Greenlandic Inuit Erotic

Greenlandic Inuit call themselves Kalaallit and their island Kalaallit Nunaat, the land of the Greenlanders. Almost every other Arctic Indigenous people is a minority governed from somewhere else. Greenlandic Inuit are not: they make up close to nine in ten of Greenland's residents, and the self-government in Nuuk is theirs. Home is a thin strip of coast between the ice sheet and the sea, mostly on the west side. People live in towns such as Nuuk, Sisimiut and Ilulissat and in settlements with no road to anywhere else, reached by boat, by helicopter or, in the north, by dog sled. A sizable community also lives in Denmark.

Their ancestors are the Thule people, who crossed from Arctic Canada in the 1200s and for a time shared the island with Norse farmers in the south. Three branches took shape. West Greenlanders, the Kalaallit proper, bore the full weight of colonial rule after the Lutheran missionary Hans Egede arrived in 1721. The Tunumiit of the east coast had no lasting European contact until the 1880s. The Inughuit of the far northwest are among the northernmost people on earth. They met a British expedition in 1818, and in the 1860s they took in migrants from Baffin Island who brought back the kayak and the bow, both lost during their isolation. Each branch speaks its own variety of Greenlandic, an Eskimo-Aleut language that stacks suffixes onto a root until one long word carries a full English sentence. The western standard has been the sole official language since 2009, though Danish remains common, especially in Nuuk.

Most Greenlandic Inuit belong to the Lutheran church, and confirmation is still one of the big family days, but the older world lingers. People still tell stories of the angakkoq, the shaman, and of the Mother of the Sea, who holds back the sea animals when taboos are broken. The tupilaq was once a secret avenging creature made from bone, skin and sinew. Today it is carved from tooth and antler for collectors. The twentieth century hit hard. Greenland became a Danish county in 1953, small settlements were closed, and families moved into concrete apartment blocks. The Inughuit were moved to make room for the American air base at Thule. In the 1960s and 1970s, a campaign fitted thousands of women and girls with contraceptive coils, many without consent. Home rule followed in 1979. Daily life now mixes wage jobs and smartphones with hunting seal, narwhal and musk ox. Almost any occasion, from a birthday to a child's first school day, calls for a kaffemik, an open house where guests come and go in waves for coffee and cake.