8.

Outline and discuss traditional knowledge in relation to Arctic

subsistence practices and/or climate change



Contents

INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................................. 2


OUTLINE I: SUBSISTENCE AND TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE .......................................... 3

OUTLINE II: CLIMATE CHANGE AND TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE ................................ 5

DISCUSSION I: CULTURE, CHANGE, LIVING .................................................................................... 6

DISCUSSION II: HUNTERS IN MODERN GREENLAND ........................................................... 8


CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................................. 10



REFERENCES .............................................................................................................................................. 11

Introduction

In this article, I will outline and discuss traditional knowledge in relation to the effects that
climate change has had and might continue to have on the lives of the residents in the Arctic and
Greenland as well as their subsistence practices.

I will address two main points for discussion of the consequences of the on-going
climate change in the Arctic region: I will briefly outline the history of change in Greenland,
the impact of the modern way of life and the challenges that the Inuit are facing as sea ice
gets thinner and thus more unsafe to use for travel, transport and hunt. I will also touch upon
the literature that dismisses the discourse of a vulnerable Arctic region, where climate
change reduces people to a reactionist role, and instead regards the Inuit as fully capable
persons that can stand up for themselves and make their way through life in an ever-changing
environment, and how they deal with this change using creativity and skill. Finally, I shall
conclude the article by reassessing the points addressed in article.

The Arctic and Greenland, are particularly ideal for archaeologists, geologists,
ethnographers, anthropologists, etc., to do research in because it is seen as a pristine, semi-
isolated, self-contained island-like system. This fact means, that scientists not only can go
back in time because of permanent frost, but also that they can study how people in the
region have responded to and dealt with climate change, migration and other phenomena
alike. This part of the world has an extreme climate and climate change is more outspoken
here than anywhere else (Srensen: 37).
I will discuss how the peoples of the Arctic and Greenland have shown resourcefulness,
when dealing with climate change, maintaining livelihoods and anticipating the future. The
discussion will draw on multiple texts that deal with global crisis narratives vs. local
narratives (Tejsner; Hastrup & Olwig), social resilience in the Arctic region (Hastrup & Olwig;)
and, of course, climate change as well as flexibility and anticipation (Hastrup; Nuttall). Finally,
I will address the hunters way of life in modern Greenland and discuss the role of
anthropology in the region.

Outline I: Subsistence and traditional knowledge

Since contact with Greenland was resumed on the Danish part in the early 18th century, the
region has seen missionaries, traders, European whalers; colonial administration,
transnational companies and global politics impact the society of the once very dispersed
people in Greenland (Caulfield: 168). The economy of Greenland was entirely based on
subsistence and reciprocal trade between families and communities during the non-
communication, which lasted from the Middle Ages until the 18th century until Danish
missionaries started entering the region and Euro-American culture made contact and impact
on the trade. Up until that time, Greenlanders would hold trade gatherings, a sociable event
where next of kin and communities could get in touch. However, the interaction with
colonists, and later the global market, transformed the trade and commercialized it. Though
the Inuit population did not see it as a threat to cultural values, their local produce was soon
part of a market economy and therefore dependent and vulnerable to fluctuating prices
(Marquardt & Caulfield: 108).
Centralization was prompted, first by the Danish government through the G-50 and G-60
reforms, then by the Greenlandic Home Rule government; waves of migration into villages
and settlements started a change in lifestyle for many Arctic people. While many
Greenlanders used to depend on their own hunting skills or the skills of other hunters in the
community, now the larger towns have transformed the life-world of many from being-in an
active renegotiation with the icy, rocky environment as you went to hunt, while now you are
in being-inside town environments where jobs and store found goods imported from the rest
of the world form your livelihood (Hastrup: 255; Aporta: 30).
Nuttall (2010) praises the mobility of Arctic hunters, but as Hastrup outlines, the
sedentary way of life has marked Greenland demographics for many years now. Hunters
started to settle trade stations because their way of life meant they were flexible so they
might as well live there as anywhere else (ibid: 253). She laments the loss of traditional
way of life, i.e. hunting, and the increasing dependency on modern lifestyle goods such as
guns, coffee, sugar, etc. These have become everyday items, if not necessities, for the Inuit in
the settlements. This on-going process of centralization also means that residents of Thule
now belong to a district with the capital, Ilulissat, being 2000 kilometres to the south, and a
modern lifestyle requires ships to bring in items during the summer, locally defined by
open water, and the population are dependent on goods we know all too well in Denmark

