Sixty Degrees North

by Malachy Tallack

  The crucial difference between these two attitudes has nothing to do with towns and streets though, it has to do with fields and furrows. For ours is, at its root, an agricultural society, and has been for thousands of years. The Inuit, in contrast, have a hunting society. Land ownership and land division are fundamental to agriculture. Our ground is claimed, marked out and used; it is changed and dominated. We impose ourselves upon it, and we alter it to suit our will. For a hunting culture, the ownership of land simply does not make sense. Land is part of the space they inhabit, like air and water and ice; its ownership, in the private sense, is meaningless. A hunter may have rights of use in a particular area, but he no more owns the land than he owns the animals that live upon it.

  The relationship is better described as one of belonging. The Greenlandic politician, Aqqaluk Lynge, has explained that ‘we live there, together, therefore the land belongs to us, all of us’. But this is a reciprocal belonging: the land belongs to us, and we to it. And there, I think, is the essential disparity between the agricultural and the hunting view. The hunter sees himself as part of a natural order; he adapts to his landscape, and he accepts his place within that landscape. His aim, in Barry Lopez’s words, is ‘to achieve congruence with a reality that is already given’. Whereas, in our own culture, ‘We hold in higher regard the land’s tractability, its alterability’. The farmer, for the most part, does not adapt to his landscape, he adapts the landscape to suit his own needs. Nature is tamed, fenced off and altered. This is the attitude of the coloniser. It is the attitude with which the Norse arrived 1,000 years ago, and it is the attitude with which they died 500 years later. The Inuit have always been at home in Greenland, in a way that Europeans have never quite learned to be. They moulded their way of life around the challenges and the opportunities that the place provided. They wedded themselves to the place.

  The conflict between the Inuit attitude to the land and that of Europeans is instructive, and it has significant consequences in terms of land rights, and particularly mineral rights, which Greenland currently shares with Denmark. There are a growing number of foreign companies eager to dig things out of Greenlandic ground, and the social and economic future of the country may well depend on how it chooses to deal with this situation. The trade in northern treasure, which began with the furs and narwhal tusks of the Vikings, is now more important than ever. The south still wants what the north can provide. Today, though, that treasure comes from the earth; graphite, rare metals and gold are already being mined, and there is pressure on the country to relax its ban on the extraction of uranium. The oil industry too is coming.

  Many see this as an ideal solution to Greenland’s economic uncertainties; it is a guaranteed income, with employment opportunities into the bargain. Others, though, are not so sure. Sheila Watt-Cloutier, a Canadian former president of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, has called mining ‘the easy way out’. She has warned that ‘It could run counter to everything we are trying to recover in our culture. We need to step back and ask ourselves what kind of society we are hoping to create here. Will we lose awareness of how sacred the land is, and our connection to it? … Do we want to lose the wise culture we have relied on for generations?’

  Land use is far from the only arena in which fundamental cultural differences have been fought out here in Greenland. As I wandered down by the harbour, old men sat outside the little shack that served as meat and fish market, smoking, laughing and talking. Some held their walking sticks in front of them, palms clasped around the handles, quietly watching the afternoon pass by. Others leaned in close towards each other, their stories told in whispers. In Qaqortoq I had seen this too, a gathering of people near the water, as if this place, where seals and fish were brought to be cut up and sold, were the social hub of the town. I imagined the men had once been hunters themselves, and now the closest they could get was to come and watch the day’s catch being brought in. But the stories they were telling would connect them to those who today were wielding knives. Those stories, and the memory they contained, would connect them too to their fathers and their grandfathers, whose own knives carved into the meat, the seals, taken from the ice. These men were witnesses to a silent inheritance, a deep flash of blade and blood.

  Hunting in Greenland is an issue of identity and an issue of culture. It is also an issue of very serious controversy. In particular, the killing of sea mammals – seals and whales – has for decades attracted criticism from outside. In the 1970s, following the global backlash against the killing of seal pups in Canada, Greenland’s seal fur industry collapsed. The livelihood of the country’s hunters was severely threatened, and so Greenland’s Home Rule government stepped in to offer a solution. It nationalised the fur company, Great Greenland, and began offering a guaranteed price to hunters for every skin. It was a bold decision which, ultimately, was nothing to do with economics and everything to do with tradition. Today, while hunting is not a particularly rewarding career choice from a financial perspective, it does still remain a choice.

  There is a belief among many Greenlanders that their traditional way of life – a way of life that entirely underpins their sense of identity – is under constant threat from the ignorant views of people from outside their country. A kind of moral imperialism is suspected – the imposition of alien values onto a people for whom those values do not make sense. Individuals such as Finn Lynge, a politician who in 1985 negotiated Greenland’s tactical exit from the European Community, have worked hard to convince the world that the traditional Inuit culture is entirely compatible with environmental sustainability. Others have argued that the increasing European and American focus on ‘animal rights’, is born not from an increased empathy and understanding for the natural world but entirely the opposite. The Canadian activist Alan Herscovici has written that ‘the animal-rights philosophy [is] widening rather than healing the rift between man and nature … [it] may be more of a symptom of our disease than a cure.’

