Arctic Homeland: Kinship, Community and Development in North- west Greenland

Thomas S. Abler is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Waterloo and the author of A Canadian Indian Bibliography, 1960-1970.

Greenland, a colony of Denmark for more than two centuries, achieved
home rule in 1979. Its population is approximately 80 percent Inuit.
Although the vast majority of the Greenlandic population resides in West
Greenland, it is only in two sparsely populated districts that hunting
provides subsistence. It was at a village in one of these districts that
Mark Nuttall conducted his research in 1987–88.

The village of Kangersuatsiaq houses approximately 200 people. While
Nuttall demonstrates the importance of hunting in the economy of the
village, his focus is on the importance of hunting and traditional
practices in making Kangersuatsiaq not simply a village, but a
community. Meat is viewed not as a commodity but rather as something one
shares with other members of the community.

The hunters of Kangersuatsiaq do require cash to hunt. Animal-rights
activists have destroyed the market for seal skins, so halibut (not
favored as food locally) are fished for their market value, giving
hunters the needed income for the fibreglass dinghies, outboard motors,
firearms, ammunition, and fuel needed for subsistence hunting of sea
mammals.

In his exploration of community, Nuttall focuses on the network of
kinship and other social ties that binds individuals and households
together. Particular emphasis is placed on the custom of naming a
newborn after a recently deceased member of the community, a practice
that establishes lifelong links between the bereaved family and the
child.

The author occasionally digresses into discussions of Western
intellectual traditions or theoretical anthropology. The political
situation in Greenland is compared to that in the Canadian Arctic and
Alaska. One suspects most readers will find these discussions less
nourishing than those dealing with social life in the village.