Special Report: Greenland’s relatively isolated indigenous Inuit culture finds itself increasingly exposed to the world just as President Donald Trump pushes to take over the territory.
NUUK, Greenland − Musicians Pani and Sebastian Enequist sport once-suppressed Inuit face tattoos, hunt seals for food in remote fjords and honor nature “like a God.” But they found their calling − and each other − while they were obsessing over the American heavy metal band Slipknot.
For thousands of years, Greenland’s Inuit people survived the world’s harshest conditions by living off whales, seals, polar bears, fish and caribou. Now, gleaming new airports are opening up. TikTok stars are proliferating. A relatively isolated indigenous culture, long dominated by ruling Denmark, finds itself increasingly exposed to the world just as President Donald Trump pushes to take over the Arctic territory.
Still, if music can tell ancient and modern stories alike, then the Sound of the Damned, the Enequists’ Nuuk-based hardcore metal band, has a musical plotline that wends across time and place. The group’s raspy, guttural-growl vocals, introspective lyrics and aggressive beats are old and young. Native and foreign-born. They illustrate how change is sweeping through the island’s unique heritage, even as some things stay the same.
“We want to play metal. We also want to represent our culture,” said Pani Enequist, 32, who writes Sound of the Damned’s lyrics and recently began performing with them. Her husband Sebastian, 29, is the band’s lead singer and guitarist. The group’s new material incorporates an Inuit drum called a “qilaat,” mask dancing and throat singing, where hums, gasps and grunts mimic the sounds of animals, streams and icebergs.
The Enequists said that in 2016, they were among the first of a new generation of Greenlanders to get face tattoos, known in Greenlandic as Kakiuineq, as a way to reclaim and celebrate their Inuit ancestral roots, traditions and spirituality. They also view them as a way of rejecting the legacy of Denmark’s 18th-century Christian missionaries, who labeled the practice as pagan and sought to have it banned. Their meanings are linked to Inuit cosmology and rites of passage.
Greenland’s music scene: small but mighty
Greenland’s music scene is small, with the number of musicians and bands working in Nuuk estimated in the low dozens, according to Christian Elsner, whose family owns Atlantic Music, a record label and music store in Greenland’s capital that sells instruments and albums. Greenland has a Spotify-style streaming service called Tusass Music, linked to its postal service, only accessible to users in Greenland and Denmark.
Atlantic Music also houses one of Greenland’s few full-blown recording studios. It sits in the basement of a squat, gabled house framed by a veranda-style front porch. Across the street is Nuuk Center, an eight-story ultra-modern office tower, which would not look out of place in a European city.
Nuuk Center is Greenland’s tallest building. It is also home to its first shopping mall, which opened in 2012. On its upper floors are offices for the Naalakkersuisut or Greenlandic government, which is trying to boost tourism and the local economy by rebuilding and expanding three new airports for direct international flights.
The first direct U.S. flights to Greenland began on June 14 − Trump’s birthday. This is something many Greenlanders feel ambivalent about. They want American tourists to visit. They don’t want to become part of the United States, polls show.
Sounds of the Arctic
Laura Lennert Jensen works for Arctic Sounds, a Greenland-based music management company that represents and promotes local artists. Arctic Sounds also stages an annual music festival − the Arctic Sounds Festival − in Sisimiut, in central western Greenland, which showcases original music acts from Nordic countries.
About 90% of Greenland’s 57,000 people identify as Inuit.
Jensen said Greenlanders first started making popular music that wasn’t traditional Inuit music in the 1970s. In keeping with the times, it was influenced by popular British rock and roll acts of the day, such as Pink Floyd and Deep Purple. Over time, access to the internet improved. So did the advent of software that made it easier for musicians to write and record music without a professional studio. Greenland’s music has diversified to include rap, reggae, electronica, country, pop and everything in between.
On a recent evening in Nuuk, Jensen took USA TODAY on a whistle-stop tour of a few of Nuuk’s live music hotspots, where the acts included lounge singers, folk rock bands and jazz artists. All sang in Greenlandic to attentive local audiences. As did Kuuna, an up-and-coming pop singer who strode self-assuredly around the ring, belting out tunes in between rounds at a Thai boxing event like a fledgling Greenlandic version of Beyoncé.
