Ordinarily, the inhabitants of Kullorsuaq see no one in winter. Last April, for the first time, Le Commandant Charcot icebreaker made a stop there. This was an incredible opportunity to immerse oneself in the daily life of the Inuit people, torn between tradition and modernity, climate change and fears of annexation.
Suddenly, as if from time immemorial, dozens of sleds, a fleet racing across the ice floe, approach the ship, in a cacophony of distant barks. On this April 8, under the midday sun, as the pastel blue of the sky seems to dissolve into the white desert, the 200 passengers gather on the bridge of the icebreaker Le Commandant Charcot, and emotion and jubilation bring tears to their eyes, freezing in the -25 °C temperature.
The moment is mesmerizing, historic, for never before has a ship reached such a high point in winter, far beyond the Arctic Circle. After four days of sailing in the Baffin Sea and covering some 700 miles, we are now within sight of Kullorsuaq, a village of 450 inhabitants in northwest Greenland, in the Upernavik district, which includes nine other villages, all very distant neighbors.
In the distance, about 5 km away, its thumb-shaped rocky spur emerges, giving it its name. And what we couldn’t have foreseen upon arriving here is that the Inuit would be holding their thumbs down below, at every mention of the one they call Trumpy up here, whose annexation ambitions would fuel many a conversation…
Witnesses to a world in limbo
This exceptional journey was a dream of 30 years for the French explorer Nicolas Dubreuil, a gentle, shaggy-haired giant with a forthright manner. As an experienced expedition leader, he mobilized these 10 villages, more than 1,000 dogs, 55 hunters and the entire community. In this last stronghold of bear and seal hunters, where he lived for two decades, the customs and traditions, aside from cell phones, are a perfect replica of the film The Last Kings of Thule (1969) by ethno-geographer Jean Malaurie, who dedicated a large part of his life to defending the Inuit.
“I want the passengers to leave here having seen what they read in the books of Paul-Émile Victor or Jean Malaurie. I want them to discover the soul of this magnificent, mistreated and underestimated people. It was the locals, the last guardians of the Pole, who asked me to organize this gathering. They want to share, to exchange ideas. Some hunters traveled over 300 km by dogsled to participate in this unique event.”
Ole, Otto, Lars, Adam, Paulus and their friends are all here, coming to greet their hosts on board. To show the world their Indigenous skills, their absolute mastery of survival, with the ever-present fear of one day disappearing.
“While America insults us, seeing you here is a balm for our hearts,” says Ole Eliassen solemnly, one of the region’s most experienced hunters, who sometimes acts in films. On board the Le Commandant Charcot, the passengers, some of whom were familiar with polar regions, were warned by Nicolas Dubreuil: “You are going to be shaken up; when you get cold, you will warm up by running behind the sled, and don’t be shocked if one of the hunters stops to kill a seal; here, hunting, like fishing, is essential to feed the community.”
Before arriving in Kullorsuaq and its promise of a harsher life, everyone was able to fully enjoy the comforts. While Le Commandant Charcot shuddered, like a plane in severe turbulence, with a deep, cavernous rumble of ice cracking beneath the bow, we experienced a succession of dreamlike visions and mirages: the Northern Lights on the very first night not far from the capital city Nuuk; icebergs seemingly floating in the sky, in which the Inuit children imagined familiar shapes; endless textures of white for which our language has no name, hallucinogenic meringue-like domes.
A pinnacle of pristine, untouched beauty, Disko Bay and its labyrinth of tabular icebergs, encircled by a turquoise band resembling a lagoon. Along the way, there were all these metamorphoses of the ice, like the frost flowers, carpets of crystals that form when the air temperature is much lower than that of the ocean, and which the Inuit watch with their hearts.
