More-Than-Human Intimacies and Traditional Knowledge among Hunting Families in Northwest Greenland

The Hunter Lifeway

We first provide a brief overview of humanenvironment entanglements in everyday hunter lifeways. This context is essential for understanding the ways in which knowledge of these entanglements is transmitted, as well as how local perceptions of how the entanglements implicating traditional knowledge have shifted with time.

To understand the impetus for hunting, it is worth briefly mentioning how hunting families described preferences for Greenlandic foods (typically marine-mammal meat). Hunters often described craving seal meat, longing for seal fat, and not feeling satiated if no seal had been eaten that day. Marine mammals, in particular, compose a significant portion of the diet in northwest Greenland (Bjerregaard and Jeppesen 2010), and the household has been considered the basic unit of food production in Inuit societies (Freeman 2005:59–76). In a national survey of Kalaallit (Greenlandic Inuit), mattak and seal meat received some of the highest food-preference ratings, with seal meat being the most frequently consumed food on a daily basis (Pars et al. 2001). Diets in Greenlandic villages have been found to be particularly local relative to the rest of the country, and a propensity for a traditional Greenlandic diet has been found to increase with age, among village residents and by hunters/fishermen and their families (Bjerregaard and Jeppesen 2010). In Kullorsuaq, some described Greenlandic animals such as polar bears, walrus, narwhals, and belugas as rich in “vitamins.” One hunter said he didn’t feel full after eating Danish food, pork, or beef, but that seal meat satiated him. Hunters described positive emotional feelings after returning from a hunt and in response to seeing human kin eat their catch. These embodied aspects of traditional Greenlandic food make sense of the impetus to hunt particular species described throughout.

Hunting families in Kullorsuaq described hunting beluga, narwhal, seal, walrus, polar bear, and fish. Generally, but not always, men described dedicating their time to hunting and women preparing/processing sealskins, blubber, and food preparation. Since childhood, hunters described listening to stories and directly observing members of older generations hunt before participating in their own hunts with tools (boats, harpoons) provided directly by parents. Hunters’ wives described learning to work with and becoming attuned to the texture of sealskin from their mothers. Hunting values described included not wasting the animal carcass, feeding parts of the catch to sled dogs, and sharing divisions of the whale catch with other families in the settlement, which was also observed in practice (field notes, Kullorsuaq, October 2017).

Lifeways centered on whaling reflect centuries of practice by Greenlandic Inuit hunters (Caulfield 1993). Marine mammals comprised 48% of the faunal assemblage at the nearby Saqqaq excavation site of Nipisat, ranging from 2020 BC to 810 BC, indicating a long-standing and historical familiarity with and hunting of whales among the Greenlandic Inuit (Gotfredsen and Møbjerg 2004). Communality in whale hunting practices (both in hunting and sharing of the catch) has been documented in the nearby town of Saqqaq, and mattak (whale skin), meat, and blubber are not only locally shared but also shared as gifts throughout Inuit kinship networks (Dahl 2000; Milton 2005). Attunement to signals from the local environment amid a material scarcity conducive to communality in hunting practice made storytelling important to the transmission of hunting knowledge.

Hunters described older family members telling stories about lunar temporalities, ice formation and melting cycles, tide patterns, cloud formations, storm systems, and animal migratory behaviors that informed the contemporary practice of traditional hunting. For example, one hunter described how:

We go hunting according to the moon; during the new moon, we make a hole on the ice and put down a balloon. My father told me if the balloon goes away from land, the weather will be bad this month and that the animals would be difficult to catch. First, I didn’t understand what he meant, but then I understood that when the balloon drifts toward the land, the animals like seals and other animals will come closer to land, or there will be more of them that month. That I have noticed. On the shortest day of the year, early in the morning, we study the seaweed now. It is a special day for our family, and others have started to join us. Studying the seaweed is something our ancestors have been carrying to their children, and my father taught me how to study the seaweed. It is amazing what we can get out of studying the seaweed; whether the winter will be bad with less animals or good with lots of animals.

In some versions of the story of Sassuma Arnaa, combing or cleaning her parasite-ridden hair (i.e., seaweed) through the shape-shifting work of a shaman releases marine mammals when they do not appear (Boas 1888; Wardle 1900). In crossing the ontological boundary (Viveiros de Castro 2004), the shaman’s interaction with Sassuma Arnaa would require attunement to the seaweed to manifest a release of whales (i.e., food). The hunter’s description above is focused on nonhuman elements of a cosmopraxis stripped of its metanarrative.

