5 Places of Memory, Anticipation, and Agitation in Northwest Greenland

About 2,800 people live in several small communities along a 450-kilometre stretch of the northwest coast of Kalaallit Nunaat, or Greenland, from the area close to the northern edges of Sigguup Nunaa (Svartenhuk) in the south to Qimusseriarsuaq (Melville Bay) in the northern part of Baffin Bay. This is an archipelago of headlands, fjords, channels, and islands that constituted the municipality of Upernavik until January 2009, when a new regional governance structure realigned and reduced the number of Greenland’s municipalities from eighteen to four. The municipality of Upernavik became part of the larger (indeed, the world’s largest) administrative region of Qaasuitsup Kommunia, which also included the northernmost settlements in the Qaanaaq area and extended into Greenland’s coastal stretches along Nares Strait. Ilulissat, in Disko Bay, became its administrative centre. In January 2018, Qaasuitsup was itself reorganized. Most of it, now known as Avannaata Kommunia, comprises the northern parts, including Upernavik, while the southern region became Qeqertalik Kommunia. Avannaata’s administrative headquarters remain located at Ilulissat. Despite this restructuring, and a centralization of decision making away from Upernavik, the area retains a distinct identity as a separate district, a place local people often feel is far removed from Ilulissat and even further from Nuuk, Greenland’s ever-growing capital. Indeed, I often hear talk of how the region and people’s daily lives appear peripheral and distant to politicians and decision makers in these more southerly centres. Many people feel frustrated by bureaucratic procedures and by the fact that it often takes considerable time for local interests and concerns to be dealt with—if they are addressed at all—by the municipal authorities in Ilulissat.

Identity is not always contingent on or constituted by location, of course, but place matters to people in the Upernavik area, as it does in other parts of Greenland (see Nuttall 2001), with many exhibiting a powerful attachment to their localities. Livelihoods and household economies are based mainly on fishing and hunting, primarily for seals, narwhals, beluga, walrus, polar bears, and several species of whale, and the significance of this is reflected in the fact that Upernavik retains a status as its own resource-management district (called aqutsiverqarfik in Greenlandic), with hunting and fishing quotas allocated according to the boundaries of the old Upernavik municipality. Most of the decisions about quotas, however, are made in government departments in Nuuk, and are based on scientific stock assessments. Much of what is caught is used for household consumption, but fish such as Greenland halibut and cod, as well as some marine mammal products, find their way into and around local, regional, and national distribution channels.

As Tim Ingold (2000, 42) remarks, people become immersed in places and landscapes in an “active, practical and perceptual engagement with the constituents of the dwelt-in world.” In the Upernavik region, local knowledge of the places in which hunting and fishing activities occur is rich and deep. Those places are suffused with memories of events, activities, and actions that occur and unfold through the entanglements and trajectories of the human and non-human. There are strong networks of kinship and close social relatedness throughout the district, expressed most markedly in the practice of naming people after the deceased and the use of namesake and kin terms. A distinctive regional dialect of Greenlandic—which can often confuse visitors from southern Greenland—adds to the sense that Upernavik is a place apart. The town of Upernavik has a population of around 1,100, and some 1,700 people inhabit nine smaller villages, ranging in size from about fifty people, in Naajaat, to 450, in Kullorsuaq. Upernavik town remains an administrative and supply centre for the villages, and a number of public sector services and private businesses provide some employment. I have come to know the area through anthropological fieldwork, beginning with my first sojourn there in the late 1980s (see Nuttall 1992). I maintain friendships in the district; have followed the transitions in the local economy from marine mammal hunting to fishing for Greenland halibut; have been kept informed of people’s movements in and around, as well as from, the district (often to Nuuk); and have worked in recent years with local people and scientists to understand the effects of the changes that are happening to sea ice as well as their perspectives on oil exploration in Baffin Bay and mineral prospecting elsewhere in northern Greenland.

The construction of an airport at Upernavik town in the early 2000s has meant a regular Air Greenland Dash-8 flight from Ilulissat, if weather permits, allows easier access to places further south—yet “regular” means once or twice a week, depending on the season (the flight takes around seventy minutes and the aircraft often continues to Qaanaaq before returning to Ilulissat via Upernavik). Air Greenland also connects most of the settlements to the town with a weekly Bell 212 helicopter service (although winter darkness halts it for a few weeks and the service is cancelled when there is poor visibility or strong winds), while a Royal Arctic Line ship brings supplies in containers from Denmark via Nuuk during summer and autumn, when the coastal waters are ice-free.

Sea ice is present for several months of the year but is forming later in the winter and, in many places along the coast, is not always as firm and fast as it should be to allow for travel on it. Over the past twenty years or so, the spring sea ice breakup has also been happening progressively earlier in the season, a trend that makes hunting and fishing by dog sled precarious when the ice is not solid and yet still covers large stretches of water; by the same token, travel between communities by open boat is tenuous during this time, as the ice that lingers during the early weeks of open water hinders mobility. Less ice, though, means the ship can arrive with much-needed freight a few weeks earlier than in previous years (by late winter and early spring, supplies run low in the stores in the town and surrounding villages). The open-water season around the town is now from around early/mid-May to early November, although sea ice can remain in the bays, channels and fjords, often blocking access to and from the villages until mid-June. The rest of Greenland—and the wider world—may seem somewhat closer than was the case twenty or thirty years ago, but weather and ice still disrupt and upset air schedules and delay coastal travel by boat or ship. Upernavik is situated on a small island, with the airport constructed on its highest point (which required the levelling of the mountaintop). Flights are frequently cancelled because of winter storms, late spring or early summer snowfall, or the seemingly persistent low cloud cover and fog that obscures the runway during summer and autumn. Travellers taking the Dash-8 service to and from Upernavik must be prepared to wait in either Ilulissat or Upernavik for several days.

