‘Greenland Has Gone Through Transformations, But It’s Still Greenland’: Q&A With Dr. Genevieve LeMoine

What many people see as a giant ice sheet in North America actually encompasses a deep spiritual and cultural history. Greenland is home to the world’s largest ethnic population, the Greenlandic Inuit. Of Greenland’s approximately 58,000 inhabitants, about 88% of them are Inuit.

Archaeological records show that the Inuit made Greenland their home about four and a half thousand years ago, according to Dr. Genevieve LeMoine from Bowdoin’s Peary MacMillan Arctic Museum. The Inuit have persevered and survived in the Arctic for thousands of years, and in more modern times, have practiced resilience in the face of colonization and what LeMoine calls “Daneification” by Denmark.

If the United States is truly interested in taking over this expansive Arctic island, there should be a greater effort to understand the unique and rich history and culture the Greenlandic Inuit have. This interview with LeMoine builds a bigger picture of what Inuit history and modern lived experiences are like.

First, if you just wanted to tell me about yourself, your work, and what your research interests are.

Genevieve LeMoine: I’m by training an archaeologist. I’ve been doing archaeology, mostly prehistoric, but also some historic, in the Arctic since 1986. A long time. I did my PhD at the University of Calgary, looking at how Inuit, in the Western Canadian Arctic, made and used bone tools in the past, studying the microscopic aspects of that. And then I kind of expanded my research, and I’ve been moving steadily east and north since then, so I worked in the Central Canadian High Arctic, and since the mid ’90s, I’ve been working in Northwestern Greenland, which is a region that our museum holds considerable collections from, because that’s where Donald McMillan and Robert Peary did their work. I joined the museum in 1996, and that summer, I was in the field, doing archaeology.

I’ve also done some oral history photographic with our photographic collections in that region, and that led to more archaeology. I’m hoping to get back, again, for photographic work, because of a new collection we’ve acquired. So, I’ve done a fair bit of work and publishing on that, and then we’ve also done work on our collections, and looking at the historic connections and impacts between Inuit and explorers, and things like that.

I first want to ask you, what is prehistory and how do we study it?

LeMoine: Well, prehistory is actually these days kind of a loaded term. It basically, for archaeologists means the study of people before history is written down. Prehistory is not written down. That means it’s kind of a moving target.

Where I’ve done most of my work in Northwestern Greenland, the first contact with Europeans was in 1818, and that was sort of ephemeral. You don’t really start getting any detailed, written descriptions of the people in that region until the mid-19th century, when explorers started overwintering. And, of course, they themselves did not start writing anything down until the 20th century when missionaries came in, and then eventually schools and things like that.

What archaeologists would call prehistory there is fairly recent, even 150 years old, it would technically still be prehistory or 200 years old, say, but that leaves out oral history. It’s a very Western perception of what history is. Archaeologists over the past 10 to 20, maybe even longer than that, years, have started taking, as they should, into account more oral history. We still use that prehistory history division, but it’s more of a moving target, and oral history’s going back to pre-contact. Because that’s another way people would describe that kind of division in the new world or outside of Western Europe and Asia—contact versus pre contact periods.

You can understand what went on before Europeans started writing things down by talking to the people, and they do record orally, and then their memories, their history. Neither are a really great term to use. There’s no hard date for anyone place on one side or the other.

Okay.

LeMoine: When I’m talking about historic archaeology, I’m talking about archaeology, where there are Western industrial materials in that we are finding, whether it’s an Inuit house or an expedition.

How far back does your knowledge go of Inuit history in Greenland, and what do we know about their origins there?

LeMoine: Greenland, as far as we can tell, was first occupied by people around four and a half thousand years ago, perhaps a little earlier than that. Their archaeologists called them the Arctic Small Tool tradition (ASTt), which just describes the kinds of tools that they were using, like small microblades as one of the characteristics of their technology.

They moved from the Bering Strait region, so from Siberia, across the Bering Strait, into Alaska, really, and then across the Arctic. The small tool tradition goes back much farther than four and a half thousand years. As far as we can tell, they didn’t just decide to move from Alaska to Northern Greenland or anywhere in Greenland. The groups expanded across that empty landscape at a slowish but steady pace.