Hunters and their wives attuned to and reflected upon nonhumans in ways that characterize rapid shifts in the local environment. For example, hunters’ wives described learning to work with sealskin from a young age and observing a greater frequency of hairless skins on seals over their lifetimes, which they attributed to warmer water in a warming climate. Hunters described rapid shifts in ice formations and animal migrations over their lifetimes. Many described sea ice being thicker in the past, forming earlier and remaining frozen for a longer duration of time (typically from October to July). This contrasts with descriptions of ice being thinner and forming only during the darker winter months in the present. Hunters’ observations of the ice are generated from experiences dogsledding, spending relative amounts of time and effort boring holes to hunt seal, and changing navigational signals, such as never-before-seen land formations accompanying the melting of the ice cap. Hunters described feeling anxious and alarmed on the ice today, given the dangers associated with falling through the continuously thinning ice while hunting.

Temporary and permanent navigational markers such as ice inform local traditional knowledge in the Arctic (Whitridge 2004). Mark Nuttall (2018:6) writes that

weather words are becoming critical for anticipatory knowledge, for how people prepare, focus, and think about how they must act (silattorsarpoq), and for how they navigate a world in which daily life plays out in surroundings of movement, emergence, and becoming.

Changes in the ice cover are salient in the memories of Kullorsuaq residents, and this, in turn, has partially contributed to shifts in the technologies used by hunters to hunt. Inuit hunting technologies and techniques have been recognized for their responsiveness to the Arctic’s climate (Dugmore et al. 2007). Technology carries with it the knowledge that goes into its making (Strathern 2004), and disappearing technologies reflect ongoing epistemicide, which refers to the killing of traditional knowledge (Grosfoguel 2013; Hall and Tanden 2017). The changing climate is one of the factors implicated in how local hunting technologies are shifting with a human-environment entanglement.

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Figure 2.

Hunter from Kullorsuaq with sled dogs going to hunt seal.

Changes in the ice cover were described as changing hunting behaviors, including less reliance on dog sleds and more reliance on gasoline-powered boats. Hunters described the changing ice conditions as negatively affecting sled dogs’ paws, contributing to less polar bear hunting but more fishing. Hunters lamented their decreasing ability to predict the weather due to warmer water, strong tides, high winds, and unfamiliar cloud formations. One hunter reflected on the changes he has observed in the local environment:

Sometimes when I am out hunting and take a break looking around, I think about how much changes there are. Some places are unrecognizable from the time I started as a hunter. I know the places, but I can see that there are differences. Some places are not a part of the mainland anymore— they are now islands because of the melted ice. That’s how it is now.

Hunters also narrated shifts in whale stocks they claim coincide with the changing ice formations. Hunters described seeing more narwhal and beluga, as well as new whale species entering local waters, such as bowhead, humpback, and minke whales (Fig. 3) (Kullorsuaq, October 2017). Hunters’ observations were confirmed by a separate study of narwhals, where catch statistics showed an increase among hunters after 2002, which does not appear to reflect an increase in hunter effort rather than hunters’ attributing the increase to changed sea-ice conditions (Nielsen 2009). Furthermore, the resurgence in minke whales could reflect low quotas imposed on minke whale catches toward the end of the 20th century in western Greenland (Caulfield 1993:144–155). Intermittent sightings of bowhead whales have been historically observed in western Greenland, albeit in relatively small numbers (Born and Heidi-Jørgensen 1983).

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Figure 3.

Hunters at the fjords near Kullorsuaq with a catch from a minke whale.

Hunters described new fish species like capelin appearing in local waters. Hunters described seeing more ravens, more reindeer, and fewer seals over time. As these changes continue to occur, and as there is a stronger local market incentive for fish, many hunters appear to be disproportionately favoring fishing activities in comparison with hunting practices requiring ice travel by dog sled. In sum, the changing climate was narrated as one of the factors that influenced hunting technology and practice, as well as shifts in the size of local animal populations.

More-Than-Human Intimacies

More-than-human intimacies are the affective renderings and sometimes ineffable attachments that develop between nonhumans and their human counterparts. They emerge from deep observation, reflection, heightened sensitivities, dreaming, and storytelling among humans in which the transmission of traditional knowledge regarding nonhumans also takes place. In Inuit lifeways, components of the landscape (e.g., the ice, the ocean) comprise active memoryscapes and visionscapes that signal cosmic forces and effects (Sejersen 2004). Hunters narrated the dispositions of the prey they hunted, described dreams about the dogs they used to hunt prey, and expressed wonder at the unobserved species perceived to exist in the environments they hunted in. Here, we characterize more-than-human intimacies that hunters narrated, and we illustrate dynamics surrounding the transmission of traditional knowledge in hunter lifeways.