In northwest Greenland, flexibility in settlement patterns, resource use practices, and in the ways people organize their social lives has enabled hunting societies to live from coastal resources (as well as hunting and gathering some terrestrial resources) for the past 4,500 years. When I first went to the Upernavik district in spring 1987, hunting—for different species of seals throughout the year and for other marine mammals seasonally—was the mainstay of the economy of the town and the settlements, as it had been for generations. Community life, kinship and close social association, patterns of sharing meat and fish, and human-environment relations were all bound up with an annual seasonal round of hunting and fishing activities, of travel on the sea ice by dog sled in winter and spring (figure 5.3) and by boat though the inner fjords and around the dense pattern of islands in summer and autumn (Nuttall 1992).

But the area was beginning to undergo a transition to small-scale fishing for Greenland halibut in a more intensive and commercial way, an activity that would gradually erode the importance of hunting for some households or replace it altogether. Anti-sealing campaigns by Europe- and North American–based animal-rights groups and environmentalist organizations had done considerable damage to markets for seal skins and other products from the hunt, denying households much of their income. A small-scale commercial fishery was viewed by many people as a way to earn money instead, but the municipal authorities also saw fishing as a way of improving living conditions and raising people’s economic prospects. The coastal halibut fishery was highlighted as central to the district’s development strategy, and fishing today takes place mainly within the area around the Upernavik Icefjord and the Giesecke Icefjord (known locally as Gulteqarffik, “the Place of Gold,” on account of its richness as a fishing ground), as well as around the northern settlements of Nuussuaq and Kullorsuaq.

Oil exploration has also taken place in recent years, and around a decade ago there was some excitement in the town (mainly on the part of municipal authorities and some local entrepreneurs) at the prospect that Upernavik would transition into a base for the oil industry on northern Greenland’s new resource frontier. With no trace of oil found, companies then focused their attention instead on exploration in the waters off northeast Greenland. Local perspectives varied about the prospects of the seismic survey vessels or exploration ships returning to northern Baffin Bay. As one local entrepreneur (who provides survey, construction, logistical, and lodging services) put it to me in the spring of 2017, “I really had hopes that oil development would happen here in Upernavik. It would have been good for the town and the district, and the exploration had already been good for my business when the ships and the companies were here. But oil prices are so low now that I don’t think there will ever be any development happening out at sea.” In July 2021, Greenland’s new coalition government (formed after a snap election three months’ earlier) suspended the award of new offshore exploration licences.

Hydrocarbon exploration may be on hold at the moment, but the development of mining projects remains a key part of the economic policies of Greenland’s self-rule government. A ruby mine opened near Qerqertarsuatsiaat in southwest Greenland in May 2017 and the government’s minerals agencies and regulatory authorities for extractive industries expect more mining projects to proceed to the development phase in the next few years. In Greenland’s most northerly regions, mining companies are also engaged in prospecting and are developing plans for a number of projects (a large zinc-lead mine in Citronen Fjord near the northern coast edging the Arctic Ocean and situated in the vast Northeast Greenland National Park, the world’s largest national park) has been given approval by the mineral licensing authorities in Nuuk, and an impact benefit agreement aims to ensure employment opportunities for Greenlanders in the project.

Yet, while exploratory activity related to mining seems to offer some people hope for economic benefits, it makes many others in the Upernavik and Melville Bay area anxious. Their concerns are informed by what they remember about extensive seismic surveys carried out in 2012, when several companies combined efforts for the most intensive exploration for oil ever seen in Greenland, and in 2013, when Shell conducted a series of seismic site surveys, some of which overlapped with a narwhal protection zone in Melville Bay. There are two populations of narwhals that spend the summer in northwest Greenland: one in Kangerlussuaq (Inglefield Bredning), in the Qaanaaq area (estimated at over 8,000 narwhals), the other in Melville Bay (estimated at around 6,000 narwhals). There is a hunting quota of around 80 narwhals per year in Melville Bay, most of which are hunted during the open-water season from August to September. This is the same period when seismic activities were operating in the area. Following the surveys in 2012 and 2013, hunters from communities in the Upernavik district, as well as from Savissivik, in the northwestern corner of Melville Bay, reported that narwhal behaviour was different, with some feeling that the hunt had been influenced negatively by the seismic activities in the area (Nuttall 2016).

Narwhals are acutely sensitive to anthropogenic activities, and especially to the noise generated by them, so the high-energy air gun pulses used in marine seismic surveys are of concern to marine biologists, hunters, and environmentalists (Greenpeace, for instance, has been especially active in campaigning against seismic activities in the Arctic). They argue that long-term monitoring is necessary to determine the potential impacts, not just from resource exploration but from increased shipping. For a couple of years, starting in 2014, together with colleagues from the Greenland Climate Research Centre in Nuuk and community partners in northwest Greenland, I was concerned with identifying and understanding some of these effects and worked to contribute to a process of community-based monitoring.

