Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Greenlandic hunters and fishermen struggle to catch enough to feed themselves, their families, and their dogs, and sell the skins of the seals they eat to pay for the repair of sleds and boats. They have a high rate of freezing, starving, injury, and loss. During the three-month period of relative darkness, hunters dressed in trousers of polar-bear fur and coats of sealskin must run beside their dogsleds to forestall frostbite. Many survive the winter on kiviak, which is made from fermented auks buried for eighteen months in a fatty sealskin, then consumed raw. My Greenlandic friends assured me it was no more repellent than blue cheese. Forty years ago, these people lived in igloos. If you’ve never been inside an igloo, you cannot fathom how small they usually are. The only sources of warmth are a seal-fat lamp and the body heat of the occupants. Sewn into clothes for the winter, the denizens of an igloo would lie partly on top of one another. Now they live in Danish-style prefabricated houses with just two or three rooms because the cost of heating in a land with no readily available source of fuel—Greenland has no trees—is prohibitive.

Inuit families are large. For months on end, a family of twelve people may stay unremittingly inside their own house, usually gathered in one room. It is simply too cold and too dark for anyone to go out except the father, who goes hunting or ice-fishing once or twice a month to supplement the stock of dried fish from the summer. This forced intimacy offers no place for complaining, talking about problems, anger, or accusations. In igloo days, having a fight with someone with whom you would have to be in immediate physical contact for weeks on end was impossible. Even now you must share rooms and meals for months. If you storm out, you go into a climate in which you will surely die. As one said, referring to the old days, “When you got angry or upset, you would just turn your head and watch the walls melt.” The extreme physical intimacy of this society necessitates emotional reserve. Some people who live close to the old ways are storytellers, especially about hunting escapades and near escapes from death. Most are tolerant. Many laugh readily. Others are silent and brooding. But no matter their personality, almost none speaks of his or her feelings. The distinctive features of Greenlandic depression are not direct results of the temperature and light; they are the consequence of this taboo against talking about yourself.

Poul Bisgaard, a gentle, large man with an air of bemused patience, was the first native Greenlander to become a psychiatrist. “Of course if someone is depressed within a family, we can see the symptoms,” he said. “But we do not, traditionally, meddle with them. It would be an affront to someone’s pride to say that you thought he looked depressed. The depressed man believes himself to be worthless and thinks that if he is worthless, there is no reason to bother anyone else. Those around him do not presume to interfere.” Kirsten Peilman, a Danish psychologist who has lived in Greenland for more than a decade, said, “No one tells anyone else to behave. You simply tolerate whatever people present and let them tolerate themselves.”