The Little Mermaid and the Devil's Great Grandmother

At the harbour of Copenhagen, on a large stone by the quay, is a statue of a small womanly figure. She does not look like much, but she is world-famous and if you saw her before the pandemic, chances are she was surrounded by people from across the world photographing her. For more than a century, she has been sitting still looking at the water, her fishtail folded behind her, and her human upper body resting on her arm. Conceived by the Danish author H.C. Andersen, the Little Mermaid of the fairytale becomes a human being by giving up her beautiful voice, so she can live with the prince whom she loves. Failing to seduce him without words, she is left with only two options; either kill him in his sleep, or sacrifice her own life. The Little Mermaid chooses suicide over hurting her beloved, yet the story does not end in tragedy as her innocent selflessness is awarded with a chance to perform good deeds and finally rise up to the heavens.

The Little Mermaid in Denmark has had many visitors and travelled around the world, twice she has been decapitated, and yet she always comes back to life.1 Is it magic? Is it capitalism? Is it because she gained an immortal soul when she struck a deal with the evil sea-witch? Whenever an unsolved issue needs new attention, she is first to revive the discussions. Known to resist mainstream opinion, she often appears in scandalous outfits, with bold words or accessories, to challenge the Danish self-perception, or show solidarity with victims of oppression in other parts of the world. Having been assaulted and dismembered on several occasions, it seems this mermaid with nothing left to lose, has become a popular tool for igniting risky conversations on Danish territories.

Leaving the Little Mermaid for a moment, let us look at her from the other side of the water, by crossing the harbour to Christianshavn, taking the first bridge we arrive at the Royal Greenland Dock. From 1750 until 1970 everything Denmark took from Greenland was shipped to this place and turned into profit.2 Also the first Inuit to arrive in Denmark, abducted from Southwestern Greenland in 1605, were sailed here where the Danish king Christian IV himself came aboard the “Red Lion” to see them with his own eyes. Enjoying what he saw, he sent many more expeditions to the island where over and over Indigenous men, women and children were kidnapped and brought to Copenhagen to demonstrate conquest, stir exotic curiosity and create stories.3

But never their own stories—always the stories of colonization, which we continue to tell in Denmark even though centuries have passed. Three hundred years later in 1905, Inuit people from Greenland were exhibited in the Tivoli garden along with people from the Faroe Islands and the (then) Danish West Indies in the Colonial Exhibition.4 This show and subsequent displays of non-white peoples in the Zoo garden, made colonization stories all the more entertaining, while reinforcing the popular idea that we were superior to them. The Canadian settler/Indigenous research duo Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang explains this dichotomy: “Indigenous peoples are those who have creation stories, not colonization stories, about how we/they came to be in a particular place—indeed how we/they came to be a place.”5

If it was not for these colonization stories, would Denmark still have fairy tales about curious mermaids and invincible princes? Had we not taken Indigenous people hostage to stimulate our fantasy, would we have bedtime stories to tell our children? What stories do mothers in Greenland tell their children? In the recent documentary the Fight for Greenland one of the young protagonists Greenlandic Paninnguaq Heilmann, tells her daughter bedtime stories of Sassuma Arnaa, the soul of the sea.6 Worshipped for thousands of years by Inuit across continents she is known both as a great big mermaid and as an old vengeful woman carrying many names, but for the sake of ease, let us stick with the translation Mother of the Sea.7 Opposite the Little Mermaid she was born human, but transformed into a Goddess when drowning at sea. Refusing to marry any man from her village, her father cuts off her fingers as she hangs grasped on to the side of his boat. As she sinks to the dark depths of the sea, her fingers turn into sea animals, and as ruler of the underworld, Mother of the Sea holds power over both life and afterlife.

This subversive goddess does not dissolve into foam on the waves and become a daughter of the air, and unlike the Little Mermaid she would never agree to get her tongue cut off, but was dismembered unwillingly. She releases sea animals for the hunters if people on land do not cross her, and angakkut 8 will risk their life to comb her long hair so that no seals get tangled up.