Environmental impact assessments that were carried out in advance of the exploratory campaigns suggested there would be little disturbance from the seismic surveys. The reports from marine mammal observers onboard the vessels concluded that this was so during the sailings. However, local observations from hunters throughout Upernavik and the Melville Bay area indicated soon after that narwhals were increasingly restless and disturbed, moved closer to the coast, and swam deeper into ice-choked fjords and inlets (which increases the risk of ice entrapment for narwhals when the sea eventually freezes in autumn or early winter). While environmental changes in the marine ecosystem, such as thinning and declining sea ice, changing water temperatures, and changes in the migration and distribution of fish, also play their part and likely affect and influence narwhal movement, hunters felt that narwhals were not agitated by such changes alone. They did say, though, that the seismic surveys pikitsippaa the narwhals (pikitsisivoq means something makes someone or an animal alarmed, restless, or agitated). There are other words for different kinds of restlessness and agitation, and hunters used these to describe narwhal behaviour and movement since the seismic surveys were conducted. Katsungaarpoq, for instance, refers to narwhals being restless, agitated, and in a hurry (the opposite, katsorpoq, is to feel an inner calm and peace). Some narwhals, by contrast, have been described as eqqissinngilaq, which refers to an absence of inner peace. And hunters also observe that narwhals are sometimes confused or perplexed because they are frightened of something (uisanguserpoq).

For hunters, northern waters have become—in the way Anderson and Wylie (2009) describe in their discussion of turbulent materialities—places of agitation and disruption. This seems to have coincided not just with seismic surveys and increased marine traffic, but with recent warming trends. Places on land and sea can themselves be agitated, just as marine mammals and fish are. Sea ice, for example, can break off and suddenly go adrift because it is agitated and surprised (siku uippoq; uippoq has the meaning of surprise or fright). Hunters say that following the seismic activities, they also noticed this happening more in areas close to the coast, where there was still fast shore ice, but that the ice was breaking off and going adrift in winter more often. The Greenlandic name for the North Water Polynya between northwest Greenland and Arctic Canada is Pikialasorsuaq, “the Great Upwelling.” This refers, in a sense, to a different kind of agitation, to how the mixing of water currents results in the upwelling of nutrients and so producing the attractive conditions and feeding opportunities favourable to marine mammals, fish, and birds (pikialavoq and pikialaarpoq mean “to well out,” pikippoq means to be restless or to jump up, pikiarpoq means a bird “dives out of the water,” while pikiarsaarpoq means a seal “dives out of the water”). In areas in northern Upernavik district and in Melville Bay, though, birds and seals were observed by hunters as “diving out of the water” with greater restlessness for three or four years since the seismic activities took place.

The kinds of concerns people in the coastal Northwest express over what they see as agitated waters, sea ice that is surprised, and marine mammals that are anxious in relation to seismic surveys are consistent with how mining activities and oil exploration, involving intensive seismic surveys and subsurface mappings, and large-scale industrial development plans such as hydropower and aluminum smelter projects, have provoked considerable, and often fraught, political and social debates throughout Greenland. At the same time, these debates have revealed a diverse array of political, economic, and cultural perspectives describing what the environment and resources mean to the country and its economic, political, and cultural future at a time of increased assertions of Indigenous sovereignty and processes of state formation. Concerns are routinely expressed by local people, grassroots organizations, and environmental groups anxious and agitated about threats to community viability and human health, as well as to wildlife and indeed entire ecosystems, from oil development and the extraction of iron, gold, rare earths, and, in the case of possible uranium mining in South Greenland, about an imagined future of biohazards, contaminated landscapes and coastal waters, and generalized environmental ruin.

These different ideas concerning places and resources are common features of discourses about resource frontiers in other parts of the world, and they are consistent with what Anthony Bebbington, Nicholas Cuba, and John Rohan (2014) see as a phenomenon of “overlapping geographies” associated with the expansion and intensive development of extractive industries. They point to this notion of overlapping geographies as involving different ideas about who should access, use, and occupy particular spaces, who should govern and control what goes on in those spaces, how resources should be extracted, and who should benefit from such development. In recent writing, I have argued that assumptions about landscapes and waters as empty spaces devoid of any kind of social and cultural significance, as well as their economic importance for local communities—to be marked off and defined as resource spaces and sacrifice zones important for economic development and state formation—are apparent in the ways extractive industries approach working in Greenland, as well as in the fact that government authorities are ready to grant exploration and development licences without a deep appreciation of the meaning of place (Nuttall 2017). The planning for extractive industries involves a range of very specific economic, volumetric, and stratigraphic procedures and practices concerning landscapes, coastal waters, and the Greenlandic underlands that are used to define, demarcate, lay claim to, and regulate and govern particular places as resource spaces—remote hinterlands viewed as being at the edge of human society—rather than recognize them as lively worlds of past and present Inuit societies in which astonishing encounters between the human and more-than-human occur.

