and went on with their businesses. Have I already mentioned cozy?

Going out on the town is an experience that can hardly be described in words. It is as if the concept of spending quiet relaxing evenings at the pub has not arrived here yet. When people go out here, they paint the town so red, it could be mistaken for Moscow. No one ever counts who bought how many beers for whom. More than once I ended up drinking beers paid for by strangers as well as buying beers for people I have never seen before. When going drinking here in town, alone or with friends, there is only a single assurance one can rely on – The danger of staying bored or sober for long will never arise.

One does not have to pay visits, wait for birthdays or go drinking to experience the Greenlandic friendliness. People greet each other in the street, invite each other home as soon as they coincidently meet in the street and do their outmost to find things to celebrate – anything from a grand aunt’s birthday to the fact two people are of the same age can be used as magnificent reasons for celebration.

 

 All is not what it seems

With time more and more things that I have overseen in the beginning started to surface and the romantic picture of Greenland I had desperately tried to hold on to started cracking. Once it started doing that, it almost shattered to pieces.

I have heard of numerous suicide cases. I was personally in touch with a single case of child abuse and worked in the proximity of countless more. I have seen children being picked up to go home from the kindergarten by their parents just to show up again by themselves only fifteen minutes later asking to come back. On children’s faces I have seen the dry evidence of domestic violence. Their behavior at times was a testimony of violence of a less physical nature which they were subjected to. I have seen parents using time and money on gambling and drinking and then heard them claiming they were too busy to wash the children’s clothes and too poor to buy them new. I have seen parents not knowing where their little children were spending the night while they were busy drinking. I have regularly witnessed perfect couples turn into cat and dog after only a few beers at the pub. Just as regularly as I have experienced drunk women hitting on strange men as soon as their boyfriends or husbands as much as went to the toilet. The number of people that I know and have not seen drunk is insignificant in comparison to that of those I have seen in embarrassing states of drunkenness which I can’t wait to forget.

Why is that? How come a nation that has never been at war, always lived in perfect harmony with nature and has only been nonviolently colonized by another relatively peaceful nation functions so badly? Those and more are questions that have been bothering me for quite some time now. Thoughts and ideas have come to mind – It’s now time to organize them on paper.

Old society and hard conditions

In old times the Greenlandic society was one of hunters. They were nomads who traveled paths determined by polar bears and birds, seals and whales, ice and water. They’ve survived purely of what they could catch. From whales’, seals’ and bears’ meat, bones, skin, blubber and fur they made food, dog-sledges, clothes, lamps, tents, whips and more. Once they made a catch they shared it, more often than not first with the dogs and only then with each other. After enjoying a catch they simply stayed hungry until their next lucky break. It was a hard existence that made society strong due to mutual dependence, but also had some horrifying consequences. Orphans who could not take care of themselves were left on the ice to die. Men going away for weeks of hunting chose women as travel companions to help with the journey. Those temporary couples existed independently from any marital relationship, which either one of them might have been a part of. To this day Greenlandic children’s stories are at large about old widows who are left out of society, children disappearing on the ice and kidnapped by ghosts, giants who roam the hills and orphans being abused by kids as well as by adults.

Labor market in Greenland

Setting up a western model of labor market in Greenland proved to be a more complicated task than expected. It was a step that included setting up and introducing the local population to new sets of rules, demands, status symbols and social dividing lines. Such transformation in the most basic aspects of life could not take place without generating a fundamental adaptation in people’s perception of their lives and their world. Operating by purely economical considerations, a plan was carried out to shut down small villages that could not support themselves economically. That forced hundreds of hunters and fishermen into the relatively large modernizing cities, in the process destroying the lives of the many who could not adjust.

For ages Greenlanders held on to their culture and beliefs by mediating values and norms through storytelling and by orally passing life wisdom from one generation to another. Today the rules of life are determined by global market economy and international corporations and organizations. The experiences and wisdom of older generations are aging quickly and of diminishing relevance in this new, emerging society. In a complex modern society, as the one that Greenlanders are striving to achieve, a man’s job plays a leading role in defining one’s identity and usefulness to society. That is opposed to the old hunter-society where an individual’s importance was measured by one’s skills at hunting and ability to feed one’s family. Commitments were then only made to one’s closest and were all about survival. They were obvious and unquestionable duties.