Hunters and hunters’ wives described a wide range of emotions associated with observing the environment, typically while hunting or boating. One hunter described an immense adrenaline rush after harpooning a beluga and feeling stronger when encountering new prey. Hunters described experiences of crying outside, nostalgia/longing for contact with the unsettled outdoors after spending too much time in the settlement, feeling more energy when out in nature, feeling deeply touched by the sounds heard in nature, feeling peaceful, rich, strong, and having other affective responses in direct relation to nonhumans.

Hunters narrated the dispositions of nonhumans being hunted for human food. Some sensed that prey have become more nervous with shifts in the environment. One hunter described his fascination with the maternal instincts he observed when a young narwhal was attacked by an adult narwhal. Another told how he controlled a seal’s movement with his thoughts. The heightened sensitivity to nonhumans in local environments extends to the dogs used by hunters. Everyday attention to dog training, feeding, and caretaking was described. Indeed, the everyday conditions of sled dogs occupied attention in Franz Boas’s late 19th-century fieldnote observations about the Inuit of Baffin Island (Boas actually wanted to take two pups from a litter back with him to New York before gifting them to a man in K’armaxdjuin who had lost his dogs) (Grønnow 2009:191–201). Less-stable conditions on the ice have recently been documented as affecting dog sledding in northwestern Greenland (Hansen and Tejsner 2016). In Kullorsuaq, numerous immaterial concerns emerged surrounding dogs. Hunters described dreaming about their dogs and experiencing signals in the material environment (like a rock landing near one’s foot) that would determine the future birth of puppies. Hunters also described their sled dogs attacking qivittoq (outcasts) and protecting them from a tupilak (lethal creatures created by shamans) when sledding with their human counterparts.

Hunters told stories about seeing a giant lizard-like being, animals that looked like seals, a large man with thin arms living underwater in the sea, and large worms living in Baffin Bay. Hunters described ice-trails made by presumably large creatures that had never been seen before (these stories bear similarity to the giant kullugiaq [worm] or aasik [caterpillar] [Grønnow 2009:191–201]). Some suspected that Greenland had numerous species that had never yet been observed by humans. One hunter explained that the unobserved animals hide when they hear hunters:

I think they’re going to hear them the second they tread on that ice, and they are going to hide away. And I’ve seen that lake myself—there are many seagulls around that lake. Seagulls are only in places where they can have something to eat. And I think there’s much more life and animals here we’re not aware of around that lake.

Much more than “myth,” these stories exhibit local intimacies surrounding knowledge of nonhumans or “other-than-humans” (Hill 2012:41–57) in the local environment.

There were also perceptions that nonhuman spirits can be associated with humans, animals, or gods. Several described how after dying, the spirit of a person might remain earthbound as a result of unresolved affairs. One hunter commented that “The nature of the world has its own cycle that we don’t know of . . . we can’t control nature and we can’t change nature.” Several hunters described perceiving nonhuman presences or having direct contact with spirits. Such perceptions included hearing footsteps or something walking where there was no visible being, hearing voices emerge without visible beings creating them, seeing strange lights appear and disappear, perceiving that someone nonhuman was attempting to communicate, and hearing the kayak make a particular sound before catching a whale. Direct experiences included being sexually assaulted by an invisible being, feeling a protective force form around the exterior of the body in particularly bad weather, observing strange whale behavior and cloud formations before the arrival of Christian missionaries, and observing the levitation and movement of otherwise inanimate objects.

Many were intent on describing their dreams, interpreting dream experiences in relation to the nonhuman world. Individuals described premonitions regarding the birth and death of humans, the birth of canine pups, future material gains, and future hunting incidents as occurring in dreams. Dreams were often described with a symbolic interpretation (e.g., defecating in the dream signaled material gains in the real world or being attacked and eaten by dogs in a dream signaling wrongdoing against the person in the real world). Dreams were also described as a way to understand and communicate with other community members and kin who were in difficult life spaces, including debilitating health conditions and near/transitional death experiences. While distinct, these intimate connections with nonhumans and corresponding storytelling practices bear similarities with stories told by the Montagnais of Lake St. John about “Caribou man,” who dreamed of a female caribou before waking and joining the herd. After joining, he communicated with Montagnais about their troubles in life arising from killing caribou too freely (Speck 1925). Although everyday reliance upon shamanic practice has eroded with time, dreams were an intimate space for meaningmaking and might be interpreted in some cases as ontological boundary crossings (Viveiros de Castro 2004). The salience of dreams in the interview should not be discounted; as one hunter interrupted the interviewer to state, “I would really like to tell you more about the dreams I’ve been having while I was sleeping.”

