the 1960s

The 1960s are presented as a turning point in Greenland’s political and economic order, but not as a clean break from colonial power. The abandonment of an openly colonial policy coincides with promises of equal rights, while companies, research bodies, military access, and Danish-language education continue to direct Greenland’s resources and shape its inhabitants’ lives.

Political transition and corporate power

The novel connects the era’s political changes to a shift in the administration of the Cryolite Corporation. Councilor Ebel, whose authority had defined an earlier period, died in 1964. His death is recalled through the extraordinary demand in his will that his Rolls-Royce be sunk in the North Atlantic while actor Gosta Ekman recited Hamlet’s soliloquy aboard the ship. The narrator reads the episode as a symbol of political death and resurrection: the old, overtly colonial policy in Greenland was abandoned, making way for the policies of the 1960s, which spoke of educating “Northern Danes” to equal rights.

The corporation was reorganized around the same period. Its remaining cryolite was nearly exhausted, and the ore’s declining quality forced continued efforts to improve sorting and extraction. Rumors of new deposits periodically circulated among workers at lunchtime, briefly producing excitement before being denied. Resource depletion did not end the corporation’s reach; it altered the work and encouraged new forms of research and administration.

The account of six separate corporate cafeterias offers an earlier measure of its hierarchy. On May 17, 1957, the day she became chief accountant, Elsa Lübing challenged the arrangement before a politician on the board, arguing that the company’s social ideals sat uneasily with six dining rooms divided by rank. Several years later, only one cafeteria remained. Her recollection shows that changes in corporate organization could reduce visible divisions without undoing the deeper structures that governed access and authority.

Research, secrecy, and access

As the cryolite deposits dwindled, the laboratory staff expanded from five people to twenty, and the corporation established a permanent research group. In 1967, it formed the Advisory Scientific Commission, bringing together representatives from companies and institutions with which it worked, including drilling, mining, and geological bodies. The stated purpose was to find new deposits; for employees, the effect was greater secrecy. Elsa describes being told little, while new expedition expenses and fees made the accounts more difficult to follow. The research effort thus appears both as a response to dwindling resources and as a system whose decisions were increasingly removed from ordinary view.

The novel extends this pattern beyond corporate bookkeeping to the narrator’s own access to Greenland. In a later confrontation, she is told that she has served as navigator on nine expeditions in twelve years, using confidential maps, satellite and radar photographs, and military meteorological observations. Each expedition required her to sign a secrecy declaration. Her unusual access to North Greenland is treated as a sensitive matter, demonstrating that geographical knowledge and movement into the region were subject to state-linked controls as well as professional expertise.

Language, schooling, and assimilation

The transition is also traced through language. When the narrator and other children moved from a village school to Qaanaaq, their teachers did not speak Greenlandic and had no plans to learn it. The path offered to successful pupils led to Denmark, qualifications, and a way out of Arctic hardship, but the ascent was to take place in Danish. The narrator connects this schooling to the politics of the 1960s, when Greenland was officially designated Denmark’s northernmost county and Inuit were called “Northern Danes,” with the stated aim of educating them to the same rights as other Danes.

That promise of equality is set against the cost of linguistic assimilation. The narrator compares the loss of a language to safety-line carabiners that appeared reliable after three months in sea fog but could be pulled apart with a fingernail: Greenlandic, too, can deteriorate under sustained exposure to a hostile environment. After moving to Denmark, she initially believes she will never forget her mother tongue. Yet a chance conversation with another Greenlander makes her search for an ordinary word; later, at the Greenlanders’ House, she discovers how readily her Greenlandic can be picked apart. Her account makes language attrition a lived consequence of the educational and social order, rather than an abstract cultural loss.

Development and continuing control

The novel’s broader reflection on development carries the 1960s’ logic into a later period. It describes political and infrastructural change as recent and conspicuous, including military inspection ships, shifting relations with the Common Market, restrictions on entry to Qaanaaq, and the vast Greenland Star oil platform outside Nuuk. The platform’s linked metal pontoons and deep-sea anchoring embody a new scale of industrial presence. The narrator interprets such development as organized around coercion, while distinguishing it from the direct military violence that had once characterized Arctic rule: the pressure now works through the appeal of greed and the promise of modernization.

This later perspective complicates the era’s language of equal rights. The end of the old colonial policy did not mean that Greenland’s resources, research, language, or access to territory had become free of outside direction. The 1960s matter precisely because the form of power changes: overt colonial administration gives way to development, institutional cooperation, scientific secrecy, and assimilation, leaving the question of who controls Greenland unresolved.