I have also written previously about how people in the Upernavik area see their surroundings as places of becoming and movement (Nuttall 2009, 2017). Hunting and fishing not only require skill, technique, know-how, resourcefulness, equipment and technology, as well as a little bit of luck at times; such occupations also demand of the hunter and fisher a willingness to be ready at all times in this world of constant surprise and continual shifts and turns (Nuttall 2010). Taking nothing for granted—especially the weather, the sea, and the ice—daily life needs to be attuned to the vagaries of the weather, to the seasonal migrations and local availability of marine mammals and fish, or to the power of the sea and the formation, permutations, and fickleness of sea ice, and to the possibilities of animals being anxious or disturbed by something unsettling (animals can also be unsettled by the wrong kind of hunter, one who lacks knowledge and skill). But it is also informed by the ways people relate to one another, how they encounter and anticipate change, and how they think about the possibilities of engagement with their surroundings and the non-human (including not just the animals that people hunt and the fish they entice from the water, but the sled dogs they rely on for transportation and hunting partnerships). Hunting and fishing require an ability to sense and imagine what may be there, but also what may be absent. Being ready means anticipating what the weather could be like and the prospects for a successful hunt, for instance, or the likelihood of experiencing ice that is suddenly cut up by the current (aakarneq), but also being prepared for the absence of things and for places to no longer contain the essence of animals. Seals, perhaps, may not be in places one might expect, or muskox and reindeer may have moved to other parts of the landscape, or, as I have described, narwhals may be found closer to the coast in agitated and restless states.

Recent anthropological approaches to anticipation seek to understand it in terms of lived experience (for examples, see Bryant and Knight 2019; Stephan and Flaherty 2019), privileging its experiential nature rather than seeing it only in terms of speculation, prediction, or forecast. Similarly, I think of anticipation in Greenlandic hunting communities less as being bound up with future-making and adaptation, and more as a way of moving within the world, experiencing, encountering, and engaging with one’s surroundings, and thinking through and experimenting with the possibilities of social relatedness, not just with other people, but with the more-than-human too. Anticipation is as much about the lived moment as it is about an immediate, near, or distant future. In Greenlandic, anticipation may be rendered as either isumalluarneq or ilimasunneq, which have “thought”/“reason” (isuma) and “expect” (ilima) as their roots. Ilimasunneq conveys a sense of not only “anticipation” and “expectation” for things (especially animals and fish), which may be there, but also “feeling” and “clue.” Hunters express this in a number of other ways as well. For example, ilimagaa means “to expect something,” while neriugaa means “to hope for, or be hopeful of something.” Anticipation also, but not always, involves a measure of uncertainty, anxiety, nervousness, fear, and disappointment, as well as agitation; ilimasuppoq, for instance, can mean that one expects something fearful, does not feel safe, or senses or feels danger (ilimatsappoq is to be in a constant state of anxious expectation; for example, if a hunter is on the lookout for polar bears, but it also means an awareness of danger—of headland cracks suddenly opening up when travelling on sea ice, or of the possibility of a walrus rising up from the water and capsizing a boat). Hunters set out on the ice in winter with their sled dogs or go out to sea in summer in small boats with the hope, expectation even, of returning home with seals (they may say they are expecting something good to come from the hunt when they set out from home—ilimasuarnarpoq), while anticipating that they may not catch anything at all. One can be hopeful (neriugaa) or anxious and fearful, especially of bad weather (aarleraa).

When I first went out hunting with people from Kangersuatsiaq in the late 1980s, I was taught the importance of being prepared for the surprise of seeing the unexpected, the real, the imagined, or the spectral (aliortorpoq) when at sea, on the ice, or walking on the land. There is a word—puisaarpoq— for something that appears to be present but that can turn out to be nothing at all; something, a shape, a moving figure, or an animal itself may appear to be there, ahead in the water, or on land, but suddenly disappear. (As an aside, and related to puisaarpoq, the generic word for seal is puisi, which means, in one sense, “raises its head out of the water.”) A hunter may see what he thinks is a seal or narwhal—quite clearly—but it may turn out to be nothing. Stories are frequently told of hunters seeing a kayak, a boat, or a dog sled, or people moving in the landscape, or of campsites ahead in a valley or close to the shore, only for these images to disappear suddenly when the hunter approaches (puisaartitsivoq). They may be residual memories—or traces and glimmers of the essence—of the people and animals that inhabited the landscape and moved through the coastal waters in previous times, or they may be ghosts, other non-human entities such as beings and creatures that live underground, or visions, or they may occur because of a playful light or a trick of the eye. When one is certain a seal, narwhal, or whale has been spotted, but it disappears below the surface of the water or behind waves so that it is no longer visible, then one would describe this as qapangippoq rather than puisaarpoq. Qappivoq means to disappear below the water, or for the sea to close above and over something; qapivaa means to lose sight of something because it has disappeared below a wave or below the horizon (qapittarpoq means something disappears frequently from view because of waves in a rough sea). This is quite different from the experience of puisaartitsivoq, when something you think you can see in front of you—in the water, up on a ridge, in a dip between the mountains—suddenly disappears. Indeed, being prepared for uncertainty, disappointment, and failure (in other words, anticipating this possibility and expecting to be anxious, in terms, say, of not feeling safe—ilimasuppoq), or for not finding what you may think is there, or that you think you see, and to recognize and acknowledge that animals are elusive, and being aware of the unseen and that things may not be what they seem or appear, is a hallmark of successful adaptation to one’s surroundings and engagement with a more-than-human world in which the spatial and temporal converge and blur (Nuttall 2010, 25–26).

People in northwest Greenland have met with and responded to environmental, economic, and social change at many times in the past, but they have also anticipated possibilities and economic opportunities, seeking out, discovering, and exploring places to hunt and fish, and creating new seasonal camps and more permanent settlements in which to live and raise families (Nuttall 2010; Petersen 2003). In the mid- to late twentieth century, many places were established, abandoned, resettled, and abandoned again for various reasons, although some are still used seasonally, and place names indicate and are suggestive of what is at those places, or what one may expect to find there, such as good hunting and fishing opportunities; occasionally they also hint at what—and who—was once there and trigger memories of people, genealogies, occasions, and events, as well as spectral figures and shadows that haunt the landscape. Even the traces of the things one may have thought were there, but which suddenly disappeared, remain present in the stories told about these happenings.