In a dramatic interpretation by Hans Egede, the first Dano-Norweigan missionary to arrive in Greenland, Mother of the Sea is dominated by the male angakkoq who swings her by the hair till she loses her powers.9 Egede calls her the ‘Devil’s Great Grandmother’ and ‘The Goddess of Hell’. One can imagine she would give the 18th century priest a scare, after such an insult, perhaps that is why on his journey to Greenland he: “saw a most terrible creature, resembling nothing they saw before. The monster lifted its head so high that it seemed to be higher than the crow’s nest on the mainmast. (...) Later the sailors saw its tail as well. The monster was longer than our whole ship.”10

This became one of the earliest written accounts of a sea monster sighting. Though intimidated by the supernatural encounter, Egede prevailed on his mission to spread the word of God, and even after many generations, Danes still teach Greenlandic people to assimilate and insist that Inuit critical thinking, spirituality and creativity does not belong in the classroom. When Panninguaq is cast in the leading role as Mother of the Sea in the school musical at College of Nuuk she is disappointed to find out that her character will be performing exclusively in Danish and singing the song ‘Look At What You Made Me Do’ by Taylor Swift instead of a Greenlandic song paying tribute to her cultural heritage. She confronts her teacher and proposes to add Greenlandic expressions to the script, but her concerns are dismissed so she decides to give up the role.11 Not only do we insist on repeating colonization stories, we also colonize, appropriate and abuse their creation stories.

Was the docile Little Mermaid invented by a Danish man, in an attempt to combat the ferocious sea-goddess of Inuit myth? Endorsed by Disney, the Little Mermaid taught me and millions of girls to give up their voices and identities for the love of a white man. Rather than roaming the sea, proud of her fish tail, the Little Mermaid leaves her sisterhood behind to become ‘fully’ human hoping to live happily ever after with a prince. Back in the 18th century Christianshavn, similar hopes must have been held by the women who journeyed to Greenland from the ‘discipline, health, and improvement house’ a penal institution hosting prostitutes and children. As the new colony which Egede named ‘Good Hope’ (Godthaab) needed females to successfully reproduce, these young women and girls got married to the soldiers, prisoners and slaves who the king sent to occupy the ‘Island of Hope’ but eventually left to die from malnutrition, and infections.

2021 marks the 300th anniversary of the arrival of Hans Egede, though the capital is no longer known as ‘Godthaab’ a statue of Egede still overlooks Nuuk today. Apart from a recent attack covering the statue, with red paint, the pedestal with Inuit symbols and the word ‘DECOLONIZE’, there has been no political backlash on the celebration of the Danish colonization of Greenland.12 Instead the focus is to commemorate the meeting of cultures enforcing the colonial narrative of a happy union between the primitive and the civilized, which made Danish territory 98% larger than it was. It is this claim to territory that renders Denmark an Arctic superpower and the stolen land “natural resources”. Driven by the insatiable desire to explore, extract and exhaust these reserves, Greenlandic demands for influence are repeatedly undermined, and the current self-rule act of 2009 does not include foreign affairs, finances, defence and jurisdiction.

The influx of Greenlandic women in Christianshavn today reflects a past of hopelessness. Of the many Inuit arriving in Denmark with plans and dreams, those who have their hopes crushed often find community in the neighbourhood. Squatters in the 1970’s created a tolerant atmosphere which laid the foundation for the biggest drug market in Denmark, in the freetown Christiania. Naturally, the commune has also attracted Greenlandic people with addictions and in 2018 during one of countless police raids in Pusher Street, a violent confrontation occurred between armed police and civilians. Video recordings of the incident fluctuated, depicting an intoxicated and provocative Greenlandic woman being violently pushed back several meters by an officer, landing with the back of her head against the brick road.

It might come as a surprise, that the woman so brutally assaulted two years ago, is still in prison convicted for violence against police in function. The 51-year old woman who posed little threat to the officers in full armour, was not only wounded, she also had to go two years to prison for it. Following her arrest the newspapers did not write about the overrepresentation of Greenlandic women in Danish prisons nor did they write about the systemic invisibility Inuit are subjected to due to their Danish passports, instead they found comic relief in her court defense: “I don’t recall it. I had been drinking vodka, Bailey, Tuborg Gold, and I’d smoked some weed.”13 Struggling with trauma and addiction, many a Greenlandic woman has been racialized, and ostracized by Danish society, only to find peace at the bottom of the bottle, which Danish media dramatize gleefully, thereby enforcing dehumanizing stereotypes.

The harmful effects of this dehumanization have become so unbearably apparent, that when a homeless man was found dying in front of a mall, the first by-passer to make an emergency call was asked if the man was ‘a Greenlander’. After answering yes, it took 40 minutes and numerous other callers, before an ambulance arrived to find the man dead. Even after leaked recordings proved how police lied about the racist question, the neglect never had any legal ramifications for those responsible.15 That the Danish justice system provides no justice but rather incriminates the Inuit minority is not surprising considering that it was never a system designed to protect them, but those who made them vulnerable in the first place.