“Some of our musicians do not carry a single trace of Inuit music in what they create,” Jensen said. “Others carry it as symbolism, to reflect history or to revitalize techniques that have been lost.”
Denmark’s Greenland experiment
Greenland was a Danish colony until 1953. For hundreds of years prior, it was under Danish authority. That era began with the arrival of a Danish-Norwegian Lutheran missionary priest named Hans Egede in 1721. In 1979, Greenland was granted home rule. Thirty years later, it became a self-governing entity.
Today, Denmark retains control over Greenland’s foreign affairs, defense and macro-economic policy. The Greenlandic government manages areas such as education, health care, natural resources and culture.
During parts of colonial rule, Denmark enforced assimilation policies for the Inuit population. It discouraged use of the Greenlandic language, as did some Greenlandic elites. In 1951, it removed 22 children from their families and put them in Danish homes, an experiment aimed at turning them into model “Little Danes.”
In the 1960s and 1970s, as many as 4,500 women and girls − half of the fertile women in Greenland, according to Danish authorities − were subjected to forced sterilization by government physicians, using painful intrauterine devices. Greenland was in the early stages of its modernization. This included a construction boom that attracted many Danish workers and led to a high birth rate among Inuit women. Denmark’s city planners wanted to limit Greenland’s population growth.
The Danish government has issued formal apologies for these policies. But many Greenlanders remain shocked and bitter about these episodes, which helped fuel calls for independence from Denmark.
Greenlanders also believe that deep-rooted biases remain and a broader pattern of ongoing systemic discrimination favors Danes in areas such as access to lucrative jobs and promotions, according to Ulrik Pram Gad, a researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen.
“Many of us feel like there is discrimination in the workplace in Greenland when it comes to high-ranking positions,” said Orla Joelsen, a prison official in Nuuk whose job falls under the authority of Denmark’s justice department. Joelsen said he was speaking in a private capacity.
Greenlanders are underrepresented in the upper echelons of the island’s corporate world, according to Gad, the Denmark-based researcher. In his spare time, Joelsen runs a popular X account about Greenland that has been highly critical of Trump’s interest in Greenland.
“It’s going to be a long four years,” he said.
Greenland’s influencers
Some Greenlanders appear more ready than others for Greenland’s shifting cultural tectonic plates.
“On my TikTok account, I talk a lot about what groceries I’m buying,” said Malu Falck, 32, a singer and graphic designer in Nuuk whose short-form social videos about everyday life in Greenland have helped bring her a whole new following.
Falck has almost 10,000 followers on TikTok. She is not yet making money off of TikTok, she said, though her image was displayed as part of an ad in the window of a Nuuk storefront.
“It’s new in Greenland, but people are getting used to it,” Falck said of TikTok. She estimated that about 100 Greenlanders are “very active” on YouTube, TikTok and other social media.
One of them is Qupanuk Olsen, a Greenlandic mining engineer and politician known for her vlogs about Greenland’s culture, history and traditional Inuit life.
Olsen’s posts on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube routinely reach half a million people.
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But it is in music where Greenland’s overlapping identities are perhaps most directly observable.
Varna Marianne Nielsen, 44, is a Greenlandic filmmaker, music producer and practitioner of traditional drum dancing and drum singing. The latter involves performing with a stick made of bone or wood that is rhythmically struck against a frame drum or qilaat to make an echoing beat.
Nielsen descends from a long line of drum dancers, but grew up listening to American blues, jazz and rock music. “I have both of these traditions in me,” she said.
Nielsen described her music as “sweeping from the ice and the land.” In 2014, she had a role in an episode of the TV series “True Detective,” for which she coproduced multiple original scores.
Nielsen said that, as a child, she was proud of her Greenlandic heritage but didn’t necessarily understand how her identity had been shaped and influenced by Denmark. As an adult, Nielsen said, she has felt compelled to help revive the drum dancing and drum singing tradition that was neglected by earlier generations.
Her work includes field recordings and electronically composed beats.
