Knud Rasmussen and the Origins of the Greenland Inuit

Chapter Eleven of my book Go Greenland

WHILE I was in Narsaq I heard plenty of the Greenlandic or Kalaallisut language being spoken. About 50,000 out of the 56,000 people in Greenland speak Greenlandic, which makes it the majority language and one of the most successfully preserved indigenous languages anywhere.

The Danish colonisers of Greenland made Kalaallisut into a written language in the 1700s and did not teach Danish in the state schools on the island until the 1920s.

A lot of research into the origins and culture of the Greenlandic people was done by Knud Rasmussen, a Danish man with an Inuit grandmother on his mother’s side who was born in Jakobshavn, now Illulisaat. Rasmussen is famous as the leader of the Danish Literary Expedition, an epic journey across Greenland in which Rasmussen and his colleagues studied remote Inuit outposts and recorded their myths, tales and legends.

Knud Johan Victor Rasmussen, to record his full name, is very well known in Greenland and Denmark for his work with the Inuit. He sounded like quite the character — apparently, he had tried everything from acting to opera singing and eventually settled on becoming an anthropologist and explorer.

Rasmussen learned from the Inuit how to use a sled and train sledding dogs, setting out on his first expedition in 1902. He called his expeditions ‘Thule’ after the Greek word for the far north and set out to study the…