The central Christianshavn's Square is home to young and old alcoholized Greenlanders but also to two-billion-year-old Greenlandic marble blocks. The exploitation of land is inextricably linked to that of Indigenous peoples, and across generations, patterns emerge demonstrating the urgent need to address the pain which Denmark has for centuries inflicted upon Greenland with great indifference. As the desire for independence grows stronger, the Little Mermaid could be easily swallowed by the Mother of the Sea who—as a figure of replenishment and regeneration-uses her transformative powers to balance life in the sea, the source of Inuit economy. As she releases a new wave of national empowerment, it is yet to be seen whether Greenland will throw all colonial remnants overboard and cut ties to the old kingdom-or if her knots can be gently brushed out through Indigenous healing.

The Lesser Evil1

It seems that the hope most central to Hans Egede’s mission, which we celebrate in the coming year, was a hope for continuous acquisition of land, bodies and minds, the “development” which shaped Greenland into a constituent part of a nation state 3000 km away. This ongoing somewhat casual exploitation goes largely unnoticed and undisputed, yet when Donald Trump in 2019 proposed to buy Greenland, calling it a ‘large real-estate deal’, the status of Greenland within the Danish Realm, again became a question of public interest in Denmark. Historically the relationship between Greenland and USA, with Denmark paternalistically leading negotiations on Greenland’s behalf has led to numerous military and environmental scandals.The receding Greenland ice sheet will sooner rather than later reveal secretly disposed nuclear waste, as the ice is melting at the highest pace in 12.000 years2, making Copenhagen-based scientists admit to the failure of their climate predictions which factor in hopeful reductions of co2 emissions while underestimating the multitude of climatic processes simultaneously occurring.3

Whether it is left to climate scientists or shamans like the angakoq, to guide and foresee the future of our environments, it is evident that nature changes behaviour according to human activities. Inuit knew this many generations ago, and taboo rules and myths functioned to prevent overhunting, as Mother of the Sea could withhold the sea animals if humans violated her territory. As temperatures in the Arctic rise faster than anywhere else on the globe, it is easy to imagine the burning fury of Mother of the Sea heating up the ocean due to our ignorance and harmful habits. Believing in

man-made climate-change can be just as difficult as believing in mermaids, however we need to believe in something to have a chance at survival.4

Regardless if we decide to think of it as Arctic Amplification or the powers of a furious Goddess, the extreme decrease of sea ice opens up new shipping routes in the Arctic, so Asian goods can be transported much faster to consumers in the West. Apart from the obvious strategic benefit, Greenland also attracts global interest due to its enormous untapped supply of minerals, and rare-earth elements (REE). Estimated to contain a third of all the world’s untapped REE reserves alongside the largest undiscovered oil and gas reserves, Greenland has been dubbed the Amazon of the North.5 This is a stark comparison given the South-American rainforest is currently transforming into a desolate Savannah, depleting its Indigenous inhabitants for their sustainable ways of living.

Changes imposed to Greenlandic ways of living and dying accelerated after World War II, when Greenland changed status, becoming an ‘equal’ part of the Danish kingdom in 1953, rather than a colony subjected to UN critique. Greenland’s modernization turned self-sufficient hunters into wage-workers in Danish-owned factories and mines, and replaced semi-nomadic settlements along the coast, with poor quality concrete blocks in the capital, outsourcing care and education from the family to the emerging welfare state. No longer independent in small communities, the Greenlandic people became rent-paying and reliant on

forces of the market economy. In Marxist terms this phase is understood as the primitive accumulation preceding any capitalist society, which feminist scholar and millitant Silvia Federici argues is never a one-time isolated historical event, but an eternally recurring process, essential to global capitalism.6

With the industrialization of the 20th century, new ways of living meant an explosive growth in birth rates causing the population to almost triple in only forty years. In the early 1960’s Danish authorities began campaigning for birth control to bring down the number of pregnancies and implemented the right to abortion in 1975. Today more pregnancies end in abortion than in birth, and Greenland has one of the highest rates of abortion in the world. Paradoxically, the first Greenlandic person to be incarcerated, was a woman sentenced in 1909, who committed infaticide after an unwanted pregnancy. Just like the sisters of the Little Mermaid who had their long hair taken by the evil Sea Witch, the woman from Qaqortoq had her hair cut off as punishment.7