That far back, it’s really hard to identify how rapid the expansion was, but that’s when people first got to Greenland. You do find sites even in very far northern Greenland and down the west coast of Greenland that go back that old. Depending on where you are, there’s a few sites that have excellent preservation, because the ground is frozen, but most of them tend to be surface sites. There’s very little vegetation, and so soil doesn’t develop on top of sites. You can, in northern Greenland, for instance, you can be walking along a stony beach, and there’s the outlines of a house, and the tools in it might be four and a half thousand years old, and they’re still just sitting on the surface. Elsewhere, they do, and particularly along the West Coast, there’s some very old, frozen buried sites that are incredibly important.

What are some of the things that we’ve found that are evidence of their existence and how they survived up there?

LeMoine: You do find, sort of going in scale, you find the outlines of structures that were probably tents. We call them tent rings, and rocks outlined, that were being used to hold a tent down. Those are the kinds of houses they were living in. These early sites often have what are sometimes called mid passages or axial passages, and those are structures in the middle of a tent that are paved, so a series of flat stones. Sometimes they have stones on either side of them to create little hearths and things like that. They tend to divide a living space in half. That’s what they call them, passages. Sometimes you find them, as I say, with tent rings around them, sometimes they’re by themselves, and we’re not sure whether that means that they used to have stones around them, and other subsequent people have moved those stones, or perhaps they were being built, maybe even out of snow, but they still had a big passage in them. We don’t really know that. Again, because of the soil development, it’s really hard to know much beyond the fact that these things are there. And that style of architecture lasted for many thousands of years.

And then we find their tools. The bone tools are less common because of preservation, but they do exist, and there are stone tools as well. Barbed harpoon heads, tools, they’re called the Arctic small tool tradition, because they made a specific kind of stone tool that’s a blade—which I won’t get into how they make blades, it gets kind of complicated—but it’s a very efficient way of using stone, and it makes kind of a multipurpose, straight, very sharp piece of stone that can be used for multiple things in different kinds of handles and whatnot. They made little arrowheads and little harpoon points and those kinds of things. And needles, of course, because they had to sew clothing. So, you find very, very fine bone needles for making clothing. We don’t find a lot of the clothing, of course, except a little bit later in the really well-preserved sites, but we know if they were living in far northern Greenland four and a half thousand years ago, they had very good clothing. Otherwise, they wouldn’t survive.

How did they eventually end up moving throughout Greenland and inhabiting different areas of the island?

LeMoine: In some ways, we don’t necessarily know the details of it, but these are all people who are hunters, so they were moving across the landscape in search of land animals, like caribou and musk ox, but then also, they were really primarily maritime mammal hunters, so seals. At that point, they weren’t hunting bigger animals, but they were definitely hunting various kinds of seals. And those were in a lot of places; that was the mainstay of their diet. As a community grows, people go further in search of food and set up new settlements.

Sometimes communities, you know, there might be disagreements in a community, and some people will say, “Huh, I’ve had enough of this,” and they’ll go find their own places to hunt. The mechanisms for a group like this expanding are highly variable and kind of situational. The space is empty, the glaciers had really only not receded not that long ago, and so the ecosystems in some of those areas was still developing and stabilizing even five thousand years ago.

People were curious, and they were explorers themselves, and so they would be seeking out new places to hunt, perhaps, just going to see new places. If you’re hunting in one area, and things are okay, but they could be better, and somebody wanders 25 miles away, and finds this great place for hunting seals, they going to say, “We should be over here.” They’re going to find new places to live and gradually expand their way across the region. But as I said, that far back, it’s hard to pin down specific reasons for moving across.

Did the Inuit originally have a common culture and language or was it always made up of distinctive languages and cultures? How did that culture sort of form?

LeMoine: In the Arctic, there tends to be a lot of—sort of moving out of Alaska, from Canada into Greenland, to begin with, at least—there’s always a fair bit of uniformity. They’re all coming from the same culture. Now, one thing we haven’t got into is that there’s a kind of a break in Arctic prehistory. So, the Arctic Small Tool tradition people move out, they inhabit lots of Greenland, high Arctic Canada, low Arctic Canada, and they’re there for thousands of years. And there are DNA studies that back this up. Eventually, they disappear. And they’re replaced by another group that moves out of the same area, also maritime hunters, but with more elaborate and sophisticated technology, including hunting bowhead whales. Things that the ASTt (Arctic small tool tradition) people didn’t do. They move across, and in some cases, quite rapidly across the Arctic, and those are the ancestors of the modern-day Inuit. They share a common language; the DNA is all the same.

