Pulitzer Center Untold Stories

The arithmetic of self-rule

Greenland: The arithmetic of self-rule from Christopher Booker & Jason George on Vimeo.

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Greenland:The arithmetic of self-rule HD from Christopher Booker & Jason George on Vimeo.

Puju: a language warrior

Jason George & Christopher Booker, reporting for the Pulitzer Center
 

SISIMIUT, Greenland — Growing up here in the 1940s, Carl Christian Olsen came of age as the Greenlandic language and culture were in crisis. After nearly two hundred years of colonial control, Denmark made sure that schools here taught Danish first. The nomadic way of Inuit living had been long lost, replaced with a hybrid hunting-modern existence. (In the 1800s Denmark shipped Greenlanders to Copenhagen to learn how to build wooden houses since no one in Greenland had any idea how to construct the foreign abodes.) The Americans too had arrived in force, manning several large air bases during the World War II era. The Americans had even built facilities in the county’s remote north, where Inuit had lived largely undisturbed for thousands of years. Facing his own future, Olsen worried about Greenland’s prospects.

And so as he went to college in Denmark—Greenland then had no university—he chose linguistics, believing Greenland’s own language was worth saving. “The only thing they couldn’t kill was the language and we are proud of that symbol as part of our identity. It’s part of our historical documentation.” Still, his decision left many friends scratching their heads. “Why not choose a more productive study like historian or doctor?” he remembers them asking. The answer could be found in his upbringing in this west coast fishing village.

“My grandmother and then my mother and most of my family here they would only speak Greenlandic, and they are very enlightened people in the Greenlandic sense, knowing a lot of historic Greenland, the way of living as Inuit,” he said in English. “They are proud of it. They are not really disturbed by the type of propaganda Denmark was doing to [claim that] Danish is kind of a better language for Greenlanders. We didn’t really believe that in my family.”

 After school in Denmark, Olsen continued his linguistic graduate studies in Alaska, Illinois and Ohio. This being the 1960s, Olsen was doing a lot more than just studying syntax. “I was watching the civil rights movement in the United States.”

Learning Greenlandic - one æ at a time

Jason George & Christopher Booker for the Pulitzer Center

Greenlandic & Climate Change from Christopher Booker on Vimeo.

This blog entry re-ran at WorldFocus.

NUUK, Greenland—When Denmark handed "self rule" to Greenland last month—ending 200+ years of significant oversight—one of the first changes Greenland made was to declare Greenlandic the country’s lone national tongue.

For Greenlanders it was a point of pride to drop Danish off the list, but people here also wanted to symbolically declare that Greenlandic is central to the country’s future. They see nothing nostalgic or quaint about Kalaallisut, the most widely-spoken dialect, even if only about 55,000 people speak it.

At a popular internet café in the capital, local teenagers spend summer evenings playing computer games, chatting online in English with other gamers around the world. All Greenlandic students learn English in school and many are as comfortable with the language (and its locker room humor) as any American teen.

However amongst themselves these teens talk almost exclusively in Greenlandic, and there’s no evident pressure to ‘look cool’ by speaking English. In fact one 15-year-old gamer, Rasmus Nielsen, told us that when he moved here from Denmark 10 years ago the kids teased him about not being able to speak Greenlandic.

He learned quickly.

Greenland: Thin Ice

Jason George and Christopher Booker, for the Pulitzer Center

Thin Ice from Christopher Booker and Jason George

What do endangered languages, the northern lights and glaciers have in common?

They’ll all topics that researchers are currently studying at Dartmouth College’s Institute of Arctic Studies.

For nearly 100 years, Dartmouth has brought scientists and scholars together to examine life at the top of the world. Given how much the arctic environment is changing, it makes sense that most of those researchers study the region’s climate, ecology and geology.

So why endangered languages?

Such a topic might, at first, seem an unlikely focal point when examining the arctic. However the arctic’s dramatic environmental change has trickled down into other aspects of life as well. Culture, community and traditions must also adapt in world where the ground quite-literally can be shifting underfoot.

That’s where University of Chicago Professor Lenore Grenoble comes in.