In 1910, Rasmussen collaborated with engineer Marius Ib Nyeboe (1867–1946) to establish the Cape York Thule trading station in North Star Bay. Colloquially dubbed just the “Thule trading station,” it provided the economic backup and served as a base camp for seven scientific trips known as the “Thule expeditions.”57 The expeditions, which spanned from 1912 to 1933, brought Rasmussen international fame and recognition, while the travel narratives and collections of Inuit myths and legends he compiled in their wake proved a considerable readership success, shaping the way in which the Inuit and in particular Greenlanders have been perceived by Danes till this day.58 The longest and most spectacular Fifth Thule Expedition (1921–1924), during which Rasmussen and his two Inughuit ←31 | 32→companions from Thule: Qaavigarsuaq Miteq (later Kristiansen, 1900–1978) and Arnarulunnguak (1896–1933) used dogsleds, is regarded as his crowning achievement.59 They travelled about 18,000 kilometres from the north-western part of Hudson Bay, across the Northwest Passage and Alaska, up to Chukotka on the western side of the Bering Strait. During the journey, Rasmussen visited all the Inuit communities along the northern coast of America and in the interior, wrote down their myths and beliefs and collected ethnographic items (nearly 20,000 pieces) for the National Museum in Copenhagen. Authored both by Rasmussen and by the other travellers, the accounts of the journey still serve as the basis of international Inuit research.60 The expedition elevated Rasmussen into a national hero and cemented his reputation as a researcher and a writer – an awardee of honorary doctorates from the University of Copenhagen in 1924 and the University of Edinburgh in 1927. When he died unexpectedly on 21st December 1933 of a stomach infection he contracted on his last expedition, he enjoyed the status of an indisputable national hero and an authority on Greenland.
For my argument in this book, Rasmussen’s biography is particularly relevant in that he was “a product of the contact zone”61 between the Danish and the Greenlandic, his management of the trading station and his travels across the Arctic involved mediating between Inuit and European cultures, and he adopted the dual role of a Greenlander and a European – a native and a coloniser. When I refer to Rasmussen as “a product of the contact zone,” I mean not only his experience of growing up in West Greenland but also his method of exploring the Arctic and associating with Inuit communities which resulted from his childhood experiences and personal predispositions. Anthropologist Erik Gant states that Rasmussen “was born into his research field”62 and took over the mode of moving across the polar zones from his predecessors.63 Because he defined his ←32 | 33→goal as doing ethnographic research and locating the cradle of Inuit culture, the indigenous travelling techniques served him not only as a means to an end, but also as a prerequisite of cultural encounters that followed the rules of the communities he visited.64 Pedersen calls the method used by Rasmussen during the Fifth Expedition “prerevolutionary” – in relation to Bronisław Malinowski’s (1884–1942) “anthropological revolution” – since Rasmussen’s travels at that time largely aimed to collect ethnographic exhibits and accumulate knowledge about the spiritual culture of the communities he visited. But, as Hastrup observes, Rasmussen’s early field research during the Literary Expedition was a form of participant observation that he practiced several years before Malinowski went to the Trobriand Islands for the first time.65 As Rasmussen had spent long years amidst the Inughuit, he was largely treated by them as one of their kind who, like them, lived as a nomad, driven by a desire to see new lands and new people.66 His extraordinary literary talent helped him compose an exceptionally captivating story of a slowly perishing world of hunters and shamans, in which he also inscribed himself, contributing to his own image as a hero and a mediator between the two cultures.67
Rasmussen’s biographer, Kurt L. Frederiksen, emphasises that the famous polar explorer “could live as Eskimos did, speak their language and become one of them although, at the same time, when he stayed in Denmark, he behaved like a European both in mindset and in culture.”68 This complexity of Rasmussen’s personality is also mirrored in his activities and ventures in North Greenland. He did not commit himself only to romantic travelling from one Inughuit community to another, sharing the daily routine with the natives and salvaging their spiritual culture from oblivion. He also co-founded the Cape York Thule trading station, the first private company in Greenland ←33 | 34→since the establishment of the Royal Greenland Trading Department in 1776.69 As such, Rasmussen was a pioneering capitalist entrepreneur in the North-Greenland peripheries, engaged in skin and fur trading, which not only financially supported his polar explorations but also gave him his livelihood.70 For many years, the trading station funded Rasmussen’s Thule expeditions, multiplied the invested capital and provided salaries to Rasmussen himself and his employees.71 Scholars who study the links between Rasmussen’s pursuits and Danish colonialism argue that the establishment of his trading station made it possible to extend Denmark’s influence over the “no man’s land” that North Greenland had been72 and, after Rasmussen’s death, to incorporate it fully into the Danish Crown on 1st August 1937.73
Particularly relevant to my goals in this book is Rasmussen’s “indeterminability” [Danish: ubestemmelighed] as recognised by the researchers of his life and work,74 or, in terms of Homi Bhabha’s theories, his hybrid identity as simultaneously a Dane and a Greenlander, capable of negotiating between the two positions.75 This duality is especially interesting because it proves what Mary ←34 | 35→Louise Pratt observes in her reading of travel writings composed in the age of European colonialism; namely, that the movement of people and ideas took place not only from the European centre to the colonial periphery, but also in the opposite direction.76 I believe that this impossibility to define Rasmussen’s ambivalent role in colonialism is reflected in his literary texts, in particular in their representations of North Greenland and the Inughuit, which are equally ambivalent, complex and dynamic.
3 Research on Knud Rasmussen’s Literary Work
Postcolonial critique in Poland and Denmark has developed robustly over recent years but still remains a somewhat niche research framework. While in Denmark studies on Danish-Greenlandic relationships are already well entrenched and appreciated, the theme is still only occasionally addressed in Polish academia. One reason for this paucity is a lack of Polish translations, which makes such research practicable