PHOTOS AND TEXT BY CAMILLA STEPHAN
y grandmother Arnaluak was born in Greenland in 1933. She grew up in a small arctic Eskimo society with her mom, stepdad, and three older brothers. They lived in houses made of stones and soil, and hunted seals and polar bears for food and clothing. There was no such thing as running water or electricity.
As a young girl she met a Danish man who was employed at the international weather station near her village. Despite his employer’s laws against mingling with the locals and their vastly different cultural backgrounds, the two of them fell in love. At just 16 years of age, she boarded a small vessel heading for Denmark with him. About 50 rough days at sea later they arrived ashore to discover she was pregnant.
Despite my gran not being able to speak Danish, the two of them decided to settle there, get married, and raise my mother. A couple of decades later came a little bundle of joy known as “me.” While I grew up in Denmark, my grandmother’s three brothers stayed in Greenland and established their own families there.
At the end of last year I went back to Qaanaaq, Greenland, to visit them all and find out a bit more about my roots. I discovered a few important things during the trip, but chief among them was that a) it’s fucking freezing in Greenland, b) they eat some gross stuff, and c) I love my family.
