Particular Report: Greenland’s comparatively remoted indigenous Inuit tradition finds itself more and more uncovered to the world simply as President Donald Trump pushes to take over the territory.
NUUK, Greenland − Musicians Pani and Sebastian Enequist sport once-suppressed Inuit face tattoos, hunt seals for meals in distant fjords and honor nature “like a God.” However they discovered their calling − and one another − whereas they have been obsessing over the American heavy metallic band Slipknot.
For hundreds of years, Greenland’s Inuit folks survived the world’s harshest situations by residing off whales, seals, polar bears, fish and caribou. Now, gleaming new airports are opening up. TikTok stars are proliferating. A comparatively remoted indigenous tradition, lengthy dominated by ruling Denmark, finds itself more and more uncovered to the world simply as President Donald Trump pushes to take over the Arctic territory.
Nonetheless, if music can inform historical and trendy tales alike, then the Sound of the Damned, the Enequists’ Nuuk-based hardcore metallic band, has a musical plotline that wends throughout time and place. The group’s raspy, guttural-growl vocals, introspective lyrics and aggressive beats are young and old. Native and foreign-born. They illustrate how change is sweeping by means of the island’s distinctive heritage, at the same time as some issues keep the identical.
“We wish to play metallic. We additionally wish to signify our tradition,” stated Pani Enequist, 32, who writes Sound of the Damned’s lyrics and lately started performing with them. Her husband Sebastian, 29, is the band’s lead singer and guitarist. The group’s new materials incorporates an Inuit drum referred to as a “qilaat,” masks dancing and throat singing, the place hums, gasps and grunts mimic the sounds of animals, streams and icebergs.
The Enequists stated that in 2016, they have been among the many first of a brand new technology of Greenlanders to get face tattoos, identified in Greenlandic as Kakiuineq, as a strategy to reclaim and have fun their Inuit ancestral roots, traditions and spirituality. In addition they view them as a means of rejecting the legacy of Denmark’s 18th-century Christian missionaries, who labeled the practice as pagan and sought to have it banned. Their meanings are linked to Inuit cosmology and rites of passage.
Greenland’s music scene: small however mighty
Greenland’s music scene is small, with the variety of musicians and bands working in Nuuk estimated within the low dozens, based on Christian Elsner, whose household owns Atlantic Music, a file label and music retailer in Greenland’s capital that sells devices and albums. Greenland has a Spotify-style streaming service referred to as Tusass Music, linked to its postal service, solely accessible to customers in Greenland and Denmark.
Atlantic Music additionally homes considered one of Greenland’s few full-blown recording studios. It sits within the basement of a squat, gabled home framed by a veranda-style entrance porch. Throughout the road is Nuuk Middle, an eight-story ultra-modern workplace tower, which might not look misplaced in a European metropolis.
Nuuk Middle is Greenland’s tallest constructing. It is usually residence to its first shopping center, which opened in 2012. On its higher flooring are places of work for the Naalakkersuisut or Greenlandic authorities, which is making an attempt to spice up tourism and the native economic system by rebuilding and expanding three new airports for direct worldwide flights.
The primary direct U.S. flights to Greenland started on June 14 − Trump’s birthday. That is one thing many Greenlanders really feel ambivalent about. They need American vacationers to go to. They do not wish to turn into a part of the USA, polls show.
Sounds of the Arctic
Laura Lennert Jensen works for Arctic Sounds, a Greenland-based music administration firm that represents and promotes native artists. Arctic Sounds additionally phases an annual music competition − the Arctic Sounds Festival − in Sisimiut, in central western Greenland, which showcases unique music acts from Nordic nations.
About 90% of Greenland’s 57,000 folks determine as Inuit.
Jensen stated Greenlanders first began making standard music that wasn’t conventional Inuit music within the Seventies. Consistent with the occasions, it was influenced by standard British rock and roll acts of the day, similar to Pink Floyd and Deep Purple. Over time, entry to the web improved. So did the appearance of software program that made it simpler for musicians to write down and file music with out a skilled studio. Greenland’s music has diversified to incorporate rap, reggae, electronica, nation, pop and every little thing in between.
On a current night in Nuuk, Jensen took USA TODAY on a whistle-stop tour of some of Nuuk’s dwell music hotspots, the place the acts included lounge singers, people rock bands and jazz artists. All sang in Greenlandic to attentive native audiences. As did Kuuna, an up-and-coming pop singer who strode self-assuredly across the ring, belting out tunes in between rounds at a Thai boxing occasion like a fledgling Greenlandic model of Beyoncé.
