THE LYUBOV ORLOVA—We are in Greenland, motoring through battalions of icebergs off the west coast. In the collision of light, rock, ice, water and sky, it is the most beautiful landscape I have ever seen. The small town of Ummannaq, for example, sits under what can only be described as a heart-shaped mountain, and when you first hear that description you think it must be nonsense—how can a mountain be heart-shaped—but it is true.  And that is what ummannaq means. A heart made of pink granite and beneath it, perched on its lower slopes, a Legotown, it seems, tall handsome wooden houses painted deep red and mustard and green and a rich blue, windows trimmed in white, perched on the rocks, many accessible only by sturdy wooden staircases.

The first thing you think when you see this bright, warm town in Greenland is how shameful it has been of the Canadian government, how thoughtless and oh, I don’t know, southern, in the 1950s and 60s and ever since, to have the ugliest, cheapest building materials and the greyest and brownest of paints possible sent north for the construction of indifferently designed, too strong a word, dwellings and public buildings. The second thing you realize, or must be told, is that the interaction between Inuit and European cultures in Greenland began more than 300 years ago and that the nature of that relationship is very different than that of the Canadian south and the Canadian north. Although only its fringes are occupied, the strategic importance of Greenland has commanded respect.

So the infrastructure in Greenland is impressive. The towns look attractive and prosperous. But not far beneath the surface, there are fissures, the same challenges faced in Inuit communities but probably more endemic, because of the proximity to Europe and the long period of interaction. In Aasiaat, we picked up a young teacher hitchhiking home to Ilulissat. Carl Otto Iversen is a fine-looking young Greenlander, married with two children, who has a birth defect that makes him completely deaf in one ear. He has been waiting more than ten years for surgery; the doctors are still flying doctors in Greenland; they come infrequently from Denmark and do a few weeks of surgery at a time. Carl Otto does not believe that Greenland is ready for Home Rule, which is a long-time aspiration of many Greenlanders. At first he simply says Greenland cannot survive without  the money. But later he talks about how difficult it is to be a teacher, because he has no time to teach. He is too busy dealing with children of broken families, children battered by alcoholism, drug and sexual abuse.

I mentioned Aaju Peter previously, when I imagined that Aaju and I could easily have a conversation. Not so, until we leave Greenland, because it is Aaju who makes our visit to Greenland more than just a tourist moment. She was born in a northern Greenland community and lived up and down the west coast, because her father was a teacher and preacher. In 1981 Aaju moved to Iqaluit, where she now resides. She reads and speaks many languages, is a graduate of Akitsiraq Law School, and designs stunning sealskin garments. She is a performer, translator, volunteer, and she collects traditional law from elders for the Department of Justice. And she has five children.

Aaju is also extraordinarily beautiful—small,  graceful, with thick shiny black hair and intensely bright eyes. She wears her sealskin dresses and leggings under a belted acid-green poncho and uses a rifle and a guitar with equal ease.  She is fiercely political and never hesitates to articulate her vision for Nunavut.

But we are in Greenland. Aaju is first ashore in the little towns, and makes things happen with the local people. She teaches the passengers a Greenlandic song so we can sing in an old stone church to the Greenlanders, who sing a lot, in harmony. She searches out country food—raw, frozen Arctic char, narwhal, fresh seal and caribou—brings it onboard, chops it up with her elegant little carved knife, an ulu, and offers it to us.

In Aasiat, she has arranged for a soccer game between the Walrus Arctic Expedition and the elders.

More on that another day.

Across from Ummannaq is Qilakitsoq, the cliff where 500-year-old Thule mummies were found by a couple of Greenlanders in 1972. There were eight bodies, including several children, in two graves and they were stacked on top of one another on a ledge under a sheltering overhang, carefully wrapped in skins. Mass burials are unusual, and they may have suffered a catastrophe. To see the spot where they were found (the mummies themselves have been moved to Nuuk) you climb from a gravel beach at the base of an amphitheatre of stone up along a ridge (past a birch forest, the trees only six inches tall, and their tiny perfect leaves in brilliant fall foliage)  and down again into a narrow valley.

This is the first time that Jason Kunnuk has been to this site. He tells me that as he approached the place where the graves had been, he felt great emotion welling up inside him. He wanted to cry. His arms and legs were shaking. When he returned to the amphitheatre, he made an offering, a tunilaq, to the people who had died there, to their souls. He took a scrap of Arctic char skin (Aaju was preparing country food on a mound of tussock in the centre of the village site, and Clarke was playing a drum) and threw it over his right shoulder.

Tags: Walrus Arctic Expedition

More in Walrus Arctic Expedition | Email Marian Botsford Fraser <-->| Blogs Home | Current Issue | SUBSCRIBE »

Posted on Sunday, September 21st, 2008 at 8:18 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.