such as baby-food, socks or beer, birthday cards and windows, dishwashers, etc. (ibid:
255-256). Even though the government helps marketing the country foods so that hunters
and fishers can provide for themselves, and for the trade in Greenland to be less dependent on
import (Marquardt & Caulfield: 113), the global restrictions on game are perceived as a threat
to cultural survival, hunting traditions and Inuit autonomy. Just two examples are the quotas
on traditional subsistence such as whales, seals, fish and skins to sell at the local market, as
well as the government policy that urges people to eat healthy, i.e. vegetables, rye bread,
and, thus, discourages the hunters from eating their traditional food (Hastrup: 256-257).
The growing presence of the central government through policies, game restrictions and
judicial administration is seeping into the life-worlds of residents in northern Greenland and
creating an atmosphere of mistrust for authority and sense of loss of control, as expressed
through a dim view of the future: in ten years we are no longer here (ibid: 257). The
anonymous rationale of Greenlandic government and the everyday lived experience of local
residents in Thule, Hastrup argues, serve as two very distinct environmentalities, when it
comes to economic subsistence, climate change and sustainability (ibid: 258). It also means
that while central government is trying to create policies to protect local or traditional
methods, the policies can be perceived by the people as an attempt to control them: With
each regulation, the hunters have become more integrated into the state, colonial or
otherwise, yet at the same time they have become marginalized from their own histories
(Hastrup: 257).
The policies to deal with overfishing are a clear-cut example of the biologist-
protectionist rationale. The government use biologist frames to define overfishing, while
local residents of Thule perceive it to be a moral concept, describing a persons conduct, not
killing more than is strictly needed for survival. One informant proved to have a very
distinctive perception of fish population numbers: How many is many? (ibid: 260). Hastrup
also describes how the biologist framing of narwhal population puts qualitative measures in
the background; locals do no overfish if they feel a population needs time to regenerate, and
when it comes to narwhal, they need their mattak (blubber) to fight off depression in the
harsh winters. Between biologists and Inuit residents, it is, thus, a conflict between points of
view, and not between long-term interests (ibid: 263).

Outline II: Climate change and traditional knowledge

Scientific models of climate change tell of a pending threat to Arctic peoples livelihood. But
the envisioned future for the global climate is a model and is not experienced on ground
level (Tejsner, 47; Hastrup & Olwig: 5-6). The extensive use of poster-child animals such as
polar bears by the global media is a phenomenon that has very little to do with the everyday
worries of hunters (Tejsner: 50). Nuttall (2010: 28) considers [w]orries over the loss of polar
bears and their habitat and talk of the last days of the Arctic hunter to have captured public
attention and provoked the alarm of conservationists and Indigenous activists. In the public
imagination, that is media, NGOs, environmental and animal rights organisations perceived
image of Arctic climate change, Greenland has become one of the starkest examples of global
climate change. Despite the fact that media coverage portrays glacial retreat as a
consequence of global warming, not only have Danish expeditions in the 1940s whose
purpose it was to investigate the melting of Greenlands glaciers, concluded that this is not
best understood as global warming, there is also in the Inuit communities a common
knowledge of glacial retreat. An elderly hunter reports that [t]he ice is always moving, and
this gives the impression that [m]ovement is an everyday fact of life, whether in the social
worlds of the Inuit communities, in the sudden migratory shifts of beluga whales, or in the
behavior of glacial ice (Nuttall: 28).
Nuttall calls attention to how the Arctic peoples historically have been perceived as
human beings that are especially well suited to adapt to climate change (2010: 22). He argues
that the Inuit have been able to survive and adapt to not just to the Arctic climate, but also
extreme climate change by creatively finding means of livelihood in a constant relation to
animals and the environment, anticipating, waiting, hoping, pondering, and imagining the
movements of seals, narwhals, fish, and other animals to be caught (ibid: 25). Tejsner also
experienced this during his fieldwork with hunters in the Disco Bay area. His focus, however,
is on the crisis narratives that has framed Arctic residents as being exposed to global
warming, which in turn does not necessarily form part of the lived everyday experience and
knowledge of the local population. As he points out when citing Kelman: in Inukitut [] there
is no word for vulnerability and instead the local sense of vulnerability revolves around
emotions [and] the value of intangibles (2013: 54). Tejsners interaction with the local
residents show how knowledge of the environment helps people survive and creatively find
solutions to problems places along the coast [] will always tell you where you are and how