The DNA studies that have been done, they do show that those two groups, the ASTt—the early people—and the later people, about 5,000 years ago, there is some shared genetic materials. So, they’re sort of coming out of the same base, but there’s two big waves of migration.

Technologically, and as far as we can tell, spiritually, both groups, there was a lot of commonality. People are very far spread out, but there was still, as far as we can tell, lots of interaction between groups, and so ideas could go back and forth relatively easily. For instance, about 1,500 years ago, when the Arctic Small Tool tradition people, who, at that point, were called Dorset, when they were sort of at their height, you find these amazing little ivory carvings that they made, that were amulets of some sort. And you can find one in the Central Canadian Arctic, and you can find one in Northern Greenland. They’re almost indistinguishable. There was obviously a common belief system, and in links to that, probably a common language, all the way across.

And then for the ancestors of today’s Inuit, there are many dialectical differences from Alaska to Greenland, but there’s lots of commonalities. People can—they might have to work at it a little bit, the way we have to work at understanding somebody with a strong Scottish accent—they can communicate all the way across that great vast distance.

What are some of their spiritual beliefs that were created by the descendants of the modern Inuit’s that are still practiced today?

LeMoine: I think the most fundamental part of their belief system is that everything, particularly all animals, they have spirits. They are a hunting culture, they live by killing animals, but that that is all part of a kind of a social interaction between the hunters and the animals. The animals are giving themselves to the hunters. They’re offering themselves to the hunters to be hunted. And out of respect for that gift, then the hunters have to treat the animals with respect, both in terms of how they hunt them, how they talk about them, but also in how they use the animals.

The first thing often that traditionally a hunter would do when they kill a seal, for instance, is offer it a drink of water. Because it lives in salt water, so it’s probably thirsty. They’re respecting it in that sense. But then also sharing the meat among the community, and using the rest of the animal, particularly the skins, for example, to make clothing for the family. Those are all just gestures of respect to the animal.

The hunter’s wife is often the one doing the butchering and overseeing the sharing. She’s certainly the one cleaning the hides and making the clothing. She’s the one doing a lot of that respectful treatment of the animals. There’s a really nice article based on oral interviews with hunters in Alaska. The title of the article is, “I’m Not the Great Hunter, My Wife Is.” It’s that the hunter would have no success without the wife carrying out these very respectful actions towards the animals, because if that’s not happening, then animals are not going to give themselves to the country. So, it’s that belief in sort of respect for the animals that you’re hunting, and the ways that you show that respect is fundamental.

As far as I can tell, that’s still there. People hunt differently now, of course. They hunt with guns; they don’t hunt with harpoons and things like that. But that is still an essential part of how they understand the world.

Lots of people have been converted to Christianity, so traditionally, if there was trouble between people and the spirits of animals, and if people were starving or there wasn’t good hunting, a shaman would be the individual who can send their spirit out to interact with the spirit world, and resolve those problems. It’s a shamanistic belief system that was pretty effectively squashed by Christian missionaries. But there’s still a great deal of knowledge of how it worked. Some historians have managed to work with elders who understood that system and could tell them about it. There’s good documentation of it.

Do they have any sort of special connection to nature and the land itself?

LeMoine: Well, that’s it. Yes, people are very, very connected to the land and the landscape. And you can see that in the names they give to their regions. So, in Canada, Nunavut, means “our land.” In Labrador, the Inuit area there is called Nunatsiavut, which means “our beautiful land.”

That tie to the landscape, and sort of the geography of their area, is all part of that. There’s been some great work done on place names, and how they embed community memories. People are very tied to their areas, and they know them in a way that visiting archaeologists will or anybody else will never really have. They are modern communities, but the people who are out in the land, they have an in-depth knowledge of it that takes years, because the knowledge is being passed down through generations.

What were some of the means of survival in the Arctic conditions? What was the weather like there?

LeMoine: It’s cold. So, I mentioned clothing, and the things you need to survive in the Arctic are food, calories, clothing—warm clothing—to keep you warm and dry, a shelter, whether it’s a tent, a snow house or an igloo, stone igloo, or whatever.