  Lynge would agree. For him, the focus on individual animals’ rights demonstrates a failure to understand nature, or to recognise our own place within it. What the Inuit see in the European and American attitudes to Arctic hunting is the gaping distance between our people and our environment. They see a hypocritical culture that frets and recoils over the deaths of individual animals elsewhere in the world, yet which engages in industrial farming, ‘pest-control’ on an immense scale, widespread polluting and the devastating destruction of natural habitats. As individuals, we consciously distance ourselves from killing, we close our eyes to it, yet our culture is, in general, ‘characterized by its propensity for cruelty and death’, as Lynge has it. And our distaste for hunting is a very recent development.

  As a teenager I knew men who had been whalers. Shetland has always had a strong connection with that industry. As Herman Melville noted in Moby Dick, ‘the Greenland whalers sailing out of Hull or London, put in at the Shetland Islands, to receive the full complement of their crew. Upon the passage homewards, they drop them there again. How it is, there is no telling, but Islanders seem to make the best whalemen.’

  From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, thousands of Shetland men sailed west to Greenland, leaving wives and mothers to look after the crofts in the islands. They would return months later with more money than could ever be earned at home. By the twentieth century, though, the industry had moved to the south Atlantic, based around the island of South Georgia. Again, many Shetlanders travelled the length of the ocean to work, to kill whales. I would listen to the stories these men told – men not much older than my father – and I could barely believe that they could have lived such a life, that these things could have taken place so recently. It seemed incredible, like another world, so quickly have we distanced ourselves from whale hunting.

  It is easy to understand why the Inuit see hypocrisy in the European attitude to whaling. Britain and others led an intense industrial assault on the whale for centuries, an assault that ended on
ly in the 1960s, when that industry ceased to be profitable. And today, the pollutants we pump into the air and sea are far more of a threat to Arctic wildlife than the hunters who live there. So the moral high-ground, from which we lecture on the evils of killing sea mammals, seems at least a little shaky. For if these animals are now endangered – and some species certainly are – the blame lies not with the Inuit but at our own door.

  It would be a mistake, though, to dismiss concerns about hunting entirely. Wildlife in the Arctic is vulnerable, and the needless killing of animals and birds in Greenland has been well documented, both historically and in the present day. Today, some claim, hunting regulations are routinely flouted and rarely enforced, and populations of some bird species, such as Brünnich’s guillemots and eider ducks, are well below sustainable levels. Lynge and others have been accused of misrepresenting the truth, and of propagating ‘the myth of the sustainable Inuit’.

  It is commonly agreed, however, even among groups such as Greenpeace, who led the anti-sealing campaigns of the 1970s, that Greenland’s seal hunt is not damaging the animals’ population. Numbers of the four main species – ringed, bearded, harp and hooded seals – are stable or rising, and there is little prospect of increased demand for fur threatening this balance. Watching the hunters arrive at the market each afternoon, seeing them carefully slice and distribute the meat, I was glad that this was so, glad it could continue.

  One evening over dinner, a young Greenlandic couple who had invited me to their home, asked whether we had seals in Shetland. When I replied that we had many but that islanders had never really eaten them, they seemed confused.

  ‘Why wouldn’t you eat them?’ the woman enquired.

  I did not have a good answer. I thought, perhaps, that an abundance of fish might have made seal meat superfluous in the past, but that didn’t seem very plausible. I wondered also whether superstition might have played a part. Stories of selkie folk – seal people – were widespread in Shetland as they were elsewhere in northern Scotland, and perhaps this notion that seals were somehow too human to be eaten, that they might have souls, was the real problem. I wasn’t sure, and I am still not sure. The young woman seemed dissatisfied with my answer, and I was not surprised. The idea that a seal might have a soul did not seem, to her, a good reason for it not to be eaten.

  A shaman once explained to the explorer and anthropologist Knud Rasmussen that ‘the greatest peril lies in the fact that to kill and eat, all that we strike down and destroy … have souls as we have, souls that do not perish with the body, and therefore must be propitiated lest they revenge themselves.’ For the traditional Inuit, souls are not the exclusive property of human beings, they are widespread and take many forms. Propitiation is achieved by following certain cultural traditions and, at all times, by showing respect towards the animal that is killed. It is both atonement and thanksgiving. In our own culture, meat has been increasingly divorced, for most of its consumers, from the death that makes it possible and the life that it once held. Because of this, there is a kind of thankfulness and humility that we no longer know how to feel, and a grace we have forgotten how to say.