What also contributed to an increased population was the influx of Danish migrants who performed skilled labour and administration in the growing public sector. Of these 'postcolonial'8 generations many were born to Danish fathers, who bore no legal responsibility for

children born out of wedlock in Greenland and had their right to anonymity protected by Danish law. This law ensured that mothers to children born out of wedlock before 1974, could be taken to trial for informing anyone of the Danish father’s identity. Only in 2014, after years of documenting the traumatic consequences experienced by fatherless children, did the organization Juridiske Faderløse (eng. Juridically Fatherless) achieve a change in legislation allowing Greenlandic children born out of wedlock to Danish fathers, the same rights as any other child born to unmarried parents.9

Until recently Danish legislation was not only efficient at protecting Danish men’s sexual freedom, it also ensured via the birth-place criteria10 that their salaries would be approximately twice as high as those of Greenlandic workers. This type of discrimination was not a modern invention, since the earliest attempts of colonization, the nation state has gendered and racialized in order to exploit Indiginous populations. Discrimination and obsessive categorization was deeply embedded in the social design of the colony, illustrated by the Royal Greenland Trade Department who prohibited employees from marrying Inuit or racially mixed women in 1782. The term ‘mixed’ was used to describe any Greenlander who, even generations back, had some European ancestry, effectively reducing the 'fully' native population, evoking the blood-quantum laws of Northern America. Other than placing Greenlanders in one of two ethnic categories and assessing their literacy and moral behaviour, the administrators did everything to quantify the isolated Inuit population.

Thus Inuit was ordered into the binary categories of women and men, promoting strictly monogamous heterosexual marriages, as anything other would be irreconcilable with God.11 In contrast, Inuit had traditions involving extramarital sex, and believed that every person had a female and a male spirit, that gender was not defined by the body but by which of the two spirits was the most dominant within it.12 The three centuries of Danish occupation in Greenland demonstrates how colonization subjugated populations to Christianity, turned women’s reproductive rights into a ‘bio-political’ instrument, and invented race and gender as tools for capitalist exploitation threatening the lives of any non-conforming peoples.13

In her online lecture at KABK, Federici brings up the notion of body territory, tying the resistance and defense of land to the female body, as the same authorities inflict violence on both. Federici emphasizes how the capitalist state invades not only geographical territories but renders the female body a territory, an ‘object of direct appropriation’: “women’s body is a colony that can be acquired, dominated, exploited without risk, with impunity.”15 Our understanding of colonization needs to be extended to the female body, sexuality, and reproductive rights, if we are to understand how the Danish colonization has extended far beyond the date Greenland officially stopped being a colony.

Meanwhile the trauma of forceful modernization has been passed on to following generations and stories of neglect, abuse, discrimination and violence are ubiquitous across Inuit territories, leading to a stark rise in suicides. Until the year 1950 only 14 suicides had been recorded in Greenland but by the late 1970s the ratio had changed

from being amongst the lowest in the world to the highest. A world record which has remained for 35 years in a row, a reality so deeply painful, statistics can only give an indication of the suffering.16 Violence, alcohol and sexual abuse is recognized as contributing factors to the suicide epidemic, a health survey from 2014 suggest that almost 50% of East Greenlanders have suffered from sexual abuse while growing up, but surveys rarely reflect the historic roots of problems.17

Though the number of suicides peaked in the wake of rapid changes to Greenlandic society, criticism is seldomly explicitly directed at the Danish politics which imposed these rapid changes. In the essay ‘Necropolitics’ political theorist Achille Mbembe defines sovereignty as the right to kill, to subjugate the ‘other’, or in the case of suicide the self, to different degrees of death: “Whether read from the perspective of slavery or of colonial occupation, death and freedom are irrevocably interwoven. As we have seen, terror is a defining feature of both slave and late-modern colonial regimes. Both regimes are also specific instances and experiences of unfreedom. To live under late modern occupation is to experience a permanent condition of “being in pain”” In this experience of unfreedom, the ongoing pain is relieved only at the moment of death, and the sole possibility

for attaining sovereignty over life is to become one's own killer.19

Looking at death as an intrinsic part of politics, and learning that Indigenous and First Nation peoples across the globe battle equally brutal statistics, it seems evident that the colonization and still-Danish sovereignty is reflected in the pain Greenland faces today. But in Denmark the perception is very different. Mostly when Greenland gains media attention, it is for its nature portrayed as a great unexplored resource, or for its people portrayed as emotionally dysfunctional addicts, unable to meet modern ways of living. Danish film and tv producers will use music and effects to dramatize the vast and beautiful landscapes, in stark contrast to the ugliness of Inuit suffering. The awareness that we contribute to that same suffering, has yet to sink in, while Denmark continues to postpone or deny attempts of reconciliation.