The hunting is important. One of the reasons people can survive in the Arctic is because it’s quite—we think of it as barren and cold and horrible—but it’s a great environment for lots of different species, particularly sea mammals. Sea mammals have lots of fat, and fat is great calories. It’s not only food that people can eat and keep them warm, but the fat is also traditionally what they burn in lamps to heat and light the house. It’s both food and light and heat. Sea mammals are fundamentally important, and, of course, the sealskin makes great waterproof clothing, and the women developed ways of sewing seals, preparing sealskin, and then sewing sealskin that they could make waterproof clothes, for example. Which is the last thing you want to do in the Arctic, get wet, right? So that’s really, really, really important.

They just engineered the most amazing clothing to keep you warm, but not too warm, because you also don’t want to sweat, right? And so they developed clothing using different kinds of furs, designing the clothing so that it was sort of breathable, but also would keep you warm and dry.

And the houses, whether it’s a snow house, which is, snow is a great insulator, so a snow house is surprisingly warm. The design of the houses, they were snow houses, but in the winter, they would live traditionally in semi-subterranean houses that were partly dug down into the ground, and that’s so you can have a cold trap, you know, how hot air rises. In those traditional houses, there would be a tunnel going down a little ways, and then you would come up, and there would be a floor, and then there would be what’s called the sleeping platform at the back. That meant people were sleeping at the back, and up relatively high in the house at the warmest part, because all the warm air would be rising up there. The fact that the tunnel was down low was called a cold trap entrance. The cold air would be trapped down there by the warm air above it. They engineered their houses to keep themselves warm as well.

Those are the main things you need: warm, dry, and food. They really excelled at that. That’s one of the things, here at the museum—it’s the Peary MacMillan Arctic Museum—so we study, to some extent, exploration. Robert Peary, one of the things that made him so successful as an explorer, was that he realized, unlike a lot of the other explorers, he realized that if you wanted to survive in the Arctic, you had to live like the people who were living there so successfully already, so he understood the genius of their technology.

Was there any fluctuation in the climate back then, and, like, if there was, how did they deal with that?

LeMoine: Yes, there’s always some fluctuation in the climate. Everything from a bad, stormy year, which is a weather change. There have been climate ups and downs. The medieval warm period, the Little Ice Age, where the climate changed. And you can track how people move or adapt what they’re hunting to accommodate that. You can see, for instance, along the coast of Labrador, when the sea ice changed at different times in those periods, you can see people switching the kinds of seals they’re hunting, because the seals themselves are reacting to the changes in the ice, and you can see people moving into far, far northern Greenland, but not staying, because the climate didn’t allow it. They reacted to climate, they experienced climate change. They adapted to climate change. There are times when some parts of the Arctic become empty. People were living there, and then they’re living there no longer. It’s probably tied to the availability of food, which is linked to the climate. There’s other times when we don’t know, for example, where there’s no clear link between climate and people living in a place or not. But there certainly are times when they’re reacting to it.

Was there any conflict between different settlements at all? Were there illnesses? Did the population of different settlements and people in general dwindle or suffer because of something?

LeMoine: Oh, absolutely, yeah. There are records and oral histories of conflicts in really heavily populated areas, particularly in Alaska. The Bowen Era Wars, I’m not that familiar with it, but there is evidence of that, and we find archaeologically, you can find armor made out of bone, slat armor. There is a little bit of evidence of conflict, but not a huge amount.

But in communities that were heavily impacted by disease, almost always introduced by Westerners, not necessarily intentionally. There were times, for instance, in West Greenland, there was a huge smallpox epidemic. The population was nearly completely wiped out. And people from other parts of Greenland eventually moved in and repopulated the area. But, yes, there have been real dramatic instances of communities dying because of disease, and that’s had severe impacts on, in different ways, on different communities.

Can you talk about how and why Denmark was interested in Greenland, went to Greenland, and how that relationship started?

LeMoine: Erik the Red was exiled from Iceland, found Greenland, went back, and told everybody, “Oh, you got to come and live here.” And so, Greenland was colonized in the early part of the last millennium. They survived quite well. And when they got to South Greenland, there weren’t other people living there, as far as we can tell. There were Arctic Small Tool tradition, Dorset people further north, and they did eventually come into contact with them. But they didn’t displace people, but they didn’t last forever, either. Why they left or died out, or both, is still a little bit unclear, but there’s lots of ideas about it.

