Aasivissuit-Nipisat

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Follow the low line of stones across the plateau and it does not stop. Set into the treeless ground above the tundra ponds, single boulders and cairns run in a broken string for the better part of four kilometers, curving where the land curves, funneling toward a narrows between water and slope. This is a drive-fence — at about 3.9 kilometers the longest known in Greenland — and it was built to be seen by animals, not people: a line the migrating caribou would not cross, herding them along a chosen path to where the hunters waited. Around it lie the other marks of the summer that recurred here for centuries. Twenty-two rings of stone that once weighted the skirts of hide tents. Low stone chambers where meat was cached under the cold. Graves. And the “hopping stones,” set so a family could cross the boggy ground dry-shod. The place is called Aasivissuit, “the great summer camp,” and it sits on the high inland plateau at the very edge of the Greenland Ice Sheet, where the white of the sermersuaq, the great ice, fills the eastern horizon.

Now pull the eye west. Two hundred and thirty-five kilometers away, past the fjords and the ice-scoured valleys, a small low island lies in the Davis Strait off the outer coast, some fifteen kilometers south of the modern town of Sisimiut. It is called Nipisat, and its shell-and-bone middens hold the leavings of people who camped there four thousand years before the tent-dwellers of Aasivissuit — the same people, in the deepest sense, following the same animals. One landscape holds both ends of the line: the sea at one end and the inland ice at the other, and between them a way of living off the seasons that ran, in one form or another, for more than four millennia.

The transect between ice and sea

The property that UNESCO entered on the World Heritage List in 2018, at the 42nd session of the World Heritage Committee in Manama, is named Aasivissuit – Nipisat: Inuit Hunting Ground between Ice and Sea. It was nominated by the Kingdom of Denmark on behalf of Greenland — Kalaallit Nunaat — and inscribed under cultural criterion (v), the criterion reserved for a traditional human settlement or land-use that is representative of a culture and its interaction with its environment. The listing recognizes not a monument but a way of life written into a landscape.

The numbers are large and worth stating plainly. The property covers 417,800 hectares — roughly 4,178 square kilometers — and lies just north of the Arctic Circle in Qeqqata Kommunia in central-west Greenland. It is not a compact reserve but a corridor: a transect about 235 kilometers long running east to west, from Nipisat island in the Davis Strait inland, past the deglaciated country around Kangerlussuaq, to Aasivissuit at the margin of the inland ice. Along that line the nomination bundles seven key localities into a single continuum — Nipisat, Innap Nuua, Arajutsisut, Sarfannguit, Saqqarliit, Itinnerup Tupersuai, and Aasivissuit — chosen because together they document the whole of the seasonal round, coast to interior, and the whole of its history, layer on layer.

That history is deep, and the archaeology sorts it into four cultural horizons. The oldest are the Saqqaq, a paleo-Inuit people who reached this coast around 2500 BCE and whose traces at Nipisat persist to roughly 700 BCE — the first human beings to work this ground. After them came the Dorset, the people the Inuit remember as the Tuniit, present here from about 800 BCE into the first centuries of the common era. Then, after a gap, the Thule culture: the direct ancestors of today’s Kalaallit, who spread east out of Alaska and Arctic Canada with the dog-sled and the skin boat and were established locally by around 1200 to 1250 CE. Last, from the eighteenth century, the historic layer — the Kalaallit of the colonial period and the Danish presence that arrived with the mission. Four peoples, or four chapters of one long occupation, stacked in the same soil.

The inland river country of the Aasivissuit–Nipisat transect in high summer, tundra and meltwater between the coast and the ice. Chmee2/Valtameri, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0.

Nipisat itself is the coastal anchor and the best-read of the sites. A small island exposed to the open strait, it was a Saqqaq winter and spring camp, and its middens were excavated in campaigns running from 1989 to 1994. They gave up an extraordinary record: over 70,000 fragments of animal bone and on the order of a thousand artifacts. The bones are the argument — seal above all, but also seabird, caribou, fish, whale, and the occasional polar bear, the diet of people who worked both the sea-ice edge and the land. From so much refuse a whole economy can be reconstructed: what was taken, in what season, and with what tools.

