IA

IA is the political organization formed after the Young Greenlanders’ Council was disbanded, as Smilla recalls it. Its brief appearance places the party within a struggle over Greenland’s political direction: it must define itself in relation both to social democracy and to a Greenlandic upper class, while the larger narrative traces how Danish power persists through institutions, language, secrecy, and development.

Formation and Political Position

Smilla recalls that the Council was disbanded to make way for IA. The new organization had to position itself in relation to SIUMUT, which she identifies as social democratic, and ATASSUT, which she describes as representing a reactionary Greenlandic upper class. The passage establishes IA through this act of political differentiation, without specifying its internal structure, membership, or program.

The political reading associated with this transition is Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Smilla remembers becoming fond of the book for its empathy and indignation, and for its confidence in the possibility of deliberate change. Her own uncertainty complicates that faith: she has wanted much, yet feels directed by forces she cannot see. IA’s formation therefore appears amid a tension between collective political commitment and the limits of individual agency.

Political Institutions and Unequal Power

The novel sets IA’s political context against institutional arrangements in which Greenlandic affairs remain entangled with Danish authority. In her account of the cryolite corporation, former chief accountant Elsa Lübing describes a board that included politicians and a company partly owned by the government. Although the corporation’s accounts were subject to public scrutiny, some sections remained inaccessible even to her, and cooperation with private companies created complicated administrative relationships. The example shows how formal oversight and partial transparency can coexist with restricted access and layered power.

That institutional pattern extends beyond corporate administration. Smilla recalls that Greenland’s schools encouraged pupils to excel in Danish as a route to education and opportunity in Denmark. Political policy then treated Greenland as Denmark’s northernmost county and Inuit as “Northern Danes,” presenting assimilation through Danish-language schooling as equality. The account gives IA’s political emergence a setting in which questions of representation and self-determination cannot be separated from who controls education, administration, and the terms in which Greenland is described.

Language, Culture, and Political Agency

Smilla compares the weakening of Greenlandic to the corrosion of metal exposed to sea fog: a carabiner that appeared reliable after months outdoors could be pulled apart with little effort. Language, she argues, deteriorates through a comparable process. In her own experience, schooling in Qaanaaq took place with teachers who knew no Greenlandic and had no plans to learn it. After moving to Denmark, she found that ordinary words in her mother tongue could become difficult to retrieve, even though Greenlandic remained the language of thought and memory.

The narrative also resists the reduction of Inuit life to an ethnographic image. Smilla recalls her mother combining practices that outsiders might divide into gendered categories, and describes her using a kayak made according to an older North Greenland tradition alongside a sealed plastic hunting float. These details matter to the political frame around IA: cultural continuity is shown not as a fixed display for outsiders, but as lived knowledge adapting to practical circumstances. The organization’s appearance in Smilla’s recollection thus belongs to a broader insistence that Greenlanders must not be confined to identities and futures defined elsewhere.

Development and Significance

The novel does not recount IA’s later development or describe specific policies, electoral activity, or organizational achievements. Instead, it situates the party at the point when the Young Greenlanders’ Council gives way to a new political formation, and makes that transition legible through the contested choices surrounding Greenland’s political alignment.

Across the surrounding narrative, the pressures bearing on such choices take several forms: language loss through Danish schooling, limited access within corporate and administrative structures, military control over entry to Qaanaaq, and development projects framed in the language of progress. Smilla’s later judgment that these arrangements have been created with coercion in mind links economic modernization to political power without making IA itself responsible for any particular response. IA’s significance in the novel is therefore chiefly contextual: it marks an attempt at political positioning within a society whose apparent modernization does not, in Smilla’s account, eliminate the older asymmetries of control.