Throughout the year, people move between their home settlements and spring, summer, and autumn camps, or move to other communities for the winter to take advantage of the Greenland halibut fishery. People travel regularly and extensively, whether to hunt and fish, to visit relatives, to shop in Upernavik, or to spend time living seasonally in other villages or in camps. As fishing for Greenland halibut is the mainstay of the household and the regional economy, people often travel between specific places and points. Fishers must locate themselves near the best fishing grounds, often spending several months of the year away from their home communities. Movement between places is also a matter of capacity in the fishing industry. Most villages have fish landing and freezing facilities owned by Royal Greenland, a Greenland government–owned company focused on fishing and fish processing, but communities such as Naajaat and Kangersuatsiaq do not (the facility in Kangersuatsiaq closed in 2011, which I discuss in more detail below), meaning fishers must travel to places such as Kullorsuaq, Nuussuaq, Nutaarmiut, Innaarsuit, and Tasiusaq in the more northerly parts of the district to fish and land their catch. Some even make a more or less permanent move to those communities, settling there because of the better possibilities for fishing and selling the Greenland halibut they pull out of the water on longlines. Much fishing is also done for the household and for wider community sharing. From May onward, fishing camps (which become centres of family activity, as well as places of procurement for household consumption and sale) are established in the southern and central parts of the district. Arctic char and Greenland halibut are caught, then prepared, dried, or smoked at the camps; cod are boiled and eaten as soon as they are caught, or dried for later, Atlantic wolfish are consumed with relish, while fjord cod are caught for dog food (plentiful supplies are needed for autumn and winter).

Sea ice (siku) remains central to how people arrange and configure their lives for several months of the year, yet even before climate change became a local concern, people have always had to be attentive to how siku’s apparently solid nature, its thickness, fixity, and fastness, cannot and should not be taken for granted. Today, however, anticipatory knowledge is challenged by changes to sea ice cover. The flexibility that has been characteristic of life along the coast is reduced—yet a hunter’s openness to uncertainty, to movement, to presence and absence, and knowing and appreciating that the world is full of surprise, means a life characterized by anticipation goes a considerable way to helping meet this challenge (see also Hastrup 2016). People are increasingly encountering difficulties in gaining access to hunting and fishing places (as well as in travelling between communities) because of quite rapid and dramatic changes in sea ice cover and extreme weather conditions (figure 5.4). The sea still freezes (sikornepoq) in the Upernavik area during winter, but people say the cover of ice that forms on the sea is no longer all that solid (sikorluppoq), and sikuaq (thin ice), rather than siku, is a more common way of describing what now does form in many places, while sikunnaq, weather that promises a cover of ice, seems an increasingly rare occurrence in some months. Travel by dog sledge between some communities is also now almost impossible in winter, especially from the settlements to the town of Upernavik (Nuttall 2017).

The consequences of a changing climate are noticeable throughout the district. Fjords and bays are filled with the detritus of ice from tidewater glaciers, and land is being revealed as those glaciers recede (often providing opportunities to establish new campsites and places for hunting and fishing—even as glacial ice disappears, places emerge, and local topographies are reshaped). Increased meltwater runoff from glacial fronts is affecting water temperature and circulation patterns as well as the formation of sea ice (Briner, Håkansson, and Bennike 2013). This has an influence on the distribution and availability of the marine mammals—the seals, walrus, narwhals, beluga, and whales—and the fish that hunters seek out. In summer and autumn, some seals have been moving further away from coastal waters with the shifting pack (and some hunters in the southern part of the district say that they noticed the absence of seals following the seismic activities that were carried out in Baffin Bay). The pack ice that remains also acts as a barrier for getting to and from the settlements. This makes it necessary for hunting forays and journeys between some communities to be made some distance from the coast, to get around the ice, into what hunters call iluakkooq (the swell) and even further out to sea where the swell is heavier (iluakkoorpoq). This adds a greater element of risk and danger to hunting and to travel at sea. The world around them may not be seen as fragile or vulnerable, as scientists and environmentalists might have it, but while people in the Upernavik district increasingly reflect upon it as a world that is changing, moving, turbulent, and precarious in ways it may not usually have been experienced, it is also one of absence.

When they talk about changes in the weather and their surroundings, people will generally give the same accounts of thinning, patchy ice, or brittle ice (sikulaaq), and areas of open water where the surface of the sea no longer freezes (sikujuippoq). Certainly, this has been the trend recently, yet I was able to experience how the winter of 2015 brought good, solid ice throughout much of the district. Some hunters made journeys by dog sled from the central part of the district south to Upernavik town and to Kangersuatsiaq. Stories were told to young people that these trips lasting several days were like those both people and dogs were able to make “in the old days,” invoking memories (and recalling photographs) of travel on sea ice in places many are no longer able to visit and experience in winter. But when people talk of “the old days” or “times in the past” (qangarsuaq), or situate their memories “in former times” or “in times gone by” (itsaq), this sense of temporality encompasses the 1980s and early 1990s as much as it does decades before, a relatively recent time before observations and experiences of the recent changes in climate and a transforming icescape indicated what was to become more usual.

