Remote Work

In September 1921, the ethnographer Knud Rasmussen left Nuuk, Greenland, and sailed west across the Davis and Hudson Straits aboard the Søkongen. He and six Inughuit (Inuit from the island’s northwest), four Danes, and one Kalaaleq (West Greenlander) made up the Fifth Thule Expedition, out to prove that Inuit had come from inland and later developed a marine culture. They failed to confirm their theory, as the historian Kenn Harper explains in Give Me Winter, Give Me Dogs, but that’s not why Rasmussen and his outing are remembered.

Born in 1879 in Jakobshavn (the western Greenland community now known as Ilulissat), Rasmussen grew up driving dogsleds, speaking Kalaallisut, and adoring stories about elders. When he was twelve, his parents sent him to school in Denmark. Eleven years later, he travelled to the northwest of Greenland, where he first encountered Inughuit. He returned twice, in 1909 and 1910, to establish a mission and then the Thule...