In recent debates over the word ‘eskimo’ concerns for white fragility, overrule any considerations for Greenlandic experience. Thus the ice cream called ‘Gigantic Eskimo’ can still be found in supermarkets, ignoring decades of Inuit activism.20 Ignorance has been the preferred attitude towards Greenlandic demands for as long as anyone remembers; when an American military plane carrying bombs crashed outside the Thule-base in 1968 Denmark ignored it until years later, when it was revealed how the Danish prime minister had been informed about the presence of atomic weapons in Greenland, despite the Danish ban of nuclear power.21 The scandalous incident illustrates how laws which applied to all of Danish territories, could in the case of Greenland, be by-passed, bended or completely ignored.

Mbembé elaborates on this state of exception, as a consequence of racism, the technology which enabled Europeans to commit murder, without it being a crime: “That colonies might be ruled over in absolute lawlessness stems from the racial denial of any common bond between the conqueror and the native. In the eyes of the conqueror, savage life is just another form of animal life, a horrifying experience, something alien beyond imagination or comprehension. In fact, according to Arendt, what makes the savages different from other human beings is less the color of their skin than the fear that they behave like a part of nature, that they treat nature as their undisputed master. Nature thus remains, in all its majesty, an overwhelming reality compared to which they appear to be phantoms, unreal and ghostlike.”22

Undoubtedly, the lifestyle of Inuit communities was used to fuel the fantasy of a vast wilderness, in which 'primitive' savages subordinated to nature in order to survive. The colonial imagination of us and them as separate species, justified the difference in treatment, present even in ‘postcolonial’ Greenlandic society.

In the Canadian settler-state the Inuit population were forced to carry badges similar to dog tags, identifying them by number instead of name. The ‘eskimo identification’ was officially in use until the 1980’s while until the 1990’s children were forcefully removed from their families, cultures and languages to receive a ‘civilized’ Christian education. With prime minister Stephen Harper’s apology in 2008 these politics of the Canadian state were officially declared a cultural genocide against Indigenous peoples. In comparison to US and Canadian settler-coloniality, Denmark’s rule over Greenland is portrayed as the lesser evil. Yet Denmark too has experimented with the same variation of cultural genocide, while survivors who were removed from their families and sent to Denmark as children in the 1950’s are still waiting for an apology.23 The institutional assaults on Greenlandic identity bear witness to the importance of education.24 It is alarming how racism found heavy anchors in innocent things like children’s stories, amusement parks, zoos, and candies, how rather than admitting error, and critically educating about past mistakes, we choose to insist on the right to feed children racist ice cream.

The Master’s Tools1

As much as it has been used for colonization, education can also be a tool for decolonization—to instill pride and confidence in Indigenous knowledge production and to carve out a space where alternatives to colonial systems can exist. However Tuck and Yang reminds us it cannot be achieved by metaphorizing, abstracting and conceptualizing decolonisation: “The easy adoption of decolonization as a metaphor (and nothing else) is a form of settler anxiety,

2  Tuck and Yang. Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor, 9.

because it is a premature attempt at reconciliation.”2 The duo defines six tendencies which have falsely been connected to, and taken away focus from the essence of decolonisation. Coined moves to innocence, these responses frequently appear in the context of ‘justice-work’ and provide colonizers and their descendants with relief from inherent guilt.

In response to the vandalism of Hans Egede’s statue, two white scholars wrote the article ‘Activists demand the mental decolonisation of the mind’ for Justiceinfo.net. The article begins with a superficial introduction of the Danish colonisation of Greenland, after which they quote artist and activist Aqqalu Berthelsen’s statement:  “It’s about time that we stop celebrating colonizers and that we start taking back what is rightfully ours. It is time to decolonize our minds and our country. No colonizer deserves to be on top of a mountain like that. We need to learn the Truth of our History,” This straight forward demand is however moulded into the settler-friendly idea, that only the minds need decolonisation, without any mention of land.