far you need to go. These local, or coastal narratives tell of the enduring hardship that is
coupled with enduring confidence and that local hunters in Disco Bay perceive their
environment as one that has always provided [them] with what [they] need and at the same
time they will continue to find ways of making a living because that is what they have
always done (ibid: 58). Instead of concern about consequences of global climate change, what
really concerns Inuit hunters on an everyday level is the sea ice getting more and more unsafe
(Aporta: 24; Nuttall: 28). Ice-edge hunting is making hunters more nervous than ever,
because it has become more slippery and some have gone over to using dogsled on shore
fast ice. At the same time, the snow cover is also changing and making transport with dogsled
and snowmobile less easy (Nuttall: 28).
The discourse of vulnerable animal species and peoples in the Arctic has created a
sympathetic attitude towards dealing with climate change and the well-being of the people
living there, but simultaneously creating a view of exposed and endangered cultures and
nature (Tejsner; Nuttall; Hastrup). Caulfield even wrote his essay for a book called
Endangered Peoples of the Arctic. While we outsiders might consider threats to the Arctic
region to be the loss of biodiversity, rising sea levels and pollution, the hunters themselves are
perhaps more concerned with winds that makes you drift away from shore, thin and slippery
ice and changing migratory patterns of animals and thus making it more difficult to hunt:
From outside the risk may look the same, but seen from within a particular life-world the
threat becomes altogether different (Hastrup & Olwig: 6; Nuttall: 28).
Maybe in the future, as Tejsner anticipates, cod fishing will become a big industry in
Greenland as seawater temperature rises and leads certain types of fish migrate further north.
Transport across water becomes easier, as more open water lets boats and bigger ships pass
through the straits and bays (ibid: 53). This has been the case before, for example, in the
1920s and the 1930s when ocean temperatures rose and made cod fishing a profitable
industry (Caulfield: 169).

Discussion I: culture, change, living

Culture can appear time-less and, thus, culture contact, for example, as when Europeans
began traveling to the Americas, is often seen as ruptures (Agrawal: 422). But, as Agrawal
underlines, when people meet, new knowledge is shared and created, and knowledge of
technology switch hands between persons and is incorporated into the daily life of the other

