Kirsten Hastrup’s research while affiliated with IT University of Copenhagen and other places

This article follows the trail of muskoxen over many millennia and continents, focussing on their relations to humans – as their hunters and their protectors, itinerant partners and boundary makers. The human-animal histories referred to in the title began when the Pleistocene era was replaced by the Holocene and continued until the present. The article is not “historical” in the sense of being governed by a strict timeline, but the argument unfolds through topics of different historical origins, tracing particular themes. It starts with “origins” and the early loss of genetic variation, proceeds to early modern naturalist “discovery” and naming, and then onwards to early twentieth-century political skirmishes over territories and hunting rights, and finally to recent activities of muskox hunting. The story closes with a reflection on the poetics of the Muskox World.

The Inughuit of Northwest Greenland are hunters of marine mammals and other animal species of the High Arctic ecological system. Their life is rapidly changing along with the warming Arctic, and they experience massive changes in the environment that always sustained them. This fuels a question of the end of nature, to be addressed through three different natural materialities: ice, water, and land – all of them deeply infiltrating social life. The ice, now melting rapidly, has provided the infrastructure of moving into and about in the region. The water, now opening widely, has made marine mammals the major game. The land, now slowly expanding, increasingly features as a repository of unknown resources. It is suggested that the Inughuit have always dwelled within an ‘ending of nature’, seen as a non-linear process deeply embedded in larger geo-social processes of multiple temporalities.

The main tenet of this article is to show how the ice, so visually dominant in the High Arctic, is also a prominent life force. The ice is never still and as it moves, melts or freeze, it deeply affects human and animal life in the region; conversely the diverse life-forms affect the icy environment in their own way and tempo. This interplay exposes the geo-social relations at the centre of this article, taking off from the gradual retraction of the ice after the last Ice Age, opening up for human movement and settlement in High Arctic America and eventually in Thule (Avanersuaq), in Northwest Greenland. Today some 750 people live there as hunters in the unsurpassable old hunting style, yet also as modern as anybody when it comes to outlook. Through brief discussions of particular periods, from the “discovery” of the Inughuit in 1819 and until the present, it is shown how deeply their life is implicated in the living ice, for better and for worse. The ice emerges as a refrain that holds the landscape together. The argument is based both in historical research and in regular anthropological fieldwork in the region over ten years 2007–2017.

Located in Northwest Greenland, the Thule region is a remarkable frontier zone. This article focusses on the undecided nature of the frontier in both time and space. The article explores the unstable ground upon which ‘resources’ emerge as such. The case is made in three analytical parts: The first discusses the notion of commons and the implicit issue of spatiality. The second shows how the region’s living resources were perceived and poses a question of sustainability. The third centres on the Arctic as a ‘contact zone’; a place for colonial encounters and a meeting ground between human and nonhuman agents.

In 2009, Greenland obtained self-government, terminating Danish supremacy, which had taken many forms over the centuries. This article analyses significant moments in Greenlandic-Danish relations by unpacking distinct contact zones that have emerged through the many encounters between locals and newcomers. Contact zones are always emplaced and create their own logic, which is not always easily readable as “colonialism” in the sense of appropriating lands and extracting surplus. While wrongs may have been perpetrated and ill-informed actions towards the inhabitants taken, relations between Greenland and Denmark illustrate how “colonialism” is neither uniform nor scalable. The analytical focus on colonial moments stresses the nonlinearity of colonial relations and allows for a subtler understanding of the postcolonial remains.

This article presents a small community of High Arctic hunters (the Inughuit in North West Greenland) who have always had to negotiate climatic changes with great impact on their living conditions. This points us toward the natural-social entanglements implied in the notion of the Anthropocene, and to the new intellectual challenges that both natural and social scientists are facing in relation to the current climatic changes. These challenges are discussed through the case of the Inughuit with whom the author has worked over many years. Departing from their dire situation in the 19th century, when they were first described and became known to outsiders, it is shown how flexibility and mobility were always preconditions for survival in this environment. Then, they were trapped in too much ice, while now they have to negotiate a rapidly melting environment. In both cases their response is deeply implicated in their sense of who they were and are, also in relation to a larger world.

The Thule community (Northwest Greenland) sets the scene for this study of health and environmental hazards in a historical perspective. In the early 19th century, when European contact was first made, the region was still in the grip of the Little Ice Age, and the tiny population was on the brink of extinction partly owing to epidemics. This was to change in the late 19th century when more regular contact was made and provisions became more secure. During the 20th century, new political realities were mixed into the environmental issues, leaving the local population on the brink of disaster once again. Most recently, global warming is undermining the hunting economy, yet few subsistence alternatives are present this far in the High Arctic. Increasing contamination of the sea is having negative effects on all Arctic trophic levels with consequences for human health. This article discusses the historicity of health, and the unification of the world through disease and pollution and unpacks a pervasive sense of disequilibrium owing to many factors.

Based on lake sediment data, archaeological findings, and historical records, we describe rapid transformations, resilience and resistance in societies and ecosystems, and their interactions in the past in the North Water area related to changes in climate and historical events. Examples are the formation of the polynya itself and the early arrival of people, ca. 4500 years ago, and later major human immigrations (different societies, cultural encounters, or abandonment) from other regions in the Arctic. While the early immigrations had relatively modest and localised effect on the ecosystem, the later-incoming culture in the early thirteenth century was marked by extensive migrations into and out of the area and abrupt shifts in hunting technologies. This has had long-lasting consequences for the local lake ecosystems. Large natural transformations in the ecosystems have also occurred over relatively short time periods related to changes in the polynya. Finally, we discuss the future perspectives for the North Water area given the many threats, but also opportunities.