The authors conveniently overlook the most central claim of the statement, that Greenland should be officially recognised as its own country. Focusing solely on the diffuse idea of decolonising the mind the article describes the activist group as:  “(...) part of a movement in Greenland calling for mental decolonization, who argue that despite large degrees of self-government compared to other indigenous peoples around the world, a wide variety of informal forms of colonialism are still governing Greenlandic people, making the transition away from the state of Denmark almost impossible.”3 With imprecise reference, they argue Greenland has relatively large autonomy, thus instilling skepticism and ignoring the claim for sovereignty, ultimately appeasing

the white reader, that for Greenland it is almost impossible to leave Denmark. Though perhaps well-intended, this argument reveals an underlying conviction that Indigenous people are in need of guidance from the white settler state.

Tuck and Yang characterizes this form of response as the ‘free your mind and the rest will follow’. The central mechanism in this specific move to innocence, is to focus on cultivation of critical awareness without regards to the necessary actions for actual decolonisation. Another red flag is that, the article makes no mention of what was also part of the activist intervention; a red flag with white letters reading ‘LAND BACK’. In the activists’ manifesto delivered by Aka Niviâna, the flag is contextualized: “Land back. A statement not only defending the land, but the people living on it. A solidarity movement beyond colonial borders, showing solidarity with other indigenous groups and marginalized people.”4 Tuck and Yang insist that decolonization must include the return of land. That it never goes unnoticed, because it is an unsettling process of distancing the settler from that which was unjustly occupied.

Aligned with political philosopher Franz Fanon who in 1963 insisted on decolonization as a historical process of complete disorder, a break with colonial conditions, Tuck and Yang compare him with education philosopher Paulo Freire:  “Freire positions liberation as redemption, a freeing of both oppressor and oppressed through their humanity. Humans become ‘subjects’ who then proceed to work on the ‘objects’ of the world (animals, earth, water), and indeed read the word (critical consciousness) in order to write the world (exploit nature). For Freire, there are no Natives, no Settlers, and indeed no history, and the future is simply a rupture from the timeless present”5 Paradoxically celebrating the colonizer is today normalized to the point that making any changes to his presence, even as a statue, is seen as a threat to history.6

So Hans Egede remains, after a local vote, at his prominent spot, while the word “DECOLONIZE” has been washed off his pedestal. Using the word in its verb-form it becomes an imperative for the continuous dismantling of colonial values. It is with this commitment that redesigned curriculums around the globe approach education in a myriad of contexts. Research collective Decolonizing Design outlines their vision of improved design education, in Decolonising Design Education: Ontologies, Strategies, Urgencies the collective defines decolonisation of design as an ontological statement:  “What we mean by ‘ontological’ is that what we design, designs back on us, designing the very being of our world. And it seems for the Global North at least, what is required to get viable futures, is to redesign the being-in-our-worlds.”7

As much as we need to change, as merely a statement, containing no historical, ethnic or geographical specificity, ‘decolonising design education’ risks becoming yet another move to innocence.

Like feminism and anti-racism also decolonization can become trendy, but Tuck and Yang remain critical towards its application within education:  “it is not uncommon to hear speakers refer, almost casually, to the need to “decolonize our schools,” or use “decolonizing methods”, or “decolonize student thinking.” Yet, we have observed a startling number of these discussions make no mention of Indigenous peoples, our/their struggles for the recognition of our/their sovereignty, or the contributions of Indigenous intellectuals and activists to theories and frameworks of decolonization.”8

This is why at Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD) in Toronto, head of design, Elisabeth ‘Dori’ Tunstall begins every presentation by acknowledging the Indigenous custodians of the land upon which the university was built.

Meanwhile the Danish Royal Academy of Art is proud of its royalty, even though it means that the school was built with rubble used as ballast aboard slave-ships.9 When the academy’s founding father,

king Frederik V embodied by a plaster replica of a statue, suffered the tragic fate of dissolution in the canal, it resulted in scandal and firings. The act of solidarity with activists in Nuuk and elsewhere impacted by Danish colonization, was labelled terrorism and equalled with the Taliban’s annihilation of 6th century Buddha statues in Bamiyan, Afghanistan.10 Regardless of what actions like these are called, there is an urgent need for addressing and reducing the harm done by Eurocentric art and design education.

Within graphic design, typography especially illustrates existing hierarchies as it expresses written language, where Latin is favoured over all other scripts, symptomatically called Non-Latin. Typographer Robert Bringhurst defines the responsibility of graphic designers: “Communication ceases when one being is no different from another: when there is nothing strange to wonder at and no new information to exchange. For that reason among others, typography and typographers must honor the variety and complexity of human language, thoughts and identity, instead of homogenizing or hiding it.”11 An honourable task, if completed with this dedication to diversity, yet often misunderstood resulting in offensive use of type.