Aasivissuit, at the far inland end, reads differently. Where Nipisat is a coastal midden, Aasivissuit is a hunting installation — the summer camp of the caribou drive, with its tent rings and caches and graves and its great drive-fence, the largest in Greenland. Here the people were not scattered along a coast but converged. Families came up from the fjords in the warm months to the inland plateau where the caribou, the tuttu, gathered and moved, and they took them at the fence and the crossing places, dried and cached the meat, and carried it back down. The very name says as much: an aasivik is a summer gathering place, and Aasivissuit is the great one.

Only one settlement inside the whole 417,800-hectare property is still permanently inhabited. That is Sarfannguit, founded in 1843 on the fjord that carries the seasonal traffic between coast and interior — a village of about ninety-six people at the 2020 count, whose residents still hunt and fish the same waters and the same tundra their ancestors did. The landscape is not a ruin under glass. People live in it, and go out on it, now.

The seasonal round as a sacred geography

To read Aasivissuit-Nipisat only as archaeology is to miss what the drive-fence and the middens are for. The transect is a map of a cosmology as much as an economy: a single people moving, season by season, between two worlds that were never merely physical. There was the sea, imaq, and the inland ice and tundra, sermersuaq and the high country beyond it, and each was a domain with its own powers and its own rules. To live off both was to keep faith with both.

The sea and its animals were not, in this world, an open resource. They belonged to the sea-mother — a great female power known across the Inuit and Kalaallit world by many names, Sedna in the best-known Baffin tellings, Sanna or Nerrivik in Greenland — who dwells on the floor of the ocean and holds the seals and walruses and whales as her own, tangled in her long hair. When human beings break the taboos that keep sea and land in their proper order, her hair mats with the filth of their wrongdoing and she shuts the animals away, and the people starve on the ice. Then it falls to the angakkuq — the shaman, plural angakkuit — to make the spirit-journey down through the water to her house, to comb and braid the fouled hair no human hand can otherwise reach, and so to loosen her anger and send the seals back up to the hunters. That descent is described here at the distance the sources keep it: as a thing done, and known to have been done, by those with the power to do it, not as a procedure to be worked.

Inland, the country answered to other masters. The caribou and the land animals had their own owners and their own rules, and the great and dangerous power of the west Greenland tradition was Torngarsuk — Tornarsuk — the mightiest of the helping-spirits an angakkuq could command, master of the animals, glimpsed as a great bear, or a one-armed man, or a shape as tall as a person is high. The sources on his nature disagree so sharply that his true form must be counted among the genuinely contested things: benevolent to some, terrible to others, master and monster at once.

What binds it all is an ethic, not a technology. In this world the hunt is a moral relationship. The game is not seized; it gives itself to the hunter who has kept faith — who honors the bones, who keeps the products of the sea and the products of the land from touching in the wrong way, who sings the right songs and makes the right offerings and observes the countless small taboos that keep the order of things intact. Air, weather, and the reason in the world — Sila — turns against the one who breaks that order. So the drive-fence at Aasivissuit is ritual technology as much as engineering: the stones that turn the caribou are of a piece with the taboos that make the caribou come. To build the fence and to keep the taboos were the same act of hunting.

Two objects of this world belong on the land itself and should be named at ethnographic distance. One is the inuksuk and its human-shaped variant the inunnguaq — a figure of piled stone that guides a traveler across featureless tundra, marks a cache or a crossing, and, built in the drive-lines, helps turn the caribou; a standing human presence on empty ground, doing the work of a person who is not there. The other is the tupilak, a very different thing: a revenge-creature that an angakkuq was said to make in secret from scraps of animal and, some accounts say, human material, animate, and send through the sea to kill an enemy — and which, if the intended victim had the stronger power, could turn and destroy its maker instead. It was a secret thing, and it is described here as the record describes it, never as an instruction.

None of this is spoken of only in the past tense. The angakkuq tradition, the drum-dance, the masks, and above all the Kalaallisut language belong to a living people. This is a Christianized and deeply syncretic heritage now — the churches of Sarfannguit are real — but it is a continuous one, carried by the Inuit of Greenland into an age of self-rule, and being consciously revived rather than merely remembered.