  Fat grey clouds tumbled heavily around the mountains, punctured and crushed between the peaks, rolling, blowing and inflating, from slate to black, turning over in the wind. There was rain there, on the slopes. It had not reached the town yet, but it was coming. I was stranded inside the cabin. Flu had struck me on my second day in Nanortalik, and had worsened until I felt unable to leave the warmth of the building. I was hot and shivering, my nose was blocked and sinuses throbbing; my throat was raw and my muscles ached. I felt dreadful, and sat on the sofa next to the fire looking out of the window. Hours passed slowly. I read, but found it difficult to concentrate for long. I turned on the television, but switched it off again when I saw what was there.

  Outside, the ice shifted, clearing then clotting the dark water again, as the wind dragged from east to south to southwesterly. I watched its steady migration back and forth across the bay, and something inside me moved as it moved. My thoughts drifted from the island where I sat, to my own island 1,500 miles east along the parallel. I thought about the people in this town, and I thought about the great space that lay between their lives and my own. I thought, too, about my father, who seemed as close to me then as the ice outside, or the warmth within the room, but as distant and unreachable as the ravens across the bay, their black lives pinpricked against the sky.

  Above the water, glaucous and Iceland gulls bustled their way between the bergs, camouflaged on the ice. As they lifted up to shift to another place now and then, they shone bright white in the grey air. Rain wrapped itself around the town then, and I opened the window a little to listen to it falling. Inland, a thick fog was slumped around the mountains, but out to sea, from where the breeze was blowing, the sky was bright. It was an illusion – the reflection of the sea ice on the clouds above – but it was welcome nonetheless, and added to the ever-present promise of change. Gretel Ehrlich has written that ‘Arctic beauty resides in its gestures of transience. Up here, planes of light and darkness are swords that cut away illusions of permanence’. In Greenland, that transience is impossible to ignore; it permeates each moment of each day. It is there in the melting icebergs on the shore, and in the meat on the market counters; it is there in the rushing clouds and the changing climate. It is there in the air itself. There is the sense here that, at any moment, all certainty could be undermined – that the land could reach out in an instant and wipe people away, as the Norse were once wiped from this country. There is terror in that thought, but there is comfort, too.

  When my father died I learned that loss is with us always. It is not a punctuating mark in our lives, it is not a momentary pause or ending. Loss is a constant force, a spirit that moves both within and without us. It is an unceasing process that we may choose, if we wish, to bear witness to. And if we do make that choice, then we are not committing ourselves to a lifetime of grief and melancholy. Instead, we offer ourselves the opportunity of a firmer sense of joy and of beauty. It is no surprise and certainly no coincidence that we experience our greatest appreciation of life in those things that are fragile and fleeting. We find it in the song of a bird, in the touch of a lover, or in the memory of a moment long passed. So it should be no surprise that by attuning ourselves better to the process of loss and transience, we may in turn be brought nearer to beauty and to joy. It is in loss – in the anticipation of loss – that we find our most profound pleasures, and it is there also that we may find a sense of true permanence.

  In traditional Inuit society, permanence was to be found in the concept of sila, a kind of life force or spirit, which is sometimes translated as air, wind or weather, or, more widely still, as ‘everything that is outside’. Sila was the essential ingredient of life – it was breath itself – and it held the inner and outer worlds together. When a person died, their life, their breath, returned to the world and became one with it again, or it found form in another person’s body. But sila was not a predictable permanence; it was not certainty. Sila encompassed both weather and climate. It was changeable, surprising, and sometimes malign. Death was part of its process and part of its force, and the Inuit understanding of the world was shaped by this belief. Or perhaps it would be more true to say that the world in which the Inuit lived shaped this understanding. For natural philosophies do not spring from empty space, they are born from the land. And this seems to me a particularly northern view of life and death. Here, where the seasons turn heavily, emphatically, and where impermanence cannot be disguised, sila, somehow, makes sense.

  Death is at once an ending and a continuation. A breath is given back to the wind, just as ice returns to the sea. It finds new shape. But a life, too, lives on through stories and through memories, joyful in their retelling and their fleeting recollection. Loss shapes us like a sculptor, carving out our form, and we feel each nick of its blade. But without it we cannot be. Of the many absences that
I carry with me – for we all, I think, are filled with holes – the absence of my father is the one that has taught me most. It is the space through which I have come to see myself most clearly. I thought of him then, as an ice-laden wind pawed at the cabin window, and I thought of myself in those first few months without him. His was the loss that had led me to this place.

  It was another two days before I felt well enough to venture out beyond the shelter of the hostel again. My strength had drained in the stifling heat inside, and I needed to walk. The morning was dry and calm, and so I aimed for Quaqssuk – Ravens’ Mountain – which rose just beyond the north end of the village. Nanortalik’s main street was filled with teenagers that morning, just finished their final term at junior high school. They were dressed in white T-shirts, all painted with slogans and pictures, or printed with photographs of their friends and classmates. Spray cream was everywhere, and treacle too, on their hands and faces. They were chanting a song like a football anthem, and smiling as they went. Cars beeped and people cheered in congratulation.