It's Not The Dark That Kills You
April 23, 2016 7:03 PM   Subscribe

It's Not The Dark That Kills You A very moving and well-written article (with videos) about a terrible problem in isolated Arctic communities. This long article is about Nuuk and Tassilak, on opposite coasts of Greenland, but it could easily have been about Attawapiskat in Canada's North.

Part of a series by NPR on Greenland. There are two other articles already posted in this series.

The writer spent ten weeks in Greenland and writes about a very sensitive topic and how people are coping.
posted by seawallrunner (16 comments total) 28 users marked this as a favorite
 

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So many lost lives. So much lost potential.
posted by BlueHorse at 7:32 PM on April 23, 2016 [1 favorite]


Heard some about this yesterday. Very sad.
posted by Miko at 7:33 PM on April 23, 2016


Colonization, capitalism, the death of cultures.

The people who do the damage don't have to pick up the pieces.

Yet, a tiny bit of hope in the dark.
posted by allthinky at 7:49 PM on April 23, 2016 [5 favorites]


I just presented on inuit folk music for a pop culture conference in Seattle, though I am not inuit, and have been thinking a lot about this. I don't have an answer, but I have questions that I can't work thorugh. They are traditional nomadic people who have been moved south and that ended in a disaster and so we have had communities set up north and that has been an expensive disaster
because of colonial practice.

Also, hunting grounds for seal or fish or cariboo or whales have been destroyed, so returning to nomadic life seems less and less plausible.

What's next?
posted by PinkMoose at 7:52 PM on April 23, 2016 [4 favorites]


Her observations are in line with something psychologists and sociologists think is fundamental to the causes of suicide in Greenland. When communities are disrupted, like Kangeq was, families start to collapse. There's an increase in alcoholism, child neglect and physical abuse, all of which are risk factors for suicide. Later, people who didn't get the love and support they needed as children find it difficult to cope with the routine heartbreak of dating, and a breakup becomes the final insult in a lifetime of hurt.

Humans are social beings, and when you mess with the social fabric, there are consequences.
posted by polymodus at 8:17 PM on April 23, 2016 [16 favorites]


What's next?

I don't know, and I don't know *that* much about how this really plays out, but I at least liked the sound of community-driven clean energy projects along these lines. (I saw one such project briefly profiled in Naomi Klein's latest documentary. In the doc, at least, people seemed to feel excited and hopeful about their work and its role in their community (and beyond). I remember that the project's coordinator felt that it offered an empowering sorry :/ space for people who might otherwise have fallen into alienation and despair. IIRC, participants in the doc emphasized how the project aligned with their traditional values. It seems like such a great thing. I hope it is the way it was represented.
posted by cotton dress sock at 10:47 PM on April 23, 2016 [1 favorite]


Here's a recent article from the CBC on the high rates of suicide in many Canadian northern communities. Lots of attention being directed there right now because so many children are dying.
posted by congen at 6:29 AM on April 24, 2016 [1 favorite]


The rates among the native Alaska population are high too, but not nearly as high as the Greenland rate.

I really wondered at the young Dane who'd been sent to eastern Greenland in an official capacity without knowing the language. I guess especially the eastern Greenlandic dialect doesn't have very many speakers, but I'd think learning the language would be required.
posted by nat at 6:54 AM on April 24, 2016 [1 favorite]


Was listening to this earlier this morning. Such a sad story. And one that is becoming far too common.
posted by Fizz at 6:55 AM on April 24, 2016


I guess especially the eastern Greenlandic dialect doesn't have very many speakers, but I'd think learning the language would be required.

You can't require learning the language. We do this in Ireland but it only works because we have enough Irish speakers that we do not need to stuff every single one of them into a post in the Gaeltacht for the entirety of their careers. Were that not the case, nobody would declare that they speak Irish because that single declaration would determine your entire career trajectory.
posted by DarlingBri at 7:25 AM on April 24, 2016


I really wondered at the young Dane who'd been sent to eastern Greenland in an official capacity without knowing the language. I guess especially the eastern Greenlandic dialect doesn't have very many speakers, but I'd think learning the language would be required.

I would guess that there probably wasn't a single candidate who spoke the language and was otherwise qualified.
posted by Mitrovarr at 9:15 AM on April 24, 2016


Dreadfully familiar. Thank you for posting this.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 10:55 AM on April 24, 2016


Gretel Ehrlich's This Cold Heaven is also an interesting (if uneven) read about her many visits to Greenland. This article resonates.
posted by JohnFromGR at 11:06 AM on April 24, 2016


I couldn't help but wonder while reading (and I haven't finished, so forgive me if it's answered later on): why is it the men? There's definitely a cultural aspect that's hinted at, in that the men's public lives in terms of hunting and fishing changed dramatically, but I would assume that the lives of girls and women would also change dramatically when being forcibly integrated into a foreign culture, and that their expectations about the future would feel equally bleak or unnavigatable. This is not about them, so we don't see how their lives changed--I'm not implying that their stories are more important, just that the negative space of this being apparently a gendered phenomenon is so striking.

There's a bigger question here, of course, in that suicide skews dramatically to male identified people generally. But still. It's always so sad to think about those who are left behind in suicide trends anyhow, and makes me wonder why those left behind are making a different choice.
posted by zinful at 2:28 PM on April 24, 2016


Completed suicide is skewed male, but depression and suicide attempts skew female. A follow-up from Goats and Soda.
posted by gingerest at 4:17 AM on April 25, 2016


This article made me so angry I hardly know what to say.

Colonialism kills. The Danish state has refused to apologize for taking children away from Greenlandic families and placing them with foster parents in Denmark. I hold little hope that they apologize for the wholesale destruction of social bonds.

So much harm has been visited by Denmark on Greenland, or Kalaallit Nunaat to use its native name, that it's hard to wrap one's mind around.
posted by Kattullus at 8:58 AM on April 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


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