High suicide rate in Greenland

Greenland’s high suicide rate is linked in Smilla’s account to the upheaval caused by centralization: when a trading post closed and her brother was displaced from his life as a hunter, he died by suicide, and the rate in Greenland became the highest in the world that same year. The novel places that loss beside policies presented as modernization, asking what those policies cost the people whose lives they reorganize.

A Personal Loss in the Wake of Centralization

The account begins with the Greenland Trading Company’s closure of its business on Maxwell Island in 1979. Smilla’s brother had hunted there for ten years and, in her telling, occupied an unchallenged place in the island’s social world. The closure drove him south to Upernavik. By the time Smilla was posted at a meteorological station, he was sweeping the harbor docks; the following year, he died by suicide.

Smilla places the national statistic immediately beside this family history: that same year, Greenland’s suicide rate became the highest in the world. The juxtaposition does not make her brother’s death an explanation for every suicide, but it makes the human cost of economic change impossible to separate from the number. A hunter’s displacement and the loss of a familiar livelihood become the concrete instance through which the broader crisis is seen.

Development and Its Unequal Costs

The Greenland Ministry acknowledged that necessary centralization would be difficult to reconcile with the hunting trade. Its public statement, printed in Atuagagdliutit, did not mention that further suicides were likely along the way, though Smilla presents this consequence as understood. The gap between an official recognition of economic difficulty and the unspoken human cost is central to her critique.

The novel broadens that critique beyond the trading company. The school system had directed children toward Danish-language education as a route to qualifications and a life beyond what officials described as Arctic misery; Greenland was officially designated Denmark’s northernmost county, and Inuit were called Northern Danes. In Smilla’s account, these promises of equal rights and advancement coexist with the weakening of Greenlandic language and with disruption to local ways of life. Centralization appears not as a neutral administrative improvement but as a reordering whose burdens fall on Greenlanders.

A later reflection on the Greenland Star, a large floating oil platform off Nuuk, extends the argument into resource development. Smilla describes the development surrounding it as designed with coercion in mind, while distinguishing this from the earlier, more direct violence of military presence. In her view, overt force has become less necessary: the appeal of greed can itself draw people into a model of development. This later image does not explain the earlier deaths, but it shows how the novel connects the suicide crisis to a continuing political and economic order.

The Novel’s Framing of the Statistic

The suicide rate is not treated as a detached measure of individual despair. It is set against the closure of a store, the southward displacement of a hunter, and the difficulty of combining centralized administration with the hunting economy. These details make the statistic legible as part of a collective transition, while preserving the particularity of the brother’s fate.

Smilla’s account also holds two scales together without collapsing one into the other: her brother’s changed circumstances are intimate and specific, while the rate is national and the policies extend across Greenland. The result is a critique of development that records both what institutions say they are trying to achieve and what they leave unsaid about the people expected to bear its costs.