Tracing Seal - Unsettling Narratives of Kalaallit Seal Relations

Seals have carried an essential role in the unfolding of Greenland as an Indigenous homeland, colonized territory, and self-governing nation. During the past many decades, seals have also been a topic of controversy between international political actors, animal welfare groups, and Inuit communities. This doctoral thesis explores Kalaallit [Greenlandic Inuit] relations with seals as they arise in these historical and contemporary political landscapes. By tracing ‘the seal’ through various narrative trajectories in Greenland, the thesis engages with the complex processes through which coloniality and Indigenous lifeways collide and interweave. While dominant narratives on Inuit seal hunting – such as those forwarded in the EU Seal Regime – seem to undermine lived and place-based Kalaallit-seal relations, Kalaallit narratives of seals also unsettle the very same ‘seal regimes’. Suggesting that narratives encompass and navigate relations between Kalaallit, Qallunaat [non-Inuit], and seals, the thesis examines how seal narratives engage and unsettle processes of colonization in Greenland.

This article-based doctoral thesis consists of four academic articles. Each article is based on a specific, focused study which has emerged from the research process of ‘tracing seal’ in Greenland. The four articles span topics that relate to colonial and postcolonial sustainability narratives, processes of Kalaallit seal hunting, and the seamstress work of creating Greenlandic regalia. One of the articles, specifically, deals with the methodological process of undertaking this thesis research. By paying attention to the various ways in which seals are engaged, narrated, and part of Kalaallit ‘worlding’, the articles destabilize the tendency to reduce diverse Kalaallit-seal relations to simplified narratives within European conceptual vocabularies.

Empirically, this research is based on different materials that are generated from seven months of fieldwork in Greenland, from archival research, and from Greenlandic media sources. It draws substantially on interviews with hunters, seamstresses, and other persons whose professions relate to seal hunting or sealskins in Greenland. Theoretically, the thesis seeks to elaborate on postcolonial theoretical applications in contemporary studies on Greenland by engaging decolonial and Indigenous scholarships from within and outside of the Arctic. The thesis suggests that this is a necessary move in order to unsettle colonial research relations in Arctic scholarship and make way for other modes of thinking, knowing, sensing, and being in knowledge production. This approach transpires into the methodological framework of the thesis which works, auto-reflexively and practically, to interrogate and disrupt researcher positionality, academic privileges, and borderland transgressions in the claims to knowledge on Greenland. Altogether, the thesis engages with the very process of ‘tracing seal’ as a way to explore the theoretical and practical tracks for Greenlandic decolonization.