Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

“Ask no open questions” was the advice of the Danish doctor in charge of the district that included Ilimanaq. “If you ask them how they feel, they won’t be able to tell you anything.” Nevertheless, the villagers knew what I wanted to know. They did not usually give answers of more than a few words, and the questions had to be as concrete as possible, but even if the emotions were not available to them linguistically, they were clearly present conceptually. Because trauma is a regular part of the lives of Greenlandic people, anxiety after trauma was not uncommon; neither was a descent into dark feelings and self-doubt. Old fishermen told me stories of their sleds going underwater (a well-trained dog team will pull you out—if the ice doesn’t break further, if you don’t drown first, if the reins don’t sunder), and of going miles in subzero temperatures in wet clothes; they talked about hunting when the ice was moving and the thunder of its sound made it impossible for one man to hear another, and you felt yourself rising up as a chunk of glacier shifted position, not knowing whether it would soon turn over and plunge you into the sea. And they talked about how, after such experiences, it had been difficult to keep going, to wrest the next day’s food from the ice and the darkness.

We went to see the three woman elders. Amalia Joelson, the midwife in the village, was the closest approximation of a doctor in town. She had had a stillborn child one year; the next year, she gave birth to a child who died the night after it was born. Her husband, mad with grief, accused her of killing the child. At that time she could hardly bear to know that she would deliver the children of her neighbors, but could have none herself. Karen Johansen, the wife of a fisherman, had left her native town to come to Ilimanaq. Shortly afterward, in rapid sequence, her mother, her grandfather, and her older sister died, all of different causes. Then her brother’s wife became pregnant with twins. The first twin was stillborn at five months. The second was born healthy but died of sudden infant death syndrome at three months. Her brother had one child left, a six-year-old daughter, and when she drowned, he hanged himself. Amelia Lange was the minister in the church. She had married young, a tall hunter, and she had borne him eight children in rapid succession. Then he had a hunting accident: a bullet ricocheted off a rock and his right arm was split halfway between the elbow and the wrist. The bone never healed, and the break line would bend like an extra joint if you took his hand. He lost the use of his right arm. A few years later, he was just outside the house during a storm and was blown by a strong wind. Without his arm to break his fall, he broke his neck and has since been largely paralyzed from the head down. His wife had to care for him and move his wheelchair around the house, to bring up the children, and to hunt for food. “I would do my work outdoors and cry the whole time while I did it,” she recalled. When I asked whether others had not come to her when they saw her weeping at her work, she said, “They did not interfere so long as I could do the work.” Her husband felt he was such a burden to her that he stopped eating, hoping to starve himself to death, but she saw what he was doing, and seeing it broke down her silence, and she pleaded with him to live.

“Yes, it is true,” Karen Johansen said. “We are too physically close to be intimate. And we all have so many burdens here, and none of us wants to add our burdens to the burdens of others.” Danish explorers of the early and middle twentieth century found three primary mental illnesses among the Inuit, described by the Inuit themselves. These have now largely died out except in very remote locations. “Polar hysteria” was described by one man who had suffered it as “a rising of the sap, of young blood nourished by the blood of walruses, seals, and whales—sadness takes hold of you. At first you are agitated. It is to be sick of life.” A modified form of it exists to this day as what we might call activated depression or a mixed state; it is closely related to the Malaysian idea of “running amok.” “Mountain wanderer syndrome” affected those who turned their back on the community and left—in earlier times, they were never allowed to return and had to fend for themselves in absolute solitude until they died. “Kayak anxiety,” the belief contra reality that water is filling your boat and that you will sink and drown, was the most common form of paranoia.