In mid-February that winter, I experienced temperatures of around –35°C and saw a wide extent of ice cover throughout the district—extensive even around the town of Upernavik—during a helicopter flight from Upernavik to Kullorsuaq. Yet during the following winter, the ice was not so good again, and people were reminded that climate change was perhaps the new norm. People did not feel that the winter of 2015 had intimated a possible return to how the ice used to be. A friend from Kangersuatsiaq (which is located to the south of Upernavik town) told me he was fishing near the district’s most southerly community of Upernavik Kujalleq on 21 December 2016; it was very cold, he said, and he was fishing and moving around the area in his boat in the mid-winter darkness, but there was no sea ice and he was able to take his catch by boat back to Upernavik. When the ice did form a few weeks later, it was almost gone by early March 2017, although when I travelled between Upernavik and Kangersuatsiaq by boat with him in May that year some of the fjords were still frozen and the ice extended a few kilometres from the coast. This was not good ice, though, people in the community said. They could not, for the most part, get out to the fjords during winter to fish by dog sled or snowmobile as the ice was not solid enough or had not formed at all in parts, while the hunting of seals by open boat was hindered by the moving pack. Places such as Salleq, an island to the north of Kangersuatsiaq, can no longer be reached in winter by dog sled, and the ice pack often makes it difficult even to get there by boat. For example, when I first lived in Kangersuatsiaq, in the late 1980s, Salleq was a key place for seal hunting in winter and spring, and Itilleq, a dip on the western point of the island, was an important crossing place for those travelling by dog sled. Yet the winter route across Itilleq has hardly been used since the early 2000s. In May 2017, I travelled out to Salleq by boat with friends, and we told stories of setting seal nets under the ice around the island, reminiscing about spending cold January days huddled around the stove in the hunters’ hut on the island. People from Kangersuatsiaq now seldom come to Salleq in winter, they said, and they often pass it by during summer as well.

My first period of fieldwork in the Upernavik district was focused mainly on the social world of Kangersuatsiaq (see figure 5.1) and what people there thought about place and landscape and how they experienced human-environment relations. At that time, Kangersuatsiaq had a reputation in northern Greenland as a place with a young, hard-working, ambitious population. Like many other hunting communities in Greenland, though, as well as in the eastern Canadian Arctic, Kangersuatsiaq had been hit hard by the European ban on most seal skin products, following the successful campaigns run by anti-sealing and anti-trapping environmentalist and animal-rights groups. The sale of seal skins had provided the main source of income for most families. The experimental fishery for Greenland halibut was beginning and local people saw an opportunity to earn an income. The village prospered throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. Today, however, around one-third of the houses in Kangersuatsiaq are now empty as people have moved to Upernavik or to other communities over the past decade or so. One reason for this is that Royal Greenland closed the fish processing plant in 2011 because of the difficulties and expense of providing it with a supply of fresh water. This has nothing to do with climate change; the village is on a small island with no source of fresh water other than from the icebergs that surround it.

The closure of the fish plant has meant that fishing has declined in importance and the village is no longer considered a centre for the Greenland halibut fishery as there are no longer landing and processing facilities in the village and, as a result, no opportunity to sell the catch there. Many of those who still live in Kangersuatsiaq, and who were spending most of their time in recent years on fishing, have returned to being full-time hunters. Difficulties remain in selling seal skins or other products from the hunting of marine mammals, but this return to hunting has brought to the act of procurement a greater focus on the provision of meat and fish for the household and the wider community. Patterns of sharing and distributing meat and fish also remain strong, a fact that local people say also accounts for what makes it possible for those who remain in Kangersuatsiaq to sustain their livelihoods in the community. “People here share, we help each other out,” they say.

Movement away from Kangersuatsiaq began earlier than the closure of the fish processing facility, though. Some Kangersuatsiarmiit (people from Kangersuatsiaq) have always left, as people from other places have done, for purposes of education or work, or marriage, and they are to be found in many parts of Greenland as well as living in Denmark. But there had for some decades been a stability to the population, and it even increased in the mid-1990s and early 2000s as people from other parts of Upernavik district moved there because of the good fishing prospects. Movement today amounts to a process of steady depopulation, and it seems to be lamented. People in Upernavik and other parts of the district say “Kangersuatsiarmiit ikillipput” (“The Kangersuatsiarmiit have become fewer”) and this is something people from the village say of themselves too. Local explanatory accounts say that the closure of the fish processing plant, or the changing weather, or the lack of sea ice has “made them fewer” (ikillivai). But older people in the village say that those who turned full-time to fishing gave up their dogs in favour of snowmobiles and forgot their skills as hunters—those who did not anticipate the necessity of retaining hunting skills and knowledge or, in the face of a changing climate, those unable to read the signs and cues of how their surroundings take on different forms in a world of becoming (those who seemed to lack ilimasunneq)—could not make a living as hunters when the fish factory closed. A return to full-time hunting was necessary, but many chose to leave the village to be able to live as fishers in Upernavik town and other villages.

