Nuuk, Klas drove me, Urla and Naaja twenty miles into the tundra with a tent, some of Kalistiina’s seal-fur blankets, a gas stove, our bags, canned food and lots of bottled water, and will return to pick us up in four days’ time. Some Danish hikers found Naaja on the tundra already. She went off from camp on a walk on her own just because she likes to do that. She took her phone in case she twisted her ankle or anything. She came on in the afternoon and said she was with two men. She asked Urla to talk to them and tell them she was camping out with older friends and that she was okay because the men would not take her word for it.
They walked Naaja back to the tent even though it took them an hour or so. They must have been bored with their afternoon of dramatic hardship, so bored that they were ready to transcend it already and instruct us on how to be in communion with it successfully (as many Mountain Men are prone to). When we came out to meet them, they conferred conspicuously out of the sides of their mouths, and told us we were too young to be camping out alone. They said it was very dangerous to be out because a polar bear had been spotted in the area and that the ranger had told them this on their way out. As though by avoiding this abstract and likely non-existent danger they had already conquered wilderness and were in a position of authority on the subject by now.
Naaja would not believe them, and asked them what they were doing out without guns or flares if they knew there was a bear. Naaja has spent her whole young life knowing this place, but these men on a walking holiday of course boasted superior knowledge just by virtue of being older and being men.
They asked us to pack up and walk back with them and we declined as politely as we could. They were pissed off and said they would tell the ranger we were out, and that the ranger would be angry that we wasted his time in worrying over us. We promised them we had the number for the ranger saved in our phones and we would call him if we needed rescue. I got this all on camera without them seeing. They walked away, disappointed that their damsels had repudiated them.
Naaja assured us when they had gone that polar bears rarely ever come this far south, and besides we were too far inland. The hikers were either too stupid to realise their lie was almost impossible, or else they did not know what they were talking about and would believe anything they heard from any wise Greenlandic tundra man with a sense of humour that they might have met.
TWILIGHT THIS MORNING: I went to sit outside for a bit because I was feeling restless. It was probably about two but I am finding it difficult to sleep. The light through the tent is like a red lamp and gives me headaches, makes everything inside strange colours. The tundra was waking up with all the subtly hopeful colours of a new day: rust and pink from the tiny coarse flowers that blanketed the soil but still shadowless, the sun still just below the horizon and no stamp of cloud shadow, no elongation to the small and lonely trees. It all just stood, luminous and itemised like a child’s non-dimensional painting. I walked away a little to sit on a rise so that the tent was below and chalky red in the half-light. My home that will shape-shift into each new space I stop to sleep. A compact and portable idea of home. It was so pretty that I cried a little bit.
THE PILL REFUGEE FORUM
Urla got an interview with Naaja where she told us that lots of her friends (Naaja included) had had abortions. It was in Danish, of course, so Urla had to explain. She asked and Naaja did not mind at all, did not seem fazed by it as long as I promised to cut it out of the film. Of course I promised to, but I struggled a bit with coming to terms with it. I managed to convince myself that it would be dishonest of me as a documentary maker to cut it out, mostly because it would have been such an interesting and relevant sequence.
I asked if they did not have the pill in Greenland. She said no one ever talked about the pill or sex or anything, so no one really thought to use it. Her sex education at school was to have a doll that had a chip inside and could tell at the end of the week if it would have stayed alive, had it been a real baby. She said that mostly it just made her classmates think it would be fun to have a baby. They were thirteen when they did the exercise.
From what she said they seem stuck between two cultures. The Inuit leaners go back to the villages and have babies, but there are fewer and fewer of them, and the modernisers abort their babies and stay in the towns. But still living with traditional myths of transmigrating souls means the soul of the dead fetus can go on into a tree or a rock or an animal or another baby. So what is there to moralise about?
Naaja’s grandmother, her mother’s mother, teaches her Inuit myth. I wanted to know about the transmigration. It is a concept that underpins the myths of Inuits through Siberia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland. It holds that not only animals and plants but also inanimate objects and landscapes can have souls. Anything can be viewed as ‘spiritually charged.’ The souls transmigrate between vessels. When such radically different vessels can be chosen by any soul, and a male vessel can take on a female soul and vice versa, is there as much of a concept of gender? Are they a queer culture?
They do not see humans as different from the animals; there are not separate taxonomical categories of being. A person can become a man or a woman, a tree or a stone. All life is a continuum and a horizontal one. For Inuit all soul vessels are equally important no matter if they talk or not: dolphins, rocks, women. In fact they are all talking, they have something to say, just maybe not in words.
Naaja’s dad is a Christian. She told us he came to her mother’s town with the town planning service, to talk to the council about telling the village people the benefits of moving to the city. The government wanted the villagers to move out because it was costing them too much money to send supplies, it being the only village for miles around. They knew if they could get the young to leave the old would eventually die out and the village would not need to exist.
We told Naaja how the pill is handed out like sweets in Britain. I told her it is great that not many of my friends got pregnant but it is not so great that it makes lots of girls numb. That it makes some of us so numb sometimes it is countered with anti-depressants. That it can stop you menstruating, the feeling of which is like an ever-absent something that I could only compare to displacement, to homesickness, as though homesick for a body. But it does not make you as sad as having a baby would. For this we must be grateful. The pill is progress.
Naaja’s mother followed her dad to Nuuk because she loved him. They married two years later. Naaja’s mother’s parents did not come to the wedding. They stayed in the village until they had to be evicted. They will not talk to Naaja’s dad, but she goes with her mother to visit them in their new, bigger village on the coast. When her dad hears her mother talking to her about myth, he tells her to stop telling fairy stories. Mostly they talk with her grandmother. Her dad wants Greenland to melt so that the resources can be got at and it can be rich like Denmark.
What do you want, Naaja?
I want what you want, of course. I want to see the world and make a life for myself. I want to leave Greenland and its small way of life.
But somebody has to stay and be Inuit!
Why should we stay when others do not? Where does it come from, this obligation? Where is yours?
We aren’t so different. You could come with me.
But we are very different. You are so free.
DO PELICANS LOVE TO SOAR?
The others are sleeping. Outside, the tundra is putting itself together for us. Yesterday we spent the day walking and filming, trying to find something for the documentary. We walked inland through the mountains against the meltwater of the glacier as it found its way to the sea. It was urgent, dense and grey; panicked like