They were Vikings, but they were Christian, right? Which, eventually, one would have called them Catholic, right? During the Reformation in Scandinavia, there was still a memory that they had been there, but nobody had been in contact with them for some hundreds of years. And so, a Lutheran minister, Hans Egede, thought, “Well, I really should go and convert these Catholic Vikings.” They weren’t called Vikings, but these Catholic settlements in Greenland, to Protestantism, because this is the way to go now, so he was a Protestant missionary.

He got permission from the government to go out there and convert them if they were still there. And of course, he got there, and they weren’t there anymore. Inuit had moved in, and so there were lots of Inuit settlements on that coast. He got permission to stay and try and convert them. And it took him a long time, but eventually, he did, and another group of missionaries, the Moravians, moved in as well. Along with that was the expansion of European whaling, so the Greenland whale fishery was east Greenland, and they weren’t getting onto land, but the Dutch, particularly, were coming around, and wailing in Baffin Bay. More and more people were wailing in Baffin Bay. Eventually, Denmark, because of Hans Egede’s sort of permanent settlements there, Denmark moved in and established Greenland as their colony, and managed the whaling, managed the trade, managed everything. They made it, essentially, a closed colony for a very long time. That’s how they got there.

What was the relationship between Denmark and Greenland initially once they became a colony of Denmark? Was there cooperation or was there any tension, and how did that relationship evolve over time?

LeMoine: It was essentially a classic colonial relationship. You had the establishment of a stratified society with the Danish colonial administrators, being colonial administrators, and Inuit being, you know, they’re [the Danish] trying to co-opt them into being workers for them. Conversion to Christianity was part of that. They didn’t want to completely disrupt traditional lifeways, but they also wanted them to conform to their belief system and their understanding of how work went on in the world. You would have seen a big difference, for instance, in the big, main settlements at what is now Nuuk, which was then built up, and then up the coast at Jacobshavn (now Ilulissat).

You also got the development of a sort of a middle, something in between, the Greenlandic, the Inuit, and then Danish administrators would often marry Inuit women, and you’ve got kids who are being raised in kind of a mixed household. They were getting more education, and they were becoming ministers and artists. They were getting more integrated into… I wouldn’t say into Danish society, because they were still not considered Danish, and the colonial administrators were still in class, unto themselves. They were getting educated, so they were developing, writing and art, and things like that in Greenlandic. It became kind of an interesting way that, in West Greenland, the culture developed, was still very much a colonial system. Greenlanders would never be able to rise to the top of that system. It started a literary tradition, and things like that, that are very important today.

How did Denmark’s presence in Greenland change their culture and their lifestyle? How were cities built up? And on converting the Inuit to Christianity, how that changed their spirituality and religion? I know that’s a lot. [laughs]

LeMoine: That is a lot, yes. That’s the history of modern Greenland! [laughs]

There is some really good work being done by Greenlandic scholars on this, so I’m definitely not an authority on any of this. The Lutheran and Moravian, the Moravian Church was there for hundreds of years, but then also left eventually. They had a big impact. To some extent, you get sort of trickle-down impacts. For instance, the Moravians had a very strict and understanding of relations between men and women, and unmarried women, married women and all those kinds of things. The Moravian [women] would signal their marital status by the color of the ribbons in their hair. That kind of propagated through Greenlandic culture, for whatever reason, even if people weren’t Moravian, so you get people reacting in different ways.

I think in West Greenland, Christianity took hold pretty thoroughly. They [Christians] moved to East Greenland, and there was no missionary in northern Greenland until 1909 or 1910. That, of course, had a big impact. The economic impact was in the change of how people hunted. The trading company wanted people to be whaling because they wanted whale blubber, and that kind of thing interferes with what they would otherwise be doing. It changes the sort of traditional hunting cycle that people are engaged in. Eventually, fishing also becomes more of a thing, and people are engaged in commercial fisheries. They’re getting roped into an economy, very different from a traditional economy, where some things are coming from the store. A cash economy, or even a barter economy, but very different from the traditional sharing economy that they had come from.