The more-than-human intimacies we describe here might offer a sanctuary for psychospiritual expression following the epistemicide that accompanied colonization. In the 1950s, the Danish government began to “modernize” Greenland. Early Cold War tensions increased international interest in fortifying military presence and modernizing infrastructure in Greenland. Coupled with an increase in global market participation through industrial cod fisheries, Denmark initiated a strategic development plan in Greenland to grow the economy and maintain autonomy amidst the rising arctic warfare threat in 1950. Ensuing years saw construction of hospitals, schools, housing, dockyards, harbors, and transportation networks in southern and western Greenland, led by the Danish government (Nielsen 2013). Despite pressure from the United Nations to move towards decolonization, Danish policymakers fell short of granting autonomy to Greenlanders during this period of modernization, instead replicating a neocolonial agenda of development that reified Danish control over technological, political, economic, and social reforms in Greenland (Nielsen 2013; Olesen 2019). The modernization package was both preceded and accompanied by Christian missionaries engaging in acts of conversion (Abrams 2009). This effort included a legal provision to outlaw drums (made of sealskin) that were used in shamanic practice (Johnston 1977). While no mention is made of Sassuma Arnaa in descriptions of the more-than-human intimacies presented here, it is worth recalling that she was first tricked by her Fulmar husband, betrayed by her human father, and appeased by a boundary-crossing shaman to gift whales to hunters (Boas 1888; Wardle 1900). In the narrative, affiliations between nonhumans and humans are tied to strong emotions that require repeat ontological boundary crossings to result in satisfactory hunting outcomes and general survival. In Amerindian perspectivism, a non-Western ontological paradigm, it is necessary to know how to personify nonhumans, and it is necessary to personify them in order to know (Viveiros de Castro 2004). In Kullorsuaq, the experience and expression of more-than-human intimacies may offer a form of ongoingness for elements of a cosmopraxis that no longer accompanies the intergenerational transmission of traditional knowledge.

Shifting Management Regimes

Our underlying interest in women’s reproductive health brought attention back to the intrusive role of the nation-state in everyday life. Nation-states are notorious for infringing directly on Indigenous women’s reproductive autonomy (Sanford 2003; Theidon 2013; Sanford et al. 2016). Sometimes the ways in which this infringement takes place can be less obvious, indirect, and slow moving. The anthropologist Anna Tsing (2015:23) promotes “watching the interplay of temporal rhythms and scales in the divergent lifeways that gather” as a potential method relevant to environmental studies and political economy. Tsing (2015:23) observes that “assemblages drag political economy inside them, and not just for humans.” While we have relied on hunters’ narratives to illustrate how traditional knowledge is dynamically transmitted amid intimacies with elements of a shifting environment, the rise of the Greenlandic state’s marine-mammal management regime occurs at a time when shamanic engagement with Sassuma Arnaa has been eradicated from traditional practice. The context of a slow and unspoken shift in jurisdictional authority from Sassuma Arnaa to the Greenlandic state provides a foundation for ongoing epistemicide and multilayered infringements on Indigenous autonomy.

With external pressures from the North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission (NAMMCO) and Greenlandic/Canadian Joint Commission on the Conservation and Management of Narwhal and Beluga (JCCMBN), the Home Rule government was urged to intervene and implemented a hunting regime in 1992 (Sejersen 2001). In Sisimiut, Sejersen (2001) illustrated how shifting technologies amid the new management regime excluded users and promoted community heterogeneity, transforming the rules applied to the division of beluga whales (a central component of traditional hunting practice for the Inuit). The government of Greenland introduced quotas on narwhal hunting in 2004, requiring a license for the period and species, along with a hunting permit (Nielsen 2009; Nielsen and Henrik 2013). The state licensing system and establishment of quotas were lamented by hunters who often described this new regime as externally imposed. One hunter poignantly commented:

I don’t think the number of narwhals/belugas has changed. There have been many narwhals/belugas since my childhood. There are many of them, so I think the restrictions are too much. Also, for the hunt of narwhal in the Baffin Bay . . . they made it as a protected zone. It felt like they took “our” land from us.

