Greenland: Cold conversations

Consumerism has crept even into the Arctic wilderness, Stephen Pax Leonard found. Picture / Bryn Jones

A dead male polar bear lies directly outside my house.

It was shot two minutes ago. He had smelled the seal blubber around the settlement and had taken his chance. The hysterical barking of the dogs woke my neighbour and the animal was killed quickly with two bullets. It took three men 20 minutes to skin this vast eco-icon of the Arctic. It was done there and then, at 3am and in temperatures of -30C.

The meat is shared among all and the fur is used to make nannut (polar-bear fur/skin trousers) which are still used by hunters. There are no hunting trophies and there is no waste.

This encounter with a polar bear took place while I was living in a tiny settlement of 40 hunter-gatherers. In total, I spent a year living in three of the most northern permanently inhabited settlements in the world - Qaanaaq, with a population of 650, Savissivik and Siorapaluk - documenting the minority language and the spoken traditions of the Inugguit (a sub-group of the Inuit).

Living in these Greenland settlements, I became one of the very few outsiders ever to have learned their non-standardised language, a language of sighs and groans where words can be 50 letters long, where there are more than 400 affixes to learn and where a verb can decline potentially up to 700 different ways.

I lived initially in Qaanaaq, arriving there in August 2010. My days would begin by crawling out of my warm sleeping bag, running around the freezing cold room and donning as many layers as I could as quickly as possible. Every morning for months, breakfast was a bowl of steaming porridge amid a train of breath chugging across the icy room. Then it was off to meet the locals such as Ibbi - a part-time hunter and gentleman in his 40s - to hear their drum songs and to discuss lists of words for everything from trade, transportation, kinship and hunting terminology to wild flowers and cooking utensils. Ibbi would sit patiently as we discussed the alien sounds of his impenetrable language over a snack of frozen caribou and seal blubber.

In the winter, I would typically wear between five and eight layers at home and managed 10 layers while out walrus hunting on Northumberland Island.

On more than one occasion I had a small group of children run around the living room of my hut, doing a sort of shamanic dance, breathing in as much hot air as they could. They found my house fun because it was different: it had books, it was exceedingly cold and there was an enormous polar bear skin on the floor.

For weeks on end, the temperature in my house was between 5C and 10C, and during the winter months it was typically sub-zero in the bathroom. From October to April, the windows were sealed up with bin liners to stop the wind blowing through the cracks. Curtains froze to the wall and with a faulty oil heater, one day in February it was as cold as -14C inside the hut and there were weeks where I was more or less dependent on candles alone for heat. I would typically get through about 30 candles a day.

Cooped up in my icy house, steeled to understand a strange idiom, I experienced the exigencies of extreme solitude in the sense of living alone in a very remote place, but not really loneliness. I suffered perhaps with depression in the dark period, but that was not because I was alone. It was due to the frustrations of working in the community where a spirit of disengagement and ammaqa (meaning "perhaps") pervades the place.

It was because of my complete lack of productivity in the dark months when I would typically sleep for 12 hours a day.

Hankering for light, I was offered light treatment for seasonal affective disorder at the hospital in Qaanaaq, but to have allowed myself this would have felt like cheating.

By January and towards the end of my stay in the town, I felt as if I had internalised the darkness whose toil in this wintry adagio was becoming never-ending. I began to count the days left until the return of the sun.

In February, I left Qaanaaq and moved to Savissivik, a few half-deserted crumbs on a vast, perfect white tablecloth of snow and ice. Smiley children were magnetised to the stranger and adults invited the visitor in for a supper of polar bear or fermented little auks, followed by endless refills of black coffee. It is a place where men smoke pipes, sitting with lost expressions and uncritical minds in chaotic kitchens, a place where raised eyebrows replace words and signal welcome.

I had discovered the cold heaven I came looking for.

Here, for a community of 40 hunter-gatherers clinging on in an exceedingly remote place, life was stripped to its basics: subsistence, family and lots of goodwill. Empty huts had been smashed to pieces by unforgiving storms, their entrances lost behind walls of snow 3m high. Single male hunters whose wives had left them long ago would live in the simplest of conditions: an oil heater in one corner, a bucket in the other, a bed, television, crucifix, a few family snaps on the wall and no more.

The eldest hunter in the settlement and a story-teller with whom I worked, Qaerngaq Nielsen, gave Savissivik 10 years. Climate change has meant the settlement is almost impossible to get to by dog-sledge and there are few who wish to live in such isolation with no medical facilities.

Back in Qaanaaq in the month of April, I skied across the sea ice on various pilgrimages to Herbert Island. Wally Herbert, a British polar explorer who had lived among the Inugguit in the 1970s, had been an inspiration for me and it was therefore essential that I got to know the island which bears his name and the closed-down settlement on the island where he lived and which remains to this day a box of precious and difficult memories for the local people.

Herbert's hut is dirty and in a terrible state of disrepair. A pile of snow sits in the middle of the kitchen floor. There is a stained mattress on an old-fashioned sleeping platform, a ripped black-leather armchair and a small, low-lying table in the corner of the room. A few well-thumbed books are piled up on a dusty shelf. Grubby jerry cans litter the floor and an odd discoloured crucifix hangs lopsided on the feculent, polar bear fur-insulated walls. Next to the cross hangs a faded black and white photograph of a woman I recognise, sitting proudly on a crate of Tuborg beer.

Stiff, frozen coats hang from discoloured hooks.

It is almost as if the owners just got up and left.

I came to the top of the world and wished to find elderly folk sitting around telling stories.

Instead, I found for the most part adults and children glued to television screens with a bowl of seal soup on their lap, playing exceedingly violent and expletive-crammed Hollywoodian video war games.

Time and time again, I discovered this awkward juxtaposition of modernity meets tradition. Out in the Arctic wilderness, hunters dressed head to toe in skins would answer satellite phones and check their GPS co-ordinates.

Consumerism has now made it to every corner of the world. Some Inugguit may live in tiny, wind-beaten wooden cabins with no running water, but Amazon.com delivers.

To live so close to nature was a tremendous privilege for me. Living intensely and unrelentingly at the heart of another culture, I came to understand how environmental reality has shaped the life of the Inugguit, but also how the Arctic wilderness had deepened my sense of the infinite and unknown.

It was often difficult to know what to make of my year in the Polar North because positive experiences juxtaposed negative experiences, day after day. A year in an Inuit community showed me certainly that to be human is to be conflicted, thwarted and thrown by circumstance and contingency. It showed me how dualistic our thinking in the West is. To damage the environment is to forget that man and nature are enmeshed.

Before I left for the Arctic a year ago, friends told me that the experience would change me as a person. I do not think that is the case, but it is true that I will never be able to look at life and our world in quite the same way again. Living in the Arctic confirmed what I had suspected for a long time and opened my eyes to the lunacy of the congested, overpopulated world we live in where people have almost no concept of what "nature" and "wilderness" are. The society I was living in was not an ideal at all. It just happened to show me what life must have been like before industry left its mark on the world.

We cannot turn the clock back now and return to pre-industrialised society, but to stay on the current path is exceedingly irresponsible and foolish. We cannot support attempts to stem climate change and explore for oil and gas in the Arctic at the same time.

The Greenlanders have known for decades that the climate is changing rapidly, but their voice has not been heard. Now we have to start using our knowledge wisely.

- OBSERVER