Nielsen was surprised to learn recently, while doing research in Denmark, that her grandfather’s drum was exhibited in the National Museum in Copenhagen. She found this discovery upsetting because it illustrated how, even now, Greenland’s culture is being expropriated by Denmark.
“It is still difficult to access our treasures when they are in a different country and not home where they belong,” she said, adding that she hoped Danish authorities would repatriate Greenland’s drums.
Like Pani Enequist from Sound of the Damned, Nielsen’s fingers are encircled by tattoos. Their meaning connects to Sassuma Arnaa, or “Mother of the Sea,” an Inuit creation myth about the goddess Sedna. Versions of the myth vary. But the story tells how Sedna came to rule over the Inuit underworld.
In one version, Sassuma was a woman who was mistreated by her family and thrown into the sea by her father, when her fingers were severed and became seals, whales and other marine life for which the Arctic is known.
Sound of the Damned is spending several weeks this summer touring Danish schools, where band members will talk to children about Greenland’s Inuit culture. On stage, they wear “corpse paint”– a style of makeup that gives them a macabre look. Enequist said this has little to do with Greenland and everything to do with music from Metallica to Slipknot that shaped the band’s sound and formed the backdrop to her courtship with her husband.
“There is no contradiction in that,” she said.
Keeping it Greenlandic
Elsner, whose family owns Atlantic Music, is also a musician.
He plays in Nanook, perhaps Greenland’s most successful band of the modern era. The group’s name refers to Greenland’s mythological polar bear, which is on the territory’s coat of arms and symbolizes Greenland’s wildness. Since the band formed in 2008, Nanook’s debut album of melancholic folk-pop has sold around 5,000 records in Greenland − meaning that about 1 in 10 Greenlanders, 1 in 4 or 5 households, could own one.
Nanook refused an offer to sign with the Sony record label early on in the band’s career because it wanted them to sing in English. Elsner said he and his brother, also a vocalist in Nanook, found the idea “too awkward and unnatural.”
They also worried it would be a kind of betrayal of their Greenlandic inheritance.
Not many international music artists travel to Greenland, Elsner said. Distance and expense are factors. Also, there are no roads connecting Greenland’s settlements. Nanook has toured Greenland by boat, plane, helicopter, dog sled and snowmobile. Never a tour bus. Elsner said that even though the American metal band Metallica has a Danish drummer in Lars Ulrich, the California-based group has never made the trip.
But in the late 1990s, a British band called Blur did show up in Greenland.
They played to about 1,000 people in a now-defunct Nuuk bowling alley. And Damon Albarn, Blur’s lead singer, endeared himself to Greenlanders, Elsner said, because he did an interview that featured in a documentary saying it was hypocritical for Westerners to criticize Greenlanders for eating seals, whales and other Arctic marine life when there wasn’t any major livestock industry in Greenland.
“Seals,” Albarn said, were “the cows of Greenland” and they had much better lives – and deaths − than Western industrial livestock, which are often raised in intense confinement in pens and cages.
Elsner said Greenland is a paradox.
“It’s this crazy beautiful place where there is a dark side,” he said, referring to high rates of alcoholism, suicide and incest in some communities. He said Greenland’s good and bad, old and new, seeps into its music.
Socially conscious rappers talk about colonization. Metal bands like Sound of the Damned sing about “how they want their culture back.” Other musicians address the idea of independence from Denmark. And others still, like Elsner’s own band, write songs about nature and “stuff that happens to us” and deliberately avoid writing political songs. And if they do, couch them in metaphors “so it doesn’t affect some people the wrong way,” he said.
Greenland’s music, Elsner said, is, like the place, staying true to its origins yet also evolving.
There are signs, beyond music, of Greenland on the move.
A reporter saw one Tesla hum and whir by in Nuuk. There’s rumored to be a second one among Greenland’s approximately 6,500 cars for an island that’s about half the size of the Indian subcontinent and has fewer than 60 miles of road and just three traffic lights. A local boat captain who sails with tourists in Nuuk and elsewhere said that he’d seen only one polar bear in his entire life. It was in a zoo in Copenhagen.
Kim Hjelmgaard is an international correspondent for USA TODAY. Follow him on Bluesky, Instagram and LinkedIn.