Modern western societies run on the other hand mostly by the power of the written word. But in a society where the value of the written word is of little acknowledged significance and the idea of being of value to others through one’s job is only very slowly gaining ground, employers constantly have to deal with workers who neither seem to comprehend the full meaning of their contracts nor the importance of living up to them. This is unfortunately a regular phenomenon, which is an obstacle in the way of commercial and functional efficiency for businesses as well as for public services. It is as if people do not consider the abstract written message as valid as they do the more concrete newly born and expressed thought. The following is one example out of dozens I have witnessed in my short stay here.

Twice a month, when salary comes in, the town is virtually on fire. For a lot of people payday is drinking day, and when falling on a weekend it can get to violent extremes. By the end of such a weekend quite a few are regularly out of money for the rest of the month, while others are already sunken in debts. Not showing up to work due to a sudden case of hangover is neither uncommon nor unacceptable. Children show up at school restless as a result of a sugar shock they are in after a weekend of candy they bought with the money they got from their parents. In the kindergarten we are only too used to parents who fail to pick up their children in paydays’ afternoons as well as to high absence on the days following paydays. I am happy to say though that this phenomenon is now slowly fading thanks to a fairly aggressive campaign from the social authorities in town.

The combination of such a payday weekend and the in advance relaxed approach to the labor market caused recently a local factory to lose hundreds of thousands of Danish Crowns. Ten tons supply of fresh seafood that had to be packed straight away arrived on a Saturday the first of a month. Not a single worker showed up at the factory, and ten tons of perfectly fine and all paid-for seafood were taken directly from the dock to the local dump. However, this kind of incident is not likely to happen here again – That was a deadly punch to the factory, which is now closing down and moving elsewhere. The queue at the unemployment office is now about fifty people longer. This is a disastrous blow to such a small town.

The situation of the labor market here is far from promising, but I would not go as far as to call it completely hopeless. I know quite a few who have no problem holding on to their hard and demanding jobs, and like them I’m sure there are many others. Here and there an odd believer tries to start a new business or invests in education elsewhere in order to come back as an inventor. Quite a few even manage to combine the old way of life with modern expectations – I have met numerous couples where the men are full-time hunters and the women have what, in modern western societies, would be considered as conventional jobs in order to keep the house and pay the bills.

 

Danish welfare and education

It can be discussed if the Danish welfare system, which as good as copied itself to Greenland, is suitable for the Greenlandic mentality. After all, it was originally planned for a society characterized by a fairly different lifestyle than the Greenlandic. Yet, with capitalism becoming one of the strongest and most influential man-made forces, and with the unavoidable introduction of market economy in Greenland, giving the elderly, the disabled, the unemployed and other marginalized groups an economical and social ability to lead a respectable and worthy life is by no doubt a noble idea which I support full heartedly. However, for a lot of borderline cases it is hardly an incentive to hold on to a steady job. And in a society where the term “steady job” is still moderately new and of vague meaning, the borderline is quite thick and for too many it is all too easy to choose the easy way out and receive money from the state. Since the option of almost as easily not being a part of the labor power has always been there, being a part of it has to many people never become relevant.

Launching a system of elementary schools in Greenland proved to be no simpler than introducing the labor market. Offering worthwhile education has been and still is an ongoing challenge. Only in recent years can we see Greenlandic teachers take their natural place in the teachers’ room, and soon as much as half of the teachers in Greenland might actually be Greenlandic. The majority of teachers today though still consists largely of Danes who cannot speak Greenlandic or speak it poorly. Even though the demands are that the students become bilingual during their studies, there is no sign of anyone taking it seriously. I can’t even imagine what it must be like having to study the most hated subjects in school in a language one does not even understand. I wonder how motivating it can be. To top it all, the lack of teachers is such, that any certified teacher who applies for a job here is practically guaranteed to be hired.