persons. He finds that it is meaningless to talk about scientific and indigenous knowledge
and the ways in which they differ and complement each other; it is all knowledge. Therefore
we cannot talk about any authentic Inuit hunting culture just because they use kayaks,
harpoons, etc. Culture is not a fixed deposit of features. As soon as it is used for purposes
outside its everyday use, it becomes abstract or theoretical, for example, for tourist purposes
such as giving an authentic Arctic experience or visiting the Boras in the Peruvian Amazon.
Their campsites have most of the necessities like other small towns, they wear Nike t-shirts
and they use motorboats for transport on the river, but for your touristic visit to be
authentic, it means your ambassadors dress in traditional clothing made up of palm leave
hats, straw skirts and with orange fruit paint in their faces. Same thing goes for the hunters of
Thule who are required to hunt whales and seals only using traditonal technology, i.e. kayaks
and harpoons, even though in other places they are allowed to use guns and therefore have an
advantage. Fortunately for the hunters of Thule, they take pride in using their traditional
hunting methods using kayaks and harpoons. Paradoxically, they use motorboats to get to the
whale spot and the narwhals are shot with rifle (Hastrup: 263). The reason that the
traditional methods are being upheld by the Inuit themselves, I presume, must be because in
doing so it lives up to the idea they have of the hunters way of life and people living off
subsistence feel respectful and can claim moral high ground: Skills at travelling and
wayfinding are socially valued, and a source of personal pride (Aporta: 31).
The problem that anthropology faces when trying to assert the consequences of climate
change, in for example the Arctic region, is that anthropological knowledge and practice help
to shape policy of climate change (Nuttall: 23) and, thus, the findings and the resulting
discourse affect political decisions, indigenous rights claims and cultural self-perception of
the people it investigates. Nuttall argues that we need to consider people, not just in the Arctic
but everywhere, to hold intentionality and action as well as agency, imagination and the
ability to consider possibility and make choices that affect their lives. Put differently:
adaptation is reactive whereas anticipation is predictive or proactive [and] helps to orient
human action (ibid: 23, my emphasis). Travelling is another way to deal with change, in
search of subsistence or for the love of change, and other reasons such as exploration,
visiting relatives, marriage, social pressure and nostalgia (Aporta: 14), which for me seem like
very ordinary human reasons to make a change of scenery. In South Greenland, sheep
farmers benefit from more land for their animals to graze on. Politicians and business leaders

look forward to prospects of possible easier access to gas, oil and other raw material. In the
midst of this, the impact of global climate change and fear of emissions of carbondioxide (CO2)
are not on the minds of the people of Maniitsoq in western Greenland. They hope that possible
mining sites in the area will create jobs and economic development. There is also the prospect
of becoming an independent nation, breaking with the Kingdom of Denmark, and it is in this
perspective, that climate change does not threaten Greenlanders so much as it empowers
them (Nuttall: 29).
Both Tejsner and Nuttall point out, that climate change is not a threat to human
livelihood and survival, but it can become another horizon of the future, which in turn incites
to dealing with change. A change in public vocabulary is needed: one that uses not a risk-
hazard frame but one that underlines the agency, intentionality and creativity of the peoples
of the Arctic (Tejsner: 55; Nuttall: 23). In this manner, not only will the residents of the Arctic
be torn out of the passive role as spectators to their destiny, as perceived in the public image,
we will also be able to perceive them as agents and creative human beings that take their lives
into their own hands.

Discussion II: Hunters in modern Greenland

Climate change that brings about topographical change is happening simultaneously as
Greenland nation-building politics are taking shape. Cartographic changes, such as the
creation of hunting districts, means that hunters that depend particularly on their ability to
navigate through the environment and use their knowledge of places must also define
themselves and their environment in relation to the Greenlandic state politics (Hastrup: 252).
Even though [f]lexibility has been the hallmark of local resilience in a world of flux
(ibid: 267), the challenge for Arctic communities is not only dealing with climate change, but
the increasingly felt changes in political and ecological order, i.e. the government programs
and policies, and the globally agreed quotas that inhibit hunters from practicing their
traditional way of regulating and sharing the catch (ibid.) Political restrictions not only
affect the economy, but have also created physical boundaries of the so-called hunting
districts, Upernavik, Thule, Ammassalik and Ittoqqortoormiit. This means that Greenland is
becoming divided into traditional hunting grounds and modern urbanized districts
(Marquardt & Caulfield: 113). Residents of towns may start to perceive the hunting districts