As the population declines, it is old people who are mainly left in the village today (as well as a few active hunters in their forties and fifties and their families), but their number is dwindling. When I returned to Upernavik in May 2017, the first news I was given was that four old people I knew in Kangersuatsiaq—I was on my way there—had died during the winter. On my recent visits to Kangersuatsiaq, conversations tend to begin with an account of those who have passed away or who have moved elsewhere since the last time I was there. These conversations with friends in their homes are almost always accompanied by photographs of people and places. They aid the stories that are told about the places in which people have hunted, about how traces of past lives are woven through the landscape and infuse the coastal waters. Memories of people who are long deceased remain alive in stories of hunting, fishing, and community events, as well as through their names. Places are saturated with memories of travel, hunting, fishing, and individual and family action and events. These stories express powerful feelings about what and who is no longer present, whether it is a person, sea ice, or a way of life, or winter dog sled routes that can no longer be traced on maps, and about who is being lost—whether through death, suicide, or movement away. People may be fewer in terms of their actual physical presence in the village, but naming practices and the stories that are told about them mean Kangersuatsiarmiit retain their social presence after death.

Naming and memory are ways of making absence felt, but also of retaining the presence and the essence of people, things, and events that have passed, and the places that are no longer visited or used. Children are named after deceased relatives and close friends, and place names and stories about places recall the intermingling of people and events with those places, so that some (for example, campsites, an island where a polar bear was caught, a sea cave where hunters would wait in their kayaks for passing seals, a mountain slope where ghosts ooze from cracks in the rocks, or a headland that emerged as a glacier receded) assume a reputation for being inextricably connected to people and their actions and with the things people see and experience. As Meyer (2012) points out, absences have traces, but absences are themselves also traces. While this hints at the spectral aspects of place (Maddern and Adey 2008), and of the traces of the things that may still linger and possibly haunt landscapes and people’s lives, absence and loss are not necessarily expressed in memories of things past that are unduly nostalgic or that can be considered mere reminiscence, but rather in practices of remembering people, places, and activities that are rooted in the present (Degnen 2005; Meier, Frers, and Sigvardsdotter 2013). By this I mean that memories are not merely traces of things that were once present and are now absent—they retain a vitality and are essential to the contemporary meanings and everyday conversations about places. Indeed, memories, traces, ghosts, the ethereal, and the more-than-human inhabit and “people” the landscape (innersorpaa), expanding the world and bringing it into being. As Meyer (2012) also argues, absence has a materiality and it exists within and has considerable effects on the spaces and places people inhabit and use, as well as on their everyday experiences and practices.

I argue that this sense of absence—memories of people and things that are seemingly absent or of places that are seldom or no longer visited or used, as well as an awareness of things, non-human entities and substances such as ice, that are materially absent or that could be absent in the near future (see, for example, Bille, Hastrup, and Sørensen 2010)—is essential to the continuity of life, with memories of people and events, or of winters with thick, solid ice, brought into the present. This rich, social vitality contributes to the very making of a sense of community and a sense of place and it goes some considerable way toward explaining the nature of resilience in communities in the Upernavik district in the face of the social, economic, and environmental changes that are so often abrupt. As one woman put it to me in the summer of 2017, in response to my question about how she and her husband saw themselves in the future in Kangersuatsiaq: “We will stay. Yes, people are leaving and life can be a little hard here, but one gets peace (eqqissivoq) in Kangersuatsiaq.”

The rapidly changing Arctic demands the convergence of diverse ways of knowing and understanding in a dialogue on being and becoming in the world. This might then point the way toward new directions for interdisciplinary, collaborative research to inform thinking about sustainability, resilience, and adaptation. But it also demands greater understanding of people’s relationships with place, the nature of place, how the livelihoods and trajectories of human and more-than-human selves are entangled and bring places into being, and how these livelihoods shape and are also shaped by political, economic, and cultural forces and processes (for example, see Kirksey and Helmreich 2010, 545; Kohn 2007). Such an approach is attentive to the concerns raised by some recent multi-species scholarship in anthropology about the ways in which, as Anna Tsing (2013) has it, worlds are made and come into being through the intersecting trajectories of many species. In northern Greenland, these trajectories include those of humans, whether they are hunters, marine biologists, or oil and mineral exploration crews, other species such as narwhals, whales, seals, and polar bears, and other non-human entities such as sea ice and icebergs, as well as seismic lines from exploration vessels that leave no visible trace on the surface of the water but that have lingering effects in the darkest depths of the sea (Nuttall 2017).

To this I would add the importance of understanding anticipation, absence, and loss, as well as the memories, traces, and trajectories of the lives of people who have died but who continue on through their names, and how the significance of the places associated with them continue to have a lively presence. People who have passed on or who have left their home communities for somewhere else may be physically absent, but they retain a social presence not just in stories and in ways of remembering, but through names and naming relationships that inform the everyday enactment, continuation, and reproduction of social relationships (Nuttall 1992). So, too, does ice, which may have disappeared from parts of the coast, or which may not be forming as people say it should. The traces of sea ice linger in stories, experiences, community memories, and in the photographs that fill family albums. However, while people, when talking about the future, have hope that the sea ice may return to how it used to be, feelings of agitation and anxiety also play some part in how they articulate concerns over what they worry the long-term effects of oil and other resource exploration bring. These phenomena haunt northern seascapes, particularly those resulting from the seismic surveys that have been carried out in recent years in Baffin and Melville Bays.

