Five of them died in the first winter. But there was plenty of hunting, and the settlement soon flourished, spreading to six places, including Ittoqqortoormiit and two satellite villages, Cape Tobin and Cape Hope, located at strategic hunting points on either side of it. The confluence of ocean currents and winds at the entrance to the fjord system forms a polynya – an area of open water. The polynya attracts narwhals, whales, walruses, birds and seals, which in turn attract polar bears.
The practice of subsistence hunting has continued for decades and little has changed. Men took to the sea ice to feed themselves, their families, their dogs and their neighbors; women cooked, raised children, and collected seal and polar bear skins. The person who first saw the bear kept the skin, regardless of who fired the fatal shot. When there was ice, hunting was carried out by dog sleds; 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 hard to use boats, were a time of patience, comfort in the face of uncertainty, and rest.
The new settlement soon had its own municipal administration and permanent paid jobs. There was a school, a hospital, a police station, a nursing home and a general store. But Danish administrators imported people from western Greenland to fill senior positions after their own, and Ammassalik Inuit, lacking any formal qualifications, were given menial, virtually interchangeable roles. At school, children were forced to learn in Danish and West Greenlandic, and were sometimes punished for speaking their own language.
By the mid-fifties, “the trend in Danish politics was to concentrate the population of Greenland as much as possible around three services considered essential: hospitals, schools and churches,” wrote demographer Joëlle Robert-Lamblin in a study published by the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris in 1971. “These policies have had disastrous economic and social consequences.” Where there is a high concentration of people, there is too low a concentration of wild animals to feed them. “Food, becoming scarce, is then supplemented by imported European products that are poorly suited to the climate,” she noted. The scattered world of Scoresby Sound collapsed into the administrative center. Everything was in Ittoqqortoormiit.
By the late sixties, men under forty were killing, on average, fewer seals than their older counterparts. “They are increasingly losing interest in hunting,” Robert-Lamblin noted. “The new game that modern Greenlandic society is striving for is no longer about animals, but about purchasing power.” However, people found it difficult to adapt to the artificial circadian rhythm of wage work: “Many of them suddenly quit their jobs and go back to hunting. Then, after a while, they move to another job and quit again.”
Hjelmer Hammeken was born in 1957. His father, a schoolteacher at Cape Hope, hunted recreationally, like almost everyone else. But the family relied more on his salary than on what he rented.
When Hjelmer was about seven years old, he threw a stone at an Arctic bird called the auk. It was a clean hit—his first kill. In subsequent years, a hunter named Jacob took him deep into the fjord and taught him to live and hunt on the ice. Jacob kept some of his meat, narwhal tusks, seal and polar bear skins, and sold the rest both to individuals and to stores. These goods were removed from the village when a supply ship arrived from Denmark in late summer. Hunting was a viable profession: hunters' earnings were easily covered and usually exceeded those of unskilled workers.