One surprising example of such offense is the United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Designed by UN in-house designers, the legal paper uses the same typeface as the cocktail menu of the Vavoom Tiki Room in the Hague, and probably countless other ‘exotic’ publications around the world. Unlike other official documents, the headlines are in ‘earthy’ warm colours accompanied by a border consisting of geometric spirals. A strong sense of cognitive dissonance occurs when reading the text:“Resolution adopted by the General assembly…” as the eyes expect to read "Hakuna Matata!"

As in other fields, graphic designer Ruben Pater notes how often questionable design decisions are made by white designers, with no knowledge of the culture they seek to emulate, instead reflecting only the designers’ imagination, reducing Indigenous culture to a colonial stereotype. According to Pater:  “Ethnic typography can lead to racist designs, but more importantly the use of ethnic stereotypes prevents the public from seeing representations of minorities treated with the same respect as those of the dominant culture.”12 When a document concerning the ‘survival, dignity and wellbeing’ of all Indigenous peoples on this planet, at the highest institutional level, on behalf of 148 constituent nation states, is designed with this level of cultural awareness, can we trust those rights will be taken seriously?13

However not only ignorant designers are to blame, also our tools carry responsibility as they support these decisions. In the 2020 version of Adobe Illustrator, a popular software amongst graphic designers, a property called ‘borders’ enables users to apply an ‘Indigenous’

style, reminiscent of the UNDRIP spirals. Across platforms and interfaces examples of racialization can be found encoded within the software, we see as a neutral and universal vessel for design. Indeed, what we design, designs back at us, and as technology grows ‘smarter’ the question of agency becomes more and more important. Mbembe articulates this development: “We are witnessing an opening up to the multiple affinities between humans and other creatures or species. We can no longer assume that there are incommensurable differences between us, tool makers, sign makers, language speakers and other animals or between social history and natural history.”14 Without the binary division of objects and subjects, animals and humans, our machines and our brains, the mermaid becomes evermore relevant as an interspecies creature, able to float between cultures.

In pre-Christian Greenland such a separation was not made between humans and other species. In the holistic Inuit belief system the concept of Inua meant that everything visible was animated with life, not visible to the eye. This spiritual approach to nature, created an entirely different understanding of tools, than that of a consumer-society, and resulted in an intricate and inherently sustainable design practice.15 Gore-tex-like technologies were used to insulate clothing, allowing hunters to move swiftly and suddenly without sweating, to again sit still for hours without freezing. Just by feeling three-dimensional maps carved in drift-wood, hunters could navigate the coastlines in kayak in the darkness of winter. Snow goggles helped in the long bright summer days, when hunters could go blind from the sun’s reflection. The Inuit hunting techniques were so sophisticated, it took 150 years of colonization before Europeans could contribute anything significantly improving them.16

But Inuit innovations were not only practical, the interconnectedness with spirits meant design was a kind of magic that anyone could exercise for protection, revenge or healing.17 When uncritically adopting pre-existing tools, aesthetics, and attitudes shaped by those in power, we are merely reproducing the same patterns in new guises. Audre Lorde brought up this urgency in her speech ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’: “Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference—those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older—know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths.”18  Inuit knew how to create powerful tools for survival using only what was available. Indigenous knowledge-production guides a radical understanding of technology and other species, which could bring about the necessary onto-epistemological change.

Storytelling for Survival1

The genocidal history of Western civilisation teaches the dangers of celebrating the colonizers, of relying exclusively on scientific models and written languages, centering the white man who turns all other living and non-living beings into his property. Thus land back is not merely taking over a physical property, but caring for the land as a spiritual, ecological and historical responsibility as Inuit used to carry out with full autonomy. Once arrived at the realization that Denmark was never small and innocent as the Little Mermaid, but still benefits from the colonization of Greenland, and from privileges inherited from a time as the world’s seventh biggest slave-trader, a mourning of the stories no longer being told begins, and new stories can emerge.2

In Greenland Inuit storytelling has always played an active role in education and parenting. Many of the central myths were told to discipline children, and instill a moral codex to improve the wellbeing of the community. Drama, dance and drum-music accompanied rituals and celebrations and the ancestral stories that survived colonization, are today listed as UNESCO intangible cultural heritage. In the ‘The Fight for Greenland’ Panninguaq explains to her daughter that the lines under her skin, which cross her fingers, used to be tattooed in honour of the Mother of

the Sea to secure a peaceful afterlife for the soul.3 These lines indicate where the fingers of Mother of the Sea were cut, before her transformation, as traditionally, tattoos marked the passing from childhood to femalehood and protected women against anything from evil spirits to painful childbirth.

