Expedition to the Polar Peoples

By Michael Stoltze
Over a two-month period, eight people participated in an expedition to describe the everyday life of the Inuit in the year 2008. The summer journey, which was arranged by the Danish newspaper Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten, was designed to follow in the tracks of Knud Rasmussen by plane, helicopter, ship, and powerful vehicles. Rejsen til Polarfolket ('Expedition to the Polar Peoples') is the result of the breathtaking journey.
 
The world in which Knud Rasmussen travelled to collect the folktales and myths of the Inuit has changed radically since then.  The conditions of life in the cold of the northern latitudes are still rough, but the old sealing culture has almost vanished.  Like everyone else, the Inuit want to be part of modern life with its comforts and conveniences. This and much more is what Expedition to the Polar Peoples is all about.

The book was written by a journalist and correspondent for the newspaper Jyllands-Posten, Jørgen Ullerup, and beautifully illustrated by photographer Casper Dalhoff, who turned his lens on the everyday life of the Inuit.

The book describes with brutal honesty how the Inuit live, stamping out the notion that the Inuit want to go back to their old ways of life – the sealing tradition with shamans and drum dances.  The Greenland adventurer Ono Fleischer, who has travelled the entire realm of the Inuit by dog sled, says: “Here in Greenland, we live like Europeans and Danes.  The drum dance and other traditions can be compared to folk dancing on the island of Fanoe off the coast of western Jutland.” And Aili Lage Labansen, a half-Greenlander biologist from Nuuk, believes that the idea of the Greenlanders returning to their original sealing culture would be the same as thinking the Danes might go back to living like Vikings.

Of course, awareness of aboriginal culture is not a matter of indifference.  To the contrary.  But the Inuit are modern and have the same dreams that we Europeans do.  Life in these harsh regions is just not easy.  The book describes much joy and optimism but also dismal places where the distance between houses can be euphemistically called an open lumber room and less charitably called an open garbage dump. And even though the pride is clear in most Inuit, many families are split between the old and the new and burdened by social problems – alcohol, violence, incest, suicide, and teenage mothers.  One says: “It can be difficult to be proud of your identity, when all you hear about in the media are social problems....” That is the dilemma.

Among the Chukchi, who still live a nomadic life following the reindeer in northern Siberia, the travellers encounter a culture in which folktales, myths, and rituals are still fundamental elements.  The Chukchi believe in reincarnation and that everything has a soul.  But this is the exception.
 
You cannot help but become a little smitten with the book’s honest and loving presentation of the modern everyday life of the Inuit.  Otherwise, interpretation is left to the reader.

Translated by Russell Dees

Dansk version