Devil’s work, dispossession, and the souvenir

Europe did not meet this world; it overwrote it. From 1721 the Danish-Norwegian Lutheran mission of Hans Egede, and after him the Moravians, set themselves squarely against the old cosmology and the angakkuit who carried it. The most consequential act of that mission was an act of translation: the missionaries took Torngarsuk, the master of the helping-spirits, and mapped him directly onto the Christian Devil — naming the whole living order of Sedna and Sila and the tornait “the devil’s work,” and recasting the angakkuq as an agent of Satan. Egede is recorded contending hard, and sometimes with threats and force, against the shamans; the effect was to drive the séance and the spirit-journey underground. It is a striking case of a colonial category swallowing a sacred one, and it is set down here as exactly that — a thing done to this world, never a truth about it.

The suppression of the shamans was one strand of a much longer colonial record that runs across the whole Inuit homeland, and it should be named soberly and by its parts. In the Canadian Arctic the mission gave way to residential and day schools that took children from the land and the language. In 1953 Canada carried out the High Arctic relocations, moving Inuit families from Inukjuak more than a thousand miles north to Grise Fiord and Resolute Bay, in part to plant human flags of sovereignty on the empty islands. Through the mid-twentieth century the RCMP and settlers killed sled dogs, the qimmiit, in numbers that stranded hunting families where they stood. Inuit were cataloged by the “disc number,” an identification tag worn in place of a name the administration would not learn to spell. And the sealing and whaling economies that had fed these communities for millennia were gutted from outside — first by the anti-sealing campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s, then by the trade bans that followed — collapsing the price of the one thing the land reliably gave. None of that is softened here.

Against that history the same culture’s objects have been lifted out of it and sold. The inuksuk — the stone guide of the tundra and the caribou drive — became, in stylized form, the emblem of the Canadian territory of Nunavut when it was established on 1 April 1999, a red figure at the center of the territorial flag and arms. Eleven years later an inunnguaq named “Ilanaaq,” designed by a Vancouver artist, was chosen as the logo of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics — friendship, the name means — and was defended by some as homage and criticized by Inuit commentators as a decontextualized ornament, a marker of the land turned into a mascot. The tupilak, once a lethal secret an angakkuq would never willingly reveal, is today a signature form of Greenlandic carved art, worked in narwhal and walrus ivory and caribou antler and sold to visitors — the secret killing-thing become a collectible.

A carved Greenlandic tupilak, the once-secret revenge-creature now a widely made form of Kalaallit art. Kattiel, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The most famous image of Arctic life is likewise a made thing. Robert J. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), often called the first feature documentary, was substantially staged: its “Nanook” was the hunter Allakariallak, filmed spearing seal and walrus with harpoons he had largely set aside for the rifle, his family recomposed for the camera, the igloo built oversized and open-roofed so the interior could be lit. What the film sold the world as a window onto a timeless people was a costume drama of the primitive — the founding instance of a habit of looking at Arctic peoples as figures outside of history. The people of Aasivissuit-Nipisat were never outside history. They were making it here, on this exact ground, in an unbroken line, while the camera looked for a man who no longer existed.

That is finally what the 2018 inscription is for — and what makes it more than a plaque. The listing turns the whole transect, coast to ice, into a single argument against the Nanook view: that these seven places are not the relics of a vanished simplicity but the continuous work of a sophisticated people who read two worlds at once and lived off both by keeping faith with both. The drive-fence still runs its broken line across the plateau. The middens of Nipisat still hold their four thousand years of bone. And in Sarfannguit the boats still go out. The names to use for the people who made all of it, and make it still, are their own — Inuit, Kalaallit, Tuniit for the Dorset — and the exonym the outsiders brought is left where it belongs, on the outside.

→ Related: The Inuit · The Yupik · The Dorset Culture · Sedna · Nanook · Torngarsuk · Sila · Tupilaq · Inuksuk Point · Qajartalik · Nunalleq