North Greenland is not merely the remote setting of Smilla’s childhood: it is the source of her practical knowledge, her understanding of space and belonging, and her resistance to being defined by Danish institutions. The novel brings the region into view through particular acts of hunting, schooling, movement, and language, while showing how military, scientific, and administrative power shape life there.

Landscape and Ways of Living

In the remembered North Greenland of Smilla’s family, survival rests on close observation and practical skill. Smilla’s mother learned to hunt when her own father’s eyesight failed. Welfare support offered little security, and dependence on relatives could not be taken for granted; when a seal surfaced, the girl shot it, and that act marked the beginning of her life as a hunter. Smilla describes her mother as occupying roles that local convention generally kept apart: she raised children and performed work associated with women, but also shot, paddled a kayak, and brought home meat. The account makes gendered life legible through work and circumstance rather than through a simple label.

The novel also presents hunting as knowledge acquired in company and through repetition. During a bird hunt, after a day without food, Smilla waits in the landscape and catches three birds with a large net. She knows they are females returning to their young. The moment does not remain a simple account of successful hunting: she sees the birds’ deaths as part of a chain of lives, and lets them go, allowing them to rise away. The scene places skill, hunger, dependence on animals, and a changing recognition of their lives within the same experience.

Kinship and oral tradition provide another frame for understanding the region. A story recorded from the Inuit Aisivak describes a beginning in which two men, both sorcerers, transformed one body so it could give birth, and together they created children. The novel sets this account beside historical records of Greenlandic women who hunted as men did, while noting that such changes were uncommon and often required people to abandon family life. These examples complicate outside assumptions about fixed social categories, without suggesting that there was one uniform Greenlandic practice.

Family, Mobility, and Space

North Greenland shapes the movement of Smilla’s parents as well as her childhood. Moritz Jaspersen came to the region to treat trigeminal neuralgia with a new technique involving partial heat treatment of the affected nerve. He had expected to stay for a month, but remained for four years after meeting Smilla’s mother. He tried to persuade her to move onto the American base; she refused, and he followed her to housing made of plywood and corrugated tin, built after Americans displaced Inuit residents from the area where the base was constructed. Their different relations to place are presented through this choice: the base could accommodate his work, but not her need to live beyond its confines.

Smilla’s account of childhood likewise makes freedom of movement central to what North Greenland means. She recalls a life in which remaining indoors or living for a long time in one place seemed unthinkable to her mother. This memory later gives force to her own aversion to confinement: a locked room is not merely an unpleasant setting, but the opposite of the spatial freedom she associates with home. She describes the Greenlandic form of punishment as more often a fine than imprisonment, and contrasts that system with the Danish use of prison. In her understanding, the locked room becomes an especially potent image of European constraint.

The region is also remembered as a small, closely shared human world. Smilla recalls that the last time she was home, 600 people were spread among twelve settlements. People slept many to a room and could hear and see one another, while leaving a settlement for the open land brought a striking change in feeling: first a rising, almost wild energy, then clarity. Years later, crossing the ice in Copenhagen Harbor, Smilla recognizes that same clarity. The comparison shows how North Greenland remains a measure of space for her even far from it.

Schooling and Language

The novel traces the pressure of Danish schooling through Smilla’s own experience. For the first six months, she was taught in her village by a hunter’s wife. Then a Danish pastor and a West Greenlandic catechist came to take her to school in Qaanaaq, addressing the children as people from the north rather than looking at them as individuals. Moritz compelled her to go. At the boarding school she stayed for five months, until she felt able to refuse. Its regular meals, baths, and clean clothes contrasted with the work of village life, where her family collected and heated blocks of freshwater ice and washed less often, especially when hunting or traveling.

That contrast is not presented as a simple passage from hardship to improvement. Returning from school, Smilla notices that she and the other children have lost the habit of taking up ordinary tasks for themselves. They wait for someone else to act, even when cooking or washing is their responsibility. The account makes institutional dependency visible as a learned condition: a change in daily routine has altered how the children relate to work and obligation.

Language is another site of this slow change. After Smilla’s family moved from the village school to Qaanaaq, their teachers did not speak Greenlandic and had no plan to learn it. The children were told that education in Danish offered a way to Denmark, a degree, and escape from Arctic hardship. Smilla links this promise to the political period in which Greenland was officially made Denmark’s northernmost county and Inuit were described as Northern Danes who should receive the same rights as other Danes. Yet speaking Danish does not preserve Greenlandic intact: after arriving in Denmark, Smilla finds that ordinary words become hard to retrieve and that her own language has weakened. On returning, she tries to relearn it without claiming either full success or complete failure.

Administration, Science, and Control

North Greenland is also a place where outside institutions exercise influence through administration, research, and restricted access. Smilla’s father arrived as a medical researcher, and the American base offered him a house and a setting for his work. Her memories of that base exist alongside the displacement of Inuit residents from the area it occupied. The novel thus connects scientific activity to a material landscape already reshaped by military presence.

Later, Smilla is confronted with the records of her participation in nine expeditions over twelve years. Each time, she served as navigator and signed a declaration of secrecy, with confidential maps, satellite and radar photographs, and military meteorological observations involved. The official’s point is that her access to North Greenland’s sensitive information has made her a matter of concern. Her knowledge of the region is therefore double-edged: it grows from experience and navigational skill, while also bringing her within systems of military confidentiality and state scrutiny.

The novel sets such forms of control against the language of development. It describes a large oil platform near Nuuk, constructed from 25,000 linked pontoons and anchored to the seabed, as an emblem of recent technological change. Smilla interprets the new order as coercive, but distinguishes it from direct military violence: she argues that an appeal to greed can do the work of force without openly appearing as force. In this account, development is not a neutral synonym for progress. Its projects and promises can reorganize life around interests that are not determined by the people who inhabit the region.

Cultural Knowledge and Narrative Significance

Smilla resists treating North Greenland as an object that can be understood through detached comparison. She argues that another culture can be approached through living in it, learning its language, and asking to be accepted as a guest. Understanding, when it comes, is not a ranking or a tidy explanation. This perspective distinguishes her lived knowledge from the classifications used by schools, researchers, and officials, without making her experience a claim to speak for every inhabitant.

Her mother’s encounters with outsiders give that difference a concrete form. She met European visitors with a courtesy that could secure what she needed, while remaining selective about what she accepted. To challenge romantic portrayals of Inuit life, she gave ethnographers a dead bird and made them buy half the store for her. She paddled a kayak built according to an older North Greenland method, but used a sealed plastic container as her hunting float. The pairing refuses both a museum-like image of unchanged tradition and the idea that using modern materials erases local knowledge.

North Greenland consequently holds together details that outside accounts may try to separate: inherited practice and adaptation, closeness within settlements and the need for open space, schooling’s material benefits and its disruption of language and self-reliance, scientific work and colonial presence. Its importance to the narrative lies in the way these particulars shape Smilla’s judgment. The region is not an abstract emblem of untouched wilderness; it is a lived place whose knowledge she carries, and whose inhabitants are too often translated into categories imposed from elsewhere.