Rapid and quite abrupt change is nothing new for the Arctic and its peoples, of course. The legacies of colonialism, resettlement by the state, and economic transitions, or international environmentalist opposition to marine mammal hunting or fur trapping, for example, continue to have their effects in many Indigenous communities in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, northern Fennoscandia, and northern Russia today, while seasonal variations have always posed challenges to hunters, fishers, and herders. Yet the kinds of changes people are witness to and now experience in weather and climate, in the sea ice and coastal waters, and in the behaviour and habits of animals, bring a quite different range of challenges to life in northern places. Current interest in the Arctic as a global space that is either open for business or that demands protection is rarely attentive, though, to the nature of place and human-environment relations, or to the relations between humans and animals, and how people are affected by resource development or conservation practices. Nor is it sufficiently attentive to anticipation and anticipatory experience, or the need to be prepared to find that something is not there, or is no longer there—something that could be absent rather than present—and to acknowledge that deep engagement with one’s surroundings means that one has to be prepared for uncertainty and astonishment in a world of constant surprise, disappearance, and emergence.

This chapter draws from research carried out in northwest Greenland under the auspices of the Climate and Society research program at the Greenland Climate Research Centre (GCRC Project 6400), as well as the EU-funded ICE-ARC FP7 project (grant number 603887) and the ArcticChallenge project funded by the Norwegian Research Council.

• Anderson, Ben, and John Wylie
• 2009 On Geography and Materiality. Environment and Planning A 41(2): 318–335.
• Bebbington, Anthony, Nicholas Cuba, and John Rohan
• 2014 The Overlapping Geographies of Resource Extraction. ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America 13(2): 20–23.
• Bille, Mikkel, Frida Hastrup, and Tim Flohr Sørensen (editors)
• 2010 An Anthropology of Absence and Loss: Materializations of Transcendence and Loss. Springer, New York.
• Briner, Jason P., Lena Håkansson, and Ole Bennike
• 2013 The Glaciation and Neoglaciation of Upernavik Isstrøm, Greenland. Quaternary Research 80: 459–467.
• Bryant, Rebecca, and David M. Knight
• 2019 The Anthropology of the Future. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• Degnen, Cathrine
• 2005 Relationality, Place, and Absence: A Three-Dimensional Perspective on Social Memory. Sociological Review 53(4): 729–744.
• Dodds, Klaus, and Mark Nuttall
• 2016 The Scramble for the Poles: The Geopolitics of the Arctic and Antarctic. Polity, Cambridge.
• Dunbar, M. J.
• 1973 Stability and Fragility in Arctic Ecosystems. Arctic 26(3): 179–185.
• Hastrup, Kirsten
• 2016 Climate Knowledge: Assemblage, Anticipation, Action. In Anthro-pology and Climate Change: From Actions to Transformations, edited by Susan A. Crate and Mark Nuttall, pp. 35–57. Routledge, London.
• Howat, I. M., A. Negrete, and B. E. Smith
• 2014 The Greenland Ice Mapping Project (GIMP) Land Classification and Surface Elevation Datasets. Cryosphere 8: 1509–1518. doi:10.5194/tc-8-1509-2014.
• Ingold, Tim
• 2000 The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Routledge, London.
• Kirksey, S. Eben, and Stefan Helmreich
• 2010 The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography. Cultural Anthro-pology 25(4): 545–576.
• Kohn, Eduardo
• 2007 How Dogs Dream: Amazonian Natures and the Politics of Transpecies Engagement. American Ethnologist 34(1): 3–24.
• Maddern, Jo Frances, and Peter Adey
• 2008 Editorial: Spectro-Geographies. Cultural Geographies 15(3): 291–295.
• Meier, Lars, Lars Frers, and Erika Sigvardsdotter
• 2013 The Importance of Absence in the Present: Practices of Remembrance and the Contestation of Absences. Cultural Geographies 20(4): 423–430.
• Meyer, Morgan
• 2012 Placing and Tracing Absence: A Material Culture of the Immaterial. Journal of Material Culture 17(1): 103–110.
• Nuttall, Mark
• 1992 Arctic Homeland: Kinship, Community and Development in Northwest Greenland. University of Toronto Press, Toronto.
• 2001 Locality, Identity and Memory in South Greenland. Études/Inuit/Studies 25(12): 53–72.
• 2009 Living in a World of Movement: Human Resilience to Environmental Instability in Greenland. In Anthropology and Climate Change: From Encounters to Actions, edited by Susan A. Crate and Mark Nuttall, pp. 292–310. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California.
• 2010 Anticipation, Climate Change, and Movement in Greenland. Études/Inuit/Studies 34(1): 21–37.
• 2016 Narwhal Hunters, Seismic Surveys and the Middle Ice: Monitoring Environmental Change in Greenland’s Melville Bay. In Anthropology and Climate Change: From Actions to Transformations, edited by Susan A. Crate and Mark Nuttall, pp. 354–372. Routledge, London.
• 2017 Climate, Society and Subsurface Politics in Greenland: Under the Great Ice. Routledge, London.
• 2019 Icy, Watery, Liquescent: Sensing and Feeling Climate Change on Northwest Greenland’s Coast. Journal of Northern Studies 14(2): 71–91.
• Petersen, Robert
• 2003 Settlements, Kinship and Hunting Grounds in Traditional Greenland: A Comparative Study of Local Experiences from Upernavik and Ammassalik. Meddelelser om Grønland, Man and Society No. 27. Danish Polar Center, Copenhagen.
• Stephan, Christopher, and Devin Flaherty
• 2019 Introduction: Experiencing Anticipation. Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 37(1): 1–16.
• Tsing, Anna
• 2013 More-than-Human Sociality: A Call for Critical Description. In Anthropology and Nature, edited by Kirsten Hastrup, pp. 27–42. Routledge, London.
• Wadhams, Peter
• 2017 A Farewell to Ice: A Report from the Arctic. Oxford University Press, Oxford.