Sittin’ On Top Of The World!

PHOTOS AND TEXT BY CAMILLA STEPHAN

Click to enlarge The day I got to Greenland, I hung out with some of my relatives, including Alika and Marianna Og Genoveva Petersen. Here they are outside a party where the main meal served was something called “little auk.” In order to prepare this treat, they kill some auks (a cute swimming bird native to the island), bury them in the soil, and leave them there for about six months. Then they dig them up and eat them raw. It tastes like really, really strong blue cheese. In this photo they’re offering me some more, but I had to turn it down. It’s nasty!
  On my second day in Greenland, I went to Karen’s kid’s birthday party. She’s three years old and this photo shows the highlight of the day. Everybody is eating raw seal and preserved narwhal tail off the kitchen floor, cutting chunks of the flesh away with knives and chowing down with their bare hands, covered in gore. It’s quite a sight. They eat the meat off the floor because it’s easier than putting the carcass of the seal or the tail on the table. Narwhal tails are absolutely gigantic and have been known to snap kitchen tables into splinters.
  Click to enlarge Irene Danielsen lives at her grandparents’ house because her mother gave birth to her at a very young age and couldn’t take care of her. Her mother now lives in another little town, called Siorapaluk, with three kids and her husband. I hung out with her for a day and she was a lot of fun.
  All the trash from Qaanaaq ends up outside the village at a place creatively known as the Dump. Everything from cars to plastic containers to soda cans to kitchen garbage to dead dogs is thrown away here. A lot of people have dogs but they don’t treat them like pets. They’re more like slaves. There definitely isn’t the same sentimentality for a dog’s life here as there is in Europe or America. Sometimes you’ll see a whole pack of dead dogs lying at the Dump for weeks, slowly decomposing until somebody sets fire to the trash and it all goes up in black smoke.
  After the party, birthday girl Maja Petersen took a nap in her parents’ bed. Eating raw seal flesh with your bare hands off the floor can really tucker you out.
    In the winter, the temperature in Qaanaaq goes down to -40º Celsius and there’s so much snow that vehicles often get totally stranded. In the summertime all the snow melts and temperatures soar up to 12º.
  I came across this frozen blood while walking to the hospital to see my dead uncle Jakob. I think it was from either a seal or a reindeer.  

Click to enlarge