Social science students experience East Greenland

A dozen social science students from three nations learned firsthand about the people and places of East Greenland through a summer field school co-led by Alaska Sea Grant faculty Davin Holen. The week-plus trip centered on the remote 1,600-person settlement of Tasillaq and incorporated visits to two other small communities as well as to Greenland’s capital, Nuuk.

“We saw great beauty, while we learned about the deeper social layer of stress,” said Holen, an anthropologist and Alaska Sea Grant’s coastal community resilience specialist. “Those stressors include unemployment, lack of housing, the disconnect some feel to the environment, having to speak Danish, English, and the western dialect of Inuit—which is the official language—in school, and others.”

The field school was the third and final held as part of the Wealth of the Arctic Group of Experts (WAGE) Circumpolar Partnership, led by the Université Laval in Quebec City, Canada. The 12 students, who hail from universities in Finland, Greenland and Canada, saw some of the many challenges facing the spectacular but isolated region, which has seen less investment and growth than Nuuk and other settlements in the country’s more populated west. The students learned about local development efforts, including a NGO-financed program to train youth as outdoor guides and commercial fishers; a new processing plant for longlined halibut and cod; and hunters teaching youth to harvest marine mammals. 

Holen noted many parallels between Greenland and Alaska, such as the high value people place on community and on living close to the land and water. In Nuuk, a local sociologist revealed that one of the planning models leaders used for that rapidly growing city was based on Anchorage, Alaska. Holen said that fact further cemented the Alaska-Greenland connection for him.

“There are many things we can learn from our Arctic neighbors,” Holen noted. “Working in other Arctic regions has taught me so many lessons about how we can be more effective in our work in Alaska.”

To hear from the students about their experience in Greenland, please sign up to attend the December 4 roundtable, Complex inequalities and regional perspectives summer school in East Greenland: Student experiences and learnings.