“A few of our musicians don’t carry a single hint of Inuit music in what they create,” Jensen stated. “Others carry it as symbolism, to replicate historical past or to revitalize methods which were misplaced.”
Denmark’s Greenland experiment
Greenland was a Danish colony till 1953. For a whole lot of years prior, it was underneath Danish authority. That period started with the arrival of a Danish-Norwegian Lutheran missionary priest named Hans Egede in 1721. In 1979, Greenland was granted residence rule. Thirty years later, it grew to become a self-governing entity.
Immediately, Denmark retains management over Greenland’s foreign affairs, protection and macro-economic coverage. The Greenlandic authorities manages areas similar to training, well being care, pure sources and tradition.
Throughout elements of colonial rule, Denmark enforced assimilation insurance policies for the Inuit inhabitants. It discouraged use of the Greenlandic language, as did some Greenlandic elites. In 1951, it eliminated 22 kids from their households and put them in Danish properties, an experiment geared toward turning them into mannequin “Little Danes.”
Within the Sixties and Seventies, as many as 4,500 ladies and women − half of the fertile ladies in Greenland, based on Danish authorities − have been subjected to pressured sterilization by authorities physicians, utilizing painful intrauterine units. Greenland was within the early phases of its modernization. This included a development increase that attracted many Danish staff and led to a excessive start price amongst Inuit ladies. Denmark’s metropolis planners needed to restrict Greenland’s inhabitants development.
The Danish government has issued formal apologies for these insurance policies. However many Greenlanders stay shocked and bitter about these episodes, which helped gas requires independence from Denmark.
Greenlanders additionally imagine that deep-rooted biases stay and a broader sample of ongoing systemic discrimination favors Danes in areas similar to entry to profitable jobs and promotions, based on Ulrik Pram Gad, a researcher on the Danish Institute for Worldwide Research in Copenhagen.
“Many people really feel like there’s discrimination within the office in Greenland on the subject of high-ranking positions,” stated Orla Joelsen, a jail official in Nuuk whose job falls underneath the authority of Denmark’s justice division. Joelsen stated he was talking in a personal capability.
Greenlanders are underrepresented within the higher echelons of the island’s company world, based on Gad, the Denmark-based researcher. In his spare time, Joelsen runs a popular X account about Greenland that has been extremely important of Trump’s curiosity in Greenland.
“It’ll be a protracted 4 years,” he stated.
Greenland’s influencers
Some Greenlanders seem extra prepared than others for Greenland’s shifting cultural tectonic plates.
“On my TikTok account, I discuss loads about what groceries I am shopping for,” stated Malu Falck, 32, a singer and graphic designer in Nuuk whose short-form social movies about on a regular basis life in Greenland have helped deliver her a complete new following.
Falck has nearly 10,000 followers on TikTok. She just isn’t but earning profits off of TikTok, she stated, although her picture was displayed as a part of an advert within the window of a Nuuk storefront.
“It is new in Greenland, however individuals are getting used to it,” Falck stated of TikTok. She estimated that about 100 Greenlanders are “very energetic” on YouTube, TikTok and different social media.
Considered one of them is Qupanuk Olsen, a Greenlandic mining engineer and politician identified for her vlogs about Greenland’s tradition, historical past and conventional Inuit life.
Olsen’s posts on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube routinely attain half 1,000,000 folks.
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However it’s in music the place Greenland’s overlapping identities are maybe most immediately observable.
Varna Marianne Nielsen, 44, is a Greenlandic filmmaker, music producer and practitioner of conventional drum dancing and drum singing. The latter includes performing with a stick manufactured from bone or wooden that’s rhythmically struck in opposition to a body drum or qilaat to make an echoing beat.
Nielsen descends from a protracted line of drum dancers, however grew up listening to American blues, jazz and rock music. “I’ve each of those traditions in me,” she stated.
Nielsen described her music as “sweeping from the ice and the land.” In 2014, she had a task in an episode of the TV sequence “True Detective,” for which she coproduced a number of unique scores.
Nielsen stated that, as a toddler, she was happy with her Greenlandic heritage however did not essentially perceive how her identification had been formed and influenced by Denmark. As an grownup, Nielsen stated, she has felt compelled to assist revive the drum dancing and drum singing custom that was uncared for by earlier generations.
Her work consists of subject recordings and electronically composed beats.