The inherently female practice of tattooing was one of the first traditions to vanish when the colonial introduction of Christianity made all creation stories about Adam and Eve. It is only in recent years that the sacred markings have resurfaced as Western beauty ideals prevail beyond the impact of the church. Greenlandic tattoo-artist and researcher Maya Sialuk Jacobsen, acknowledges the decolonial significance of the traditional practice, but she insists that the tattoos are not revived to be Westernized, commercialized or used as a political weapon for Greenlandic independence:

 “The most pressing point of my practice right now, is how we as a people handle the finding and revival of old practices and avoid making it a weapon of the few, but instead make it the healing of everybody. It is so very easy for our practice to be taken over and politicized like it is happening now, and I am eager to change that, because it takes the opportunity away from the whole group to benefit from getting to know our culture again, and to reconnect with the deeper layers of female culture of the Inuit people.”4 The traditional tattoos make up an entire language, they tell stories of the person who carries them, not just to be read by humans but also by spirits. Women would be tattooed with the patterns from their family, and when marrying adopt designs from their husband’s ancestors, passing the combination on to their daughters.5 The symbols are also specific to geography, e.g. West-Greenlanders and East-Greenlanders would be tattooed differently according to differences in their hunting techniques.

For more than four-thousand years, the tattoos were practised by Inuit in all Arctic regions, Jacobsen explains how they are gaining popularity with the young:  “Today they just get the patterns that they like, they recognize the whole package as an Inuit identity marker, but really if you know how to read and utilize the tattoos there is great healing to get from them. I have tattooed hundreds of Inuit women across our territories and I’ve seen that it works, there is a magic!” Jacobsen describes the craft as something spiritual outside of a commercial practice, where a client requests from a catalogue, instead she practices tattooing as a way of healing communities. But this Jacobsen is not able to legally perform where she lives in Denmark.

Given the Arctic climate traditional clothing covered most of the body, so majority of the patterns were designed for face and hands, but Danish law forbids tattooing from the neck and up, and from the wrists and down.6 Even though Denmark is home to the second biggest Inuit minority in the world we make no exception from the law when it is actually requested, contradicting the UNDRIP which we signed in 2007:  “§11.1 Indigenous peoples have the right to practise and revitalize their cultural traditions and customs. This includes the right to maintain, protect and develop the past, present and future manifestations of their cultures, such as (...) designs, ceremonies, technologies and visual and performing arts and literature.”7

Legalized or not Jacobsen’s practice and her extensive research into Inuit heritage provides an empowerment that will continue to serve Greenlandic self-perception for generations. That the

tattoos have not recovered all of their original signification, makes space for artistic and deeply personal interpretations for Greenlanders8 today. Inuit patterns appearing on skin already decorated by contemporary tattoos, or on the pedestals of colonizers, illustrate how Inuit tattooing is not simply a rediscovery of lost knowledge, it is an expansion of the past stimulating the imagination of Indigenous futures.

This is vital work in a context where Indigenous culture is widely understood as belonging to the past. Colonization stories position indigeneity as incommensurable with modern life, as something that inevitably had to die out as it could not co-exist with civilization. This is why Anishinaabe theorist Gerald Vizenor speaks of ‘survivance’ combining the words survival and resistance:  “Most importantly, survivance establishes Native identity in the present, as opposed to viewing Native experience as a relic of the past, consigned to museum exhibits and to the nostalgic longing for a return to the noble, savage fictional contact narratives in the guise of an alien race (...)”9 Distanced from victimhood, survivance indicates the collective experience of existing in spite of an ongoing genocide, most often portrayed as an one-time-event of the past. Despite our ceaseless efforts to erase, christen, assimilate, disappear and forget entire populations, native researchers and cultural workers inscribe Indigenous lives into cyberspace, public space, and any other space we think of as blank.

The figure of the mermaid has been present since the dawn of humanity, and can be traced across the globe with representatives like the Japanese Ningyo, the Southeast Asian Suvannamaccha, the Assyrian Atagartis

and the West-European Melusine. This cyborg identity is so contended, today merpeople have their own unicode emoji and with the use of artificial intelligence unique mermaids can be generated (see illustrations