This combination of the very mixed Greenlandic-Danish society and a slack school system, which is largely based on a foreign language, backfires when society ends up being consisted of young people who can only speak Greenlandic and therefore do not have a promising future in terms of further education; others who can only speak Danish and get alienated from there own society, and yet others who grow up speaking both languages, never fully mastering either of them.

To make life easier for the young Greenlandic students, the Danish education system has lowered its demands for those who want to study in universities in Denmark. Did I say make life easier? I wonder how easy it would be for a Greenlander who hardly passed his exams in a poor education system to all of a sudden live up to expectations, which are calculated by Danish standards to students who passed their much more difficult exams with flying colours?

Whale tusk on the wall. Seven-Eleven in the background?

One of Greenland’s most important cultural treasures is a series of books called “Myths and folk stories from Greenland”^* by Knud Rasmussen. Rasmussen was an anthropologist of Danish-Greenlandic origin who studied the nature, people, history and culture in large parts of the Arctic, and has won what can only be described the status of national hero in Greenland. This anthology of folk stories is only one of Rasmussen’s many works. Its importance consists in it being the only written source of Greenlandic legends and folk stories. This great cultural treasure though is of no use for most Greenlanders since it is written in Danish, and an equivalent in Greenlandic does not exist. The oral passing of traditional folk stories is vanishing and there is no written form taking its place.

If to judge by the looks of most Greenlandic homes I have visited – There is nothing closer to the Greenlanders’ heart than the local tradition and Greenland itself – Maps of Greenland, images of hunters, decorations made of bones and fur of seal or bear and narwhal tusk, next to drawings of women in traditional outfits – those are just a few of the typical decorations that appear in most Greenlandic homes. Then of course, just like in any other modern living room - there is a TV set.

We we have two fixed channels to choose from here – The Greenlandic channel shows programs and news from Danmarks-Radio, the Danish public broadcasting service, along with a daily half hour news broadcast in Greenlandic and the rare original Greenlandic production – usually in the form of children’s programs or local sports events. Alongside it there is the somewhat more popular Danish commercial TV station, which shows all the American series that one would expect to see on such a channel, naturally including commercials from Denmark. Just like the rest of us, Greenlanders too get brainwashed with commercials. But there is a difference though– A considerable share of the advertisements Greenlandic viewers are exposed to is simply not relevant to them. Thousands of Greenlanders are exposed daily to a bombardment of loud colorful catchy clips of happy people in clean houses promoting fast food chains, super-markets, cars, banks and other products and services which simply do not exist here.

Frustrations are let out and new ones are created

As the case often is with societies in rapid process of transformation, it’s never cost-free, and the price is not only economical. It is first of all in the form of human souls. I see how people here, who are living under the circumstances of fast changing values and norms, try desperately to hold on to the old, yet slowly vanishing elements of life. This is a place where the only certainty is the unknown. Frustrations and hopelessness are expressed here, as they do in many other places, in forms of alcoholism, drug abuse and violent behavior. Many feel they are being pushed so far that they commit suicide. The phenomenon of young Greenlanders who take their own lives is of scary proportions. Nevertheless it seems to be a taboo in the media and the authorities are helpless. If they are helpless due to lacking resources or lacking initiative is a current debate in the Greenlandic society. Suicide cases are much like the weather in Greenland – Everyone is talking about it, but nobody is doing anything to change it.

Cases of child abuse do not fail to keep the social authorities busy. Even though the Greenlandic law is focused around the benefit of the child, more than the Danish law which takes parents’ rights more into consideration, the number of cases is so high, that the authorities remove children from their parents only in the most extreme cases. This is a part of life for so many people here, that I can’t even remember how many women told me how they were molested as children, by whom, how they felt about it then and how they live with it today. At first it shook me. With time I learned not to put on the sad sympathetic expression each time the subject came up, and I found out that I could feel free to ask and show interest. As a social worker here said – It is always a tragedy when a child is been sexually assaulted, but it was his opinion that it is less of a tragedy in Greenland than in other places. And he elaborated - Shame plays a much smaller part in Greenland than it does other places. So many Greenlanders have been molested as children, that family members, work colleagues, neighbors and others are always each other’s potential “support group”. Whereas in other western countries many children feel they have to live in shame and are afraid to talk about the terrible experience even with their dearest. Whatever the assault does not destroy in the soul of a child, the continuous burden of shame does. I have to admit that even though I feel uneasy allowing myself to believe in this pocket philosophy, I do think it makes a sort of sad sense.