And then you get the education system. To be honest, I don’t know how or when Denmark started insisting on people going to school. It might have been quite late, but you do certainly get even in the 19—or even in the late 1800s, people going to school, learning to be carpenters or Catechists, and things like that. They were most intensive in places like Godthaab in Nuuk, where, I don’t know if anybody would call it a city at that point, but certainly a town was developing there.

In Jacobshavn, up in Disko Bay, in the smaller communities along the coast, the changes would have been much more subtle. There would be a store, and there was a monopoly on the store. It was all the Royal Danish Trading Company, or Royal Greenland Trading Company, so it wasn’t like you had a choice of where to shop.

How did Danish colonization impact Inuit culture and spirituality? Was it well-preserved or were these communities out of touch with their culture because of it?

LeMoine: Well, it’s kind of a mix. Certainly, Christianity and colonialism, some things they made obsolete, like some of the hunting skills, for instance. If you’re not doing that kind of hunting anymore, you’re not teaching your kids how to do it, and you lose it. When you convert to Christianity, then all the stuff around shamanism also gets lost.

Some of it was preserved because there were people in those communities who recognized, you know, the stories and things like that, were worth saving. You did get some of that stuff written down. And, of course, stories get passed on from generation to generation. Traditional stories don’t necessarily get lost just because you converted to Christianity, but some elements of it get lost. I would say the impact is variable, again, depending on where you were and what position you had in society, and how that would propagate down through your children.

Greenlanders are still distinct from Danes, even though there’s been many hundreds of years of colonization. One of the things that was amazing in Greenland is how the language was preserved. This language is still very, very viable. There was a written element to it for a very, very long time. The written stories go back further in Greenland, say, than they do in Canada.

In the ’50s, and in the ’60s, there was a whole movement called Daneification—is how at least tell the Greenlanders call it—where, and you saw this happening all over the world with Aboriginal communities, the colonial powers decided that they needed to learn the language. They needed to go to school, and so at that point, they were taking kids from even from small, small communities, taking them so that they could get the kind of education the government felt they should get, often in Denmark. They were being moved away. They were taken… It’s the residential school problem that we have here in the U.S. and in Canada. It was the same in Greenland. It was happening at the same time, and that caused a very big break. There are some people, some young Greenlanders, whose parents didn’t learn, were taken away, didn’t learn Greenlandic, they don’t speak Greenlandic. There’s big movement now, among those people, at least the ones I know, to relearn Greenlandic. It is still very much the language, the language of government and things like that.

There were some very serious breaks at different times. The religion changed in the 18th and 19th century. There were more assaults on the language in the 20th century. But Greenlanders have continued to fight for their culture. And by the ’70s, there was a very active movement to resist that Daneification.

Obviously, right now with the current U.S. administration talking about Greenland, there’s been a lot of ongoing conversations about Greenland and the culture and the lifestyle there. My last question for you is what is something you wish people better understood about Greenland and the Inuit people there?

LeMoine: There’s such a deep ignorance about Greenland outside of, really, outside of Greenland and maybe Denmark. It would be great just if people would… they need to understand how modern Greenland is. And how Greenlandic, it still is, as well. Despite the efforts of Denmark, Daneification didn’t really work. Culture is still Greenlandic, despite all of these centuries of colonialism. I wish people would just take the time, make the effort, just to learn a bit about the country. You can do it, and you can do it in ways that are really easy. You can watch some great films. It’s a little harder to read, of course. A lot of the books first get translated into… they might be written in Greenlandic. If they’re going to get translated, [first] into Danish. There are some Greenlandic books that have been translated into English contemporary literature that are worth reading. Films, music… there’s a great music scene, there’s a great art scene. Even some amazing food. I think people need to understand that Greenland has gone through transformations, but it’s still Greenland. It’s still based fundamentally, in Inuit, Kalaallit, as they would say, culture.

---

This story is part of a semester-long investigative reporting project into Greenland’s people, history, and culture. It was created by an advanced reporting class in the Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies program at UW-Milwaukee. Other stories from the project are available on Edge of the Arctic: Greenland, the Land of the People.

This work was made possible through the support of MPC Endowment Ltd., the philanthropic affiliate of the Milwaukee Press Club, and a private donor.