as an unfamiliar nature landscape as opposed to their familiar town landscape. This could
also mean that the Greenlandic hunters and townspeople will become alienated.
Piniartoq, the Greenlandic word for hunter, translates literally as one who wants
(Nuttall: 33). The hunters anticipation of weather and the environment is key not only to a
successful hunt, but also to survive the trip. In order to anticipate such changes in weather,
[h]unters and fishers do not talk about the sea as a featureless surface of broad water [as]
the seascape is in constant flux. To be a successful hunter in Greenland, one must be able to
evaluate ones hunting environment and the weather conditions of said environment. This
means to anticipate subtle changes in the mood of the sky and their effects on the sea
(Nuttall: 31). Tejsner discusses his Qeqertarsuarmiut hunters situation, living with
uncertainties when dealing with bad weather and increasingly thinner sea ice on which to
hunt and transport cargo and people. Qeqertarsuarmiut way of life takes place along the
coastal areas of the Disco Bay, and it is a life lived alongside fluctuating weather and ice
conditions as these make themselves felt during harvesting efforts. They perceive themselves
to live in a familiar and benevolent life-world (Tejsner: 55). Because residents of the Disco
Bay are living in and with an environment that is constantly prone to change, their everyday
activities, and therefore their life-world, form part of a relationship that understands that sea
ice is not an object of concern as the crisis narrative often implies it is rather an existential
condition of being (59, emphasis original).
Nuttall holds that Greenlandic hunters are flexible, mobile and able to anticipate
(climate) change. Just as the Qeqertarsuarmiut will continue to find ways of making a living
(Tejsner: 58), Nuttall argues that, in Greenland, the concept of anticipation, translated to
isumalluarneq or ilimasunneq, holds connotations not only to reason and expectation,
but also to hope and uncertainty, etc. When [n]othing can be expected, much can be
anticipated, and surprise is [] certain, residents of the Arctic are in a constant negotiation
with their environment and, simultaneously, they need to be alert, assess and anticipate
future challenges when harvesting and making their way through the landscape (Nuttall: 26;
Aporta: 31). This shows how the life-worlds of Greenlandic hunters are a work in progress
where they acquire intimate knowledge (ilisimassuseq) of their environment (Nuttall: 26).
In most of the articles I refer to, there are descriptions of how Inuit hunters will spend
considerable amounts of time discussing weather, ice and wind conditions. This, Ingold holds,
is because the many hours that hunters talk about and observe change in their environment is

an engagement with said environment. They are engaged with their environment because
they live in it and it supports their livelihood, and, therefore, they must constantly be
respectful of it, because they know if you do not engage with it properly, you are putting
yourself at risk, and that is why: hunters and gatherers consider time devoted to forays in the
[environment] to be well spent, even if it yields little or nothing by way of useful return
(2000: 47). To deal with climate change, Inuit residents discuss weather conditions so they
can make an alignment of harvesting efforts to match the intentions of nonhuman forces as
these are felt along the coast (Tejsner: 59).
One problem with anthropological literature dealing with indigenous people, according
to Ingold, is the constructionist perspective. Drawing on phenomenological philosophy and
the work of Bird-David (1992), he discusses hunter-gatherers and their perception of the
world, and comes to the conclusion that they dwell in an environment, and this means they
are integrated into that particular environment, and it is part of their life-world. This in turn is
the complex result of learned socio-historical knowledge and biological perception. Our
everyday activity makes us skilled in an environment, and it in turn affects us (Ingold: 55).

Conclusion
This article has addressed the opportunities and difficulties that the peoples of the Arctic
region has faced and will continue to face in the coming years as climate change is affecting
the foundation for peoples way of life.
Some points of concern were the vulnerable people of the Arctic, and how this image
does not match reality; how the modern way of life has impacted the demographical reality
in Greenland, and how the urbanization might create parallel societies within this vast
country; how the use of modern technology in parts of the Arctic are restricted and what
measures are taken to deal with these challenges; and I also addressed that change is a fact of
Arctic life, and how people use this change.
We have seen how flexibility, mobility, anticipation, and creativity are human qualities
that shine bright when put to the test in the Arctic environment. I have outlined the advances
of the state policies, and anthropological research shows that Greenlandic hunters care about
their skills when it comes to dealing with change in its many aspects.

10

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