Nielsen was shocked to be taught lately, whereas doing analysis in Denmark, that her grandfather’s drum was exhibited within the Nationwide Museum in Copenhagen. She discovered this discovery upsetting as a result of it illustrated how, even now, Greenland’s tradition is being expropriated by Denmark.
“It’s nonetheless troublesome to entry our treasures when they’re in a unique nation and never residence the place they belong,” she stated, including that she hoped Danish authorities would repatriate Greenland’s drums.
Like Pani Enequist from Sound of the Damned, Nielsen’s fingers are encircled by tattoos. Their which means connects to Sassuma Arnaa, or “Mother of the Sea,” an Inuit creation fantasy concerning the goddess Sedna. Variations of the parable differ. However the story tells how Sedna got here to rule over the Inuit underworld.
In a single model, Sassuma was a lady who was mistreated by her household and thrown into the ocean by her father, when her fingers have been severed and have become seals, whales and different marine life for which the Arctic is understood.
Sound of the Damned is spending a number of weeks this summer season touring Danish colleges, the place band members will discuss to kids about Greenland’s Inuit tradition. On stage, they put on “corpse paint”– a mode of make-up that offers them a macabre look. Enequist stated this has little to do with Greenland and every little thing to do with music from Metallica to Slipknot that formed the band’s sound and shaped the backdrop to her courtship together with her husband.
“There isn’t a contradiction in that,” she stated.
Preserving it Greenlandic
Elsner, whose household owns Atlantic Music, can be a musician.
He performs in Nanook, maybe Greenland’s most profitable band of the fashionable period. The group’s identify refers to Greenland’s mythological polar bear, which is on the territory’s coat of arms and symbolizes Greenland’s wildness. Because the band shaped in 2008, Nanook’s debut album of melancholic folk-pop has offered round 5,000 data in Greenland − which means that about 1 in 10 Greenlanders, 1 in 4 or 5 households, might personal one.
Nanook refused a proposal to signal with the Sony file label early on within the band’s profession as a result of it needed them to sing in English. Elsner stated he and his brother, additionally a vocalist in Nanook, discovered the thought “too awkward and unnatural.”
In addition they fearful it will be a type of betrayal of their Greenlandic inheritance.
Not many worldwide music artists journey to Greenland, Elsner stated. Distance and expense are components. Additionally, there are not any roads connecting Greenland’s settlements. Nanook has toured Greenland by boat, airplane, helicopter, canine sled and snowmobile. By no means a tour bus. Elsner stated that despite the fact that the American metallic band Metallica has a Danish drummer in Lars Ulrich, the California-based group has by no means made the journey.
However within the late Nineties, a British band referred to as Blur did present up in Greenland.
They performed to about 1,000 folks in a now-defunct Nuuk bowling alley. And Damon Albarn, Blur’s lead singer, endeared himself to Greenlanders, Elsner stated, as a result of he did an interview that featured in a documentary saying it was hypocritical for Westerners to criticize Greenlanders for consuming seals, whales and different Arctic marine life when there wasn’t any main livestock trade in Greenland.
“Seals,” Albarn stated, have been “the cows of Greenland” and so they had significantly better lives – and deaths − than Western industrial livestock, which are sometimes raised in intense confinement in pens and cages.
Elsner stated Greenland is a paradox.
“It is this loopy stunning place the place there’s a darkish facet,” he stated, referring to excessive charges of alcoholism, suicide and incest in some communities. He stated Greenland’s good and unhealthy, previous and new, seeps into its music.
Socially conscious rappers speak about colonization. Steel bands like Sound of the Damned sing about “how they need their tradition again.” Different musicians handle the thought of independence from Denmark. And others nonetheless, like Elsner’s personal band, write songs about nature and “stuff that occurs to us” and intentionally keep away from writing political songs. And in the event that they do, sofa them in metaphors “so it does not have an effect on some folks the unsuitable means,” he stated.
Greenland’s music, Elsner stated, is, just like the place, staying true to its origins but additionally evolving.
There are indicators, past music, of Greenland on the transfer.
A reporter noticed one Tesla hum and whir by in Nuuk. There’s rumored to be a second one amongst Greenland’s roughly 6,500 vehicles for an island that is about half the scale of the Indian subcontinent and has fewer than 60 miles of street and simply three visitors lights. An area boat captain who sails with vacationers in Nuuk and elsewhere stated that he’d seen just one polar bear in his whole life. It was in a zoo in Copenhagen.
Kim Hjelmgaard is a global correspondent for USA TODAY. Comply with him on Bluesky, Instagram and LinkedIn.