Hunters criticized international nongovernmental organizations and elected state officials that aimed to increase protections for animals with policies despite their ignorance of local/traditional ecological knowledge, arguing that disarticulations between local knowledge and studies commissioned by the state resulted in the enforcement of nonsensical quotas. Hunters expressed desires to have local officials spend time with hunters in the local environment prior to making determinations regarding licensing and quota restrictions.

Hunters generally expressed frustration with the bureaucratic processes required for obtaining a license. License accessibility barriers included lengthy periods of time between license application submission and issuance, disqualifications for engagement in nonhunting income-generating activities, personal handicaps, and supplemental versus professional license determinations. Even while some hunters agreed with the quota restrictions, the waiting times associated with license issuance were described as being highly restrictive to subsistence-hunting families who rely on catches for their livelihoods. Furthermore, hunters may forego other income-generating activities to comply with hunting license restrictions, aggravating local conditions of unemployment and economic poverty. Lifetime hunters described having trouble supporting their families, having trouble selling sealskin, and not being able to accrue income from other jobs to remain in compliance with the conditions necessary for maintaining a professional license. Some hunters were disqualified from obtaining licenses with little to no income-generating activities available to them and were downgraded to accompanying other hunters with licenses on hunts but not engaging directly in hunting.

Quotas on whales were a contentious topic. The potential scarcity introduced by the quotas, particularly for a hunter who has not yet participated in a catch, was described as driving hunters to break with traditional collective-hunting practices and adopt more individualistic behaviors. One hunter described how:

What we were used to back then was, when I harpoon a beluga, and when someone else also harpoons it, then we split the beluga . . . . But we no longer do that for the white beluga. When someone harpoons it, then the one who has harpooned it will get the whole beluga.

Whereas traditional hunting practices involved collective approaches to the hunt and catch based on one’s role in a multihuman hunt for one whale, the quota system was described as encouraging more individualistic behavior and more whale killing. Hunters described becoming rivals with other hunters during the beluga-hunting season, competing to catch the largest number of whales possible until the state-enforced limit is reached. As a result, hunters described more reckless hunting techniques involving gas-powered boats and hunting rifles, abandoning the use of the traditional kayak and no longer taking the time to drive narwhal into shallow water. One hunter described entire whales being shot, sinking to the bottom of the ocean, and the carcass completely wasted.

Others described numerous parts of the whale carcass going unused (as opposed to all parts of the whale being divided/split/utilized by community members). One hunter critically stated:

When the quotas were introduced, the way of hunt changed. Hunters are rushing out to be the first ones to make sure that they get narwhal/beluga. Before the quotas were introduced, hunters hunted with patience.

Hunters described a higher frequency of equipment theft and boating accidents that accompanied the shifting regime. Hunters explained how traditionally, the community knows when not to hunt an animal because the herd is too thin and when it is appropriate to hunt a species because they are too abundant. Hunters described situations where too many narwhals were eating too many fish, resulting in a decreased number of fish but an abundance of narwhal that could not be hunted as a consequence of the quotas. Amidst conditions of material scarcity in Kullorsuaq, the introduction of the quotas appears to have altered the dynamic interface of local ecology and traditional knowledge, undermining collective strategies and driving more individualistic approaches in line with the new regime.

In addition to the unintended consequences of the regime shift for marine mammals, hunters described direct effects on their psyches. One hunter commented that:

People need to feel that they are worth something; if they don’t—some commit suicide, there are more and more people committing suicide. If one is from a hunter family and can’t be a hunter anymore, one starts worrying. Healthy and strong people that can’t or are not allowed to be hunters; it is a feeling of failure for those people.

The hunter linked the increasing incidence of suicide in the Arctic to the effects of the regime shift, which concurs with findings that the national modernization package has been a factor implicated in the increased suicide rates in Greenland (Bjerregaard 2006; Hicks 2007). The felt devaluation of human hunters and the implied devaluation of the divine feminine are ways in which the regime shift gradually erodes Indigenous autonomy. Inuit institutional arrangements have been documented as having ethical norms to support sustainable resource use, including taking animals only in response to the need for food, avoid waste, and limit physical disturbance of the animal population when taking from it. That success in the hunt will result from the hunter’s respect toward the hunted animals (Freeman 2005:59–76). The regime shift, as narrated by hunters, deteriorates the foundations of communal and individual autonomy, redefining local value in ways that ignore one’s intimacy or attentiveness to the local ecosystem.