Administration problems

The forces of nature are among other things the reason why the approximately fifty six thousand Greenlanders are scarcely spread in remote isolated communities on this enormous island. An island where the distance between its two farthest points is equal the distance from Copenhagen to the north of the Sahara Desert and its widest stretch is as far as from Copenhagen to North Italy. Yet, since 82 percent of it is covered by ice all year round, only an area the size of Sweden is left inhabitable. In this vast area, the longest road is of seventy kilometers and some of the towns are of no more than fifty inhabitants. Many are much smaller. Founding an infrastructure that would support services to such small and remote communities is not only very expensive, but nears a strategic impossibility. In the relatively large town where I am now, it seems like the one half of the population is administering the other.

Generally speaking, Greenlanders are politically split between those who support immediate independence from Denmark under advantageous conditions, which would mean receiving Danish economical help, and those who prefer waiting with the total independence till better times, where Greenland has the human and economical resources to administrate itself. Greenland’s very first period of national independence is yet to come. Central governing was namely unknown here before foreigners took over. For centuries Greenlanders have lived under the rule of foreign colonizing powers as Iceland, Norway and Denmark. Not before May 1979 was Greenland granted its own home rule by the Danish parliament. This short history of independent domestic politics and the lack of political traditions make the way towards a brighter future for this young autonomy somewhat bumpier.

 

Is this Greenland?

This is not a scientific research report. This is simply my impression of the little I have read and the plenty I have experienced in this short stay of five months in a town in Southern Greenland. The way things here fit the stories I once thought were prejudice, could easily get me to believe that they were all true if it had not been for a remark I have heard repeatedly from Danes and Greenlanders as one; from locals and from outsiders in town. Without exception they all agreed that this town is home to one of the harshest communities in all of Greenland. A man who grew up here and had moved out called this childhood home of his “The slums of Greenland”.

The only real sources of income to the town are the hotels, which are as good as full in the summer months. Yet, this is far from enough to keep the town going, and Danish as well as Greenlandic taxpayers are the lifeline of this place. Even the biggest optimists would not go as far as to call the future here potentially positive. I have been told that the situation is very different in other parts of Greenland. Unfortunately I’m only going to travel around for five weeks, spending very limited time at a handful of tourist destinations. That would hardly give me the opportunity to get a proper impression of the society there and to study it more thoroughly.

 

What next?

Soon I will be back in Denmark. Greenland will most likely be a finished chapter in my life and would feel like a far away dream. I will probably face the same remarks as I did before coming here, things like – “Wasn’t it just for you? Lots of beer?” or “How could you lead a life there between all those drunks?” I can already see it coming. My mission in coming here was to challenge those prejudicial viewpoints. I am afraid the last five months confirmed what I refused to believe was true. For today, I cannot prove the prejudice wrong, but I can on the other hand see it not as a single hard fact, but more as a phenomenon that like everything else has a cause, a reason and appears in varying extents. I love the Greenlandic people for their hospitality, openness, simple approach to life and their love of life. I understand the expressions of a collective inferiority complex, helplessness and hopelessness – though I do not always agree with them or even accept them. The raging alcoholism and the high occurrence of domestic violence have to be dealt with as the serious problems that they are. On the other hand we must not forget that they are to a high extent a manifestation of existential dilemmas. It is my opinion that it is in the true and sincere effort to solve these underlying dilemmas one can find the real and long lasting solution to the surfacing problems.

As for me - I am happy I have had the chance to see deeper beneath the surface. I have met wonderful people and lived in a reality that has brutally confronted me with my own truths and perception of life. I came here with a handful of unanswered questions and I am leaving with dozens. I was lucky to get the chance to see past the prejudice and meet the people beyond the extensive alcoholism, drug abuse and violence. What I saw were people who try to lead a simple existence, to figure out where everything they used to know has disappeared and wonder which direction the future is coming from.

Don’t we all sometimes wonder the same?