Environmental Colonialism in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland)

Tracing the Cultural Formations of Indigenous Ecologies in Literature, Film, and Art

This project studies literature, film, and art from Kalaallit Nunaat’s colonial history to offer a better understanding of the cultural interlinkages between environmental and colonial devastation.

Over the years, numerous philosophers, anthropologists, social scientists, and cultural historians have argued that current environmental crises arise from a particular Western conception of “Nature” as an open resource, freely available for human extraction and exploitation. This project explores the idea that this conception of nature was consolidated by colonial narratives that distorted the ecological dimensions of Indigenous People’s non-western alternatives. To do so, the project highlights conceptions of nature in Kalaallit Inuit’s cultural narratives and charts their transformation, as they traveled into Western contexts through Danish and US literature, film, and art (1721-). In that way, the project aims not only to recognize and advance relegated ontologies and epistemologies but also to develop a theoretical understanding of the narrative mechanisms that marginalize worldviews that does not align with Western extractivism.