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Sunday 05.02.2012

Alaska to Greenland

Greenland's produces lively and bilingual literature for schools and the greater public...as seen by Mary Hiratsuka.

Learning in two languages takes double the books, but
publishing companies meet
demand for Greenlandic titles.



Thinking back to my eighth-grade math text-
book conjures images of an intimidating thick
book with very limited color inside and an even
duller image of an apple over a horizontal graph.

One can imagine my surprise when Lone
Hindby slid a book in my direction with a
beached whale being butchered on the cover
and a cartoon boy nibbling on some muktuk
on the corner; the last thing I could ever
imagined such a text to be was a math book
for Greenlandic eighth-graders.

Naturally, the book
was produced in both
Greenlandic and
Danish because both
languages are present
throughout the island.

A friend introduced
me to Charles Kinney,
a fellow American
who recently moved
to Greenland as an
English language fel-
low with Georgetown
University, and it was
Kinney who encouraged me to meet Hindby,
the head of development for Inerisaavik,
Greenland’s source for primary educariculum and support.

Inerisaavik was established in August 1991
to aid the adoption of the new public school
act in Greenland. The act was meant to
ensure that teaching methods and practices
would continue to develop in accordance with
the development of society.

Today it seems appropriate that the material developed and published be in both
Danish and Greenlandic. Since Inerisaavik’s
conception it has grown into a larger outfit
that produces and distributes a majority of
the educational curriculum to Greenland’s 87
primary schools.

Unfortunately, Inerisaavik only offers curriculum in Greenlandic for the first 10 years
of school. Hindby noted a few challenges, like
the demand for authors within the small population of Greenland.

To write a textbook
requires time, skill and interest, and educational material can quickly become outdated, making it difficult to produce books for
older audiences.

However, there are a number of other pub-
lishing companies in Greenland that produce
fictional and non-fictional Greenlandic books
for all ages.

One of the older publishing companies,
Atuakkiorfik, was established in1959 to produce more Greenlandic books in
Greenlandic.



Recently Atuakkiorfik published a
Greenlandic cookbook, “Igaassat?” which
translates to “What’s for dinner?” It is available in either Greenlandic or Danish, has a
number of recipes for seal and lamb dishes,
and includes advice on how to spice up meals
with local plants and flowers.

Atuagkat, a larger publishing house, produces 10 to 15 new books in Greenlandic a
year. Topics range from poetry to photography and archeology to history, all of which
maintain culturally pertinent themes and are
frequently printed in both Greenlandic and
Danish with the occasional English version.

It is also possible to find children’s classics
such as Hans Christian Andersen’s famous
stories and the more contemporary favorite,
“Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone,”
translated to Greenlandic. Both were published by Atuakkiorfik.

A smaller and newer company, Milik
Publishing, is a one-woman business that
Lene Therkildsen opened in 2003.

Therkildsen, a former librarian, has worked in
Nunatta Atuagaateqarfia, the Greenlandic
Central Library, and spent several years with
Atuakkiorfik.

Milik has already published 15 titles,
including a number of children’s books in
Norwegian, French and Icelandic. A Faeroese
and a Saami book are currently in production.
“I think there is a deep satisfaction in producing books of high quality, and there is a
great need for books, especially children’s
books, here in Greenland,” Therkildsen said.

It is quite common for Greenlandic children
to learn Greenlandic, Danish and eventually
English.

The option of bilingual, or even trilingual
education, is rarely available to young people
growing up in rural Alaska.

But not only do
schools in Alaska have limited funding and
therefore limited possibilities for offering
native language classes, Alaska seems to have
limited spheres for languages to be practiced.
Despite the efforts that some bilingual
educators continue to make, learning a traditional language is half the battle, while reviving it is quite another and requires a place for
realistic application.

Mary Hiratsuka of Dillingham, Alaska is a 2007 graduate of
Dartmouth College. She is the recipient of the Lewin
Post-Graduate and the Steffansson Fellowships and an
intern at the Inuit Circumpolar Council in Nuuk, the cap-
ital of Greenland.