There was the Sikuliaq, the young sea ice, still forming. We slalomed between hummocks, an impressive chaos of ice, and ice floes clumped together in irregular masses. The further north we went, the more the wild embraced us. Thus, we saw our first polar bear, galloping, colossal, even from the top of a cruise ship, then a pair of walruses, almost imperturbable despite the ship’s approaching shadow.
Finally, later on, we were told, as if from a shamanic tale, about narwhal tracks, relayed over the loudspeaker by the enthusiastic Captain Étienne Garcia, still amazed despite his unparalleled expertise in navigating polar waters. “You have to look for the large air bubbles in the very thin gray ice that formed last night. That’s where the narwhals come to breathe,” he explained, while all the passengers pulled out their binoculars in the hope of seeing the mythical aquatic unicorns.
Lessons in adaptation
After four days of this enchanting regimen, the contemplative session in the plush cabins, between glasses of champagne and meals at the Ducasse restaurant, comes to an end. Upon arrival in Kullorsuaq, the ship will remain this luxurious cocoon, from which it is sometimes difficult to extricate oneself, but the call of the outside world will always be the strongest. Each day brings a new experience.
Five immersive camps await the budding explorers. The most challenging: Nunanutaat, a twenty-four-hour trek in -25 °C temperatures by dogsled, in these new, uncharted lands, which emerged as a result of climate change, sleeping in traditional tents and eating mattak, made from whale skin and blubber. A frozen odyssey to which one can acclimatize not far from the ship.
This is where two hunters, Otto Danielsen and Lars Jensen, wearing bearskin trousers, have set up their headquarters, where they share their ancestral techniques, laughing and using hand gestures — most Inuit guides don’t speak English. In the open water left in the boat’s wake, Lars climbs into his kayak — a feat in itself given how unstable the narrow craft is — then puts his ear to the wood of his harpoon to listen for the animals’ breathing.
“The kayak is so quiet you can even hear the baby seals in their mothers’ wombs!” Lars then treats us to a brief primer on hunting seals or walruses, and even bears, since they can be hunted from the kayak. “At the tip of my harpoon, I attached a rope to a seal intestine buoy, the avataq. This slows the animal, which is very heavy, preventing me from capsizing. And once it’s exhausted, it comes back to the surface, and I kill it with the harpoon or a rifle. It’s very dangerous: when walruses attack, they destroy everything; there have been deaths…”
The art of hunting
Listening to Lars, who is endlessly enthusiastic, one gets the sense that Inuit ingenuity seems to know no bounds. He goes on to explain that the paddle is used for communication: its shape has been designed to bounce sound up to 5 km in the summer when icebergs no longer break the silence with their creaking.
Next to the kayak camp, Ole is busy setting up the traditional tent that will welcome the cruise passengers for the night in the coming days. Two sleds, placed end to end, serve as both frame and bed base, covered with hand-sewn hides. Inside are caribou hides, and heating is provided by a lamp normally used in greenhouses. “And if you get cold, an Inuit friend will come and snuggle up to you,” Nicolas Dubreuil assures us with a laugh.
After a night as peaceful as day — the sun barely setting at these latitudes and this time of year — the notion of luxury took a turn. “I slept as well as in my cabin! It was like rediscovering what real life is, the life lived by our own ancestors, who were happy with little,” said a passenger as he emerged from the tent. The tent is guarded overnight because “there are many bears in the area, even if they are rarely seen,” explains Nicolas Dubreuil, who warns: “This 800-kilo apex predator can reach speeds of 50 km/h. But rest assured: if you see it, it has already seen you a long time ago. It means it wasn’t very hungry…”
At Camp Siku (sea ice, in Inuktitut), an hour’s dogsled ride from the ship, Adam Eskildsen is simulating a seal hunt. His rifle camouflaged behind a white screen (taalitaq) so the animal no longer perceives a human silhouette but a neutral mass, the hunter crawls until he can take the most accurate shot possible. When the temperature is extreme, the seal is then butchered on the spot to prevent it from freezing.
Despite the internet’s reach into the most remote fjords of this vast, icy land of 2.2 million square kilometers and 56,000 inhabitants, where everything is immaqaa, “only the ice decides,” the reality of daily life remains unchanged. In Kullorsuaq, as in the surrounding isolated villages, the miracle of adaptation is repeated every day. When the thermometer dips to nearly -50°C and the pantry is empty, the men head out to hunt seals and bears by dogsled — snowmobiles being forbidden for reasons of cultural preservation. Ole Olsvig, whom Nicolas Dubreuil has known since childhood, embodies this tenuous link between tradition and modernity.
The son of a hunter from Naajaat, a village of 36 inhabitants, he is one of those young people who went to study in the United States, and one of the few to return and settle here. A coder and creator of the Iluaqut website, which helps Inuit people fill out administrative forms in Danish — the language imposed by the government —, Ole dreams of digitizing the Greenlandic language before it disappears. During talks on board, he recounts the cultural shifts and shocks his country has experienced. Until the early 2000s, his parents and grandparents still used candles for light in the heart of the polar night.
“Some places had generators that ran on diesel or kerosene, but it wasn’t always easy to get a reliable fuel supply. And then, in five or ten years, computers and smartphones appeared. It all happened very quickly, and it was destabilizing.” Their elders analyzed the ice by looking at it; they use weather apps.
“Empirical knowledge is disappearing; we have to relearn everything, otherwise our sense of community, which is our strength, will be lost. How can we embrace progress without losing our identity? We don’t want to be American, or Danish. We are Greenlanders.” Ole knows this, as do most of his compatriots: geopolitical pressure has spread here, driven by commercial interests. Near Kullorsuaq, two-billion-year-old rocks, rich in minerals, are the object of intense covetousness.
Shared emotion
As we board a sled to travel to Kullorsuaq for kaffemik, a gathering over coffee and cakes, a symbol of Greenlandic hospitality, Abel Enok Hansen, a fisherman native to the village, tells us how the ice, thinning by a few centimeters each year, complicates bear hunting in winter. He speaks of the imposed quotas (85 across the entire Upernavik district) that everyone here considers unfair. “The meat can feed the whole village for a week,” the fisherman explains. “It’s the cornerstone of our livelihood, unlike in other countries.”
Below the colorful houses, the fish cannery provides a livelihood for part of the village. While there is no running water in the houses, the four reservoirs bearing the inscription Imeq Mamaq, meaning “the water is good,” supply the inhabitants. To the sound of howling chained dogs, young people buy junk food at the convenience store, check the fluctuating internet connection on their smartphones, and joke around. A palpable joie de vivre…
Serving us coffee in her overheated living room, Mina Petersen, our host for kaffemik, who, like all the women of Kullorsuaq, manages the household and sews hides, recounts the sporadic resupply by cargo ship — at best, two ships a month between July and October — and, above all, the anguish of these teenagers torn between two completely opposing worlds.
The young woman reminds us that for a long time, the village held the grim record of having the highest youth suicide rate in the world, her own son having taken his own life two months before our arrival. That evening, we run into Mina again at the edge of a snow-covered soccer field for a match against Nussuaq, enthusiastic about her team’s skillful dribbling. Despite everything, she wouldn’t live anywhere else for the world, like most of her fellow citizens.
Tomorrow, the Kammassuaq (friendship) sled race will bring us together one last time before we say goodbye to Ole, Otto, Paulus, Lars, to Adam and his friends, our friends, deeply moved as we are by this journey of a lifetime. “Arise, people of Greenland, awaken! Do not give up on your future! The West is evil, and we need you! Materialism is leading us to our downfall,” wrote Jean Malaurie in Letter to an Inuit in 2022.
In these troubled times, no words have been so prophetic. As the ship casts off, Ole Eliassen, a French flag pinned to his sled, waves to us. Then he disappears… And all of us on board hope that we are not the last witnesses to his story.