Inuit Ataqatigiit

Inuit Ataqatigiit, or IA, is the Greenlandic political party whose founding Smilla helps advance after a split in the Council of Young Greenlanders. The novel presents it both as a concrete stage in her political history and as part of a larger struggle over who defines Greenland’s future: its residents, or Danish institutions that continue to shape education, access, and development.

Formation and political profile

The account of Smilla’s early political activity links IA to the Council of Young Greenlanders. She is arrested several times during the council’s occupation of the Ministry of the Environment and later becomes active in founding IA after the council splits. The party therefore emerges from organized Greenlandic dissent, rather than as an initiative of the Danish institutions against which that dissent is directed.

An official account characterizes IA as “Those who will succeed” and labels it “Aggressive Marxism.” That classification belongs to the perspective of the authorities assessing Smilla; it is not an independent description of the party’s program. The distinction matters because the novel repeatedly shows how Greenlandic political claims are filtered through Danish administrative and security frameworks.

Smilla’s membership and departure

Smilla’s involvement with IA is consequential but brief. She leaves the party in the same year she joins, citing numerous disagreements, and remains unaffiliated afterward. The record establishes neither the content of those disagreements nor a detailed account of the party’s internal structure. It does, however, place her departure within a political trajectory shaped by recurrent conflict with institutions and movements alike: she participates in collective action, but does not remain within the party as a lasting organizational home.

The party’s place in her history is also set against her work as a Greenland expedition navigator. Across nine expeditions in twelve years, she signs declarations of secrecy and confidentiality and encounters military-supplied maps, satellite and radar photographs, and meteorological observations. Her political activity and her access to restricted knowledge thus occupy the same biography: the state treats her as a sensitive figure, while the work of navigating North Greenland gives her access to information that ordinary political participation would not provide.

Political agency and Danish institutions

The novel places IA’s formation within the wider history of Danish authority over Greenland. In Smilla’s account of schooling, Greenlandic children are taught by teachers who do not speak Greenlandic, while advancement is presented as a route to Denmark through education conducted in Danish. She connects this process to the political framework under which Greenland was officially made Denmark’s northernmost county and Inuit were described as Northern Danes, supposedly entitled to the same rights as other Danes. The promise of formal equality is paired with the displacement of language and the direction of opportunity toward Denmark.

Other institutions extend this tension beyond schooling. The state’s military role appears in restrictions on entry permits to Qaanaaq and in the confidential mapping material used on expeditions. The novel also depicts resource development through the Greenland Star oil platform and interprets the newer development order as a means of coercion: direct military violence is becoming less necessary as economic incentives encourage people to organize life around greed. These passages do not specify IA’s policies on each matter. They establish the political landscape in which Greenlandic self-determination is contested and make the party’s emergence part of a broader demand for agency.

Significance

IA represents an attempt to turn the dissent associated with the Council of Young Greenlanders into party politics. Its significance in the novel lies less in a described platform than in the contrast between Greenlandic political initiative and the systems that classify, educate, regulate, and economically redirect Greenlanders. Smilla’s quick departure prevents the party from becoming a simple resolution to those tensions; her subsequent unaffiliated status preserves the distance between political belonging and institutional participation.

The novel’s language imagery sharpens that conflict. Smilla compares the loss of Greenlandic to the corrosion of safety carabiners exposed to sea fog: objects that appeared reliable could be pulled apart after three months in a hostile environment. Language, she argues, deteriorates through a comparable process. IA’s presence in her biography therefore belongs to a struggle over more than formal political representation. It is set against the gradual weakening of cultural and linguistic continuity, and against development presented as neutral progress while its power to shape Greenlandic life remains unequal.