The two cultures meet - Traditional skills in Greenland

PART III

All happens very fast, as fast as plans evolve here in East Greeland where the weather dictates every part of life. Soon Dines and six boys, including the deckhand Ivik, Holger, Ajugutooq, Mikkel and twins Remee & Kenny step on board. We introduce ourselves and give a safety briefing and life on board-briefing in English, translated to East Greenlandic by Dines and into Spanish by Franscisco. The boys get their bunks in the shared cabins and start exploring the ship and finding their bearings, hanging out on the back deck smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee in the saloon, while Dines chats with them and tells them stories about what we see.

Dines has been working for thew local community for a long time. He has worked with troubled teenagers, boys and girls without a place in the world, trying to show them how to make a good life in this part of the world, how to be proud of one's East Greenlandic heritage and culture. His father was a hunter, and later the mayor of Tasiilaaq, who saw many decades ago that the traditional hunting lifestyle was vanishing fast and put his own children to school and told them to get an education rather than follow his footsteps and be a professional hunter. Dines is now both. He speaks fluent Danish, English and West and East Greenlandic, is well-connected in both the politics and the local tourism realm, loves his home town and dedicates his life for improving it, and also hunts seals, polar bears and whales and is a skilled, rewarded dog sleight driver.

Pamela and Francisco have lengthy discussions with Dines about the indigenous people's situation in the world. They both share the experience of being a minority even within the group of minorities - East Greenlanders are a fraction of Greenland's population, speaking a different language to the majority of the country that operates in West Greenlandic and Danish. The Kawesqar is a tiny indigenous people consisting of 18 remaining families, and 6 people who still can speak the Kawesqar language, and perhaps twelve who are skilled in the traditional basketry, making of baskets that were used for their hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the Patagonian fjords. The well-known Chilean indigenous people are called the Mapuche, and Kawesqar culture has little recognition in Chile – a matter that the siblings, their family and their association Pueblo Kawesqar is trying to change. We are Kawesqar, and we are still here, we exist, is their silent but powerful message.

In the evening we make a very large amount of spaghetti and meat sauce, I must say that I have not cooked such a large spaghetti before – the boys finish most of it in a whiff. After dinner two of the boas and Pamela and Francisco go kayaking guided by our captain Sigurdur – Pamela has not tried it before and is quite excited to paddle around the icebergs in the vanishing evening light.

The mood is good, and after the paddling, we gather in the galley and the greelandic teenagers pick up the guitars and sing songs. The 15-year old Remee wants to show us traditional drum dancing, but we don't have a traditional seal-skin drum, so he picks the plastic dishwashing bucket and a wooden ladle and sings a rhythmic song with a story and animal sounds, accompanied with drumming and a hypnotic dance.

Pamela and Francisco show photos from their home country, from the cultural house they are building, with a long pier for the fishermen, a hut for the artisan works and a community house. They also share with us the rare pictures that exist of the almost disappeared Kawesqar life and culture. Dines is translating the stories to the boys. "Just like us", Dines says, with many of the photos. The Kawesqar had summer tents with a wooden frame and sea lion skins as shelter, that were packed into tree bark canoes when the nomadic Kawesqar people moved after the food, the sea lions, fish, mussels. They had sharp harpoon blades made out of marine mammal ribs, that remind the East Greenlandic ones. Fransisco, Pamela and Dines find out that the Kawesqar and the East Greenlandic word for a whale is almost the same, which may be just a coincidence, but a happy one.

For us, looking at the interaction of our indigenous guests as outsiders, we start feeling like perhaps we were a little off in our focus when we started the project. We all saw the similarities in sea lion and seal skin use, the harpoons, the canoes and kayaks made out of natural materials to enable the nomadic lifestyle of hunter-gathering people on two opposite ends of the world, but the most important common denominator may be the struggle to exist and be recognized in a world that has in the past tried to mold everything in the same uniform frame, the cultures, the people, the languages.