Nuussuarmiut – hunting families on the big headland. Demography, subsistence and material culture in Nuussuaq, Upernavik, Northwest Greenland
Authors: Hansen Keld 
Published: October 2024

This description of a small hunting community, the settlement of Nuussuaq, Kraulshavn, in the northern Upernavik district on the west coast of Greenland, is based on fieldwork carried out in the period from 1966 to 1968. The main emphasis is on events during the course of the year from November 1967 to October 1968. During such a ‘case study’, when so many things naturally happen in the course of the year, subjective choices are necessarily made with regard to what to emphasise and pass on. The Norwegian anthropologist Frederik Barth said that “what we empirically observe is not ‘customs’ but ‘cases’ of human behaviour, it seems to me that we cannot escape the concept of choice in our analyses” (Barth 1966:1).
Daily life in the settlement itself and out on the hunting grounds is followed day by day for the year in question. However, when processing the information collected in the study year, two questions quickly presented themselves: How did these hunting families
manage in the past and what has happened to them in the subsequent 30 years up to the present day? A good impression of their life in the settlements back into the 18th and 19th centuries can be provided by the archaeological evidence. The time from the establishment of the settlement of Nuussuaq in 1923 until the study period and the subsequent period can, on the other hand, be traced through church registers, the official population and hunting statistics, written and oral information and photographs.
A long-term ethnographic study presents the opportunity to reveal the continuity in society and to demonstrate changes. With a few exceptions the latter have not been of such radical importance for the inhabitants of these northern areas as has been the case in the majority of other places in Greenland and the rest of the Arctic. One would expect that the influences from north and south, from the administration, introduction of home rule, changing ecological circumstances, drastic reduction in the price of furs as a consequence of the anti-sealskin campaign in Europe and the USA in the late 1970s etc. would at times have prompted many families to give up. That they would have accepted the offer from the authorities to be relocated south to the promised new and better housing and with a change in occupation as a consequence. But the collected evidence demonstrates a surprising stability. The hunting families have retained a great part of their traditional way of life and the majority of their traditional tools. This is not due to conservatism but because experience has shown them that these are the most efficient under the given conditions. As will be apparent later, new tools and a number of other items have been introduced in recent times, but these have only been adopted when they proved to be more efficient than those already in use. In a large number of cases they are used in conjunction with the traditional tools.
The fact that, on the periphery of modern Greenlandic society, there are still families who continue to give the highest priority to this way of life is promising as it shows that the traditional occupation of hunter is not about to die out.