One of the greatest polar bear hunters faces a vanishing world
Five of them died during the first winter. But the fishing was plentiful, and the settlement soon flourished, spreading among six sites, including Ettoqortormit and two satellite villages, Cape Tobin and Cape Hope, at strategic fishing points on either side of it. The meeting of ocean currents and winds at the entrance to a fjord system creates a polynya, a patch of open water. Polynya attracts narwhals, whales, walruses, birds and seals, which in turn attract polar bears.
The practice of subsistence hunting has continued for decades and has changed little. The men went out onto the sea ice to feed themselves, their families, their dogs, and their neighbors. Women cooked food, raised children, and prepared seal and polar bear skins. The person who first saw the bear kept his skin, regardless of who fired the fatal shot. When there was ice, hunting was done by dogsled; When there was open water, this was done by kayak. The weeks when the ice was too thin or rotten to walk on, yet too present to use boats, were a time of patience and comfort with uncertainty and comfort.
The new settlement soon had its own municipal administration and regular income-generating functions. There was a school, a hospital, a police station, a nursing home, and a general store. But Danish officials imported people from West Greenland to fill the highest positions after theirs, and the Amasalik Inuit, who lacked any formal qualifications, were given practically interchangeable menial roles. At school, the children were forced to learn in Danish and West Greenlandic languages, and were sometimes punished for speaking their own language.
By the mid-1950s, “the trend in Danish policy was to concentrate Greenlanders’ population as much as possible around three services deemed essential: hospital, school, and church,” demographer Joelle Robert Lamblin wrote, in a study published by the Anthropological Society of Paris, in 1971. “This policy had disastrous economic and social effects.” When there is a high concentration of people, there is a very low concentration of wildlife to feed. She pointed out that “food, which has become insufficient, is being supplemented with imported European products that are not suitable for the climate.” The world of Scoresby Sound spread across the administrative center collapsed. It was all in Ittoqqortoormiit.
By the late 1960s, men under 40 were killing fewer seals on average than their elders. “They are increasingly losing interest in hunting,” Robert Lamblin noted. “The new game sought by contemporary Greenlandic society is no longer an animal but purchasing power.” However, people had difficulty adjusting to the artificial daily rhythm of wage labor: “Suddenly many of them quit their jobs and go back to fishing. Then, after some time, they take up another job and give it up again.”
Helmer Hameken was born in 1957. His father, a teacher in Cape Hope, fished recreationally, as did almost everyone. But the family relied more on his salary than on what he released.
When Helmer was about seven years old, he threw a stone at an Arctic bird called the little auk. It was a clean hit, his first kill. In the years that followed, a fisherman named Jacob took him deep into the fjord and taught him how to live and ice fish. Jacob stored some of his meat, centipede tusks, and seal and polar bear skins and sold the rest, either privately or to the store. These goods were exported out of the village when a supply ship arrived from Denmark in late summer. Hunting was a viable occupation: the earnings of hunters were easy to obtain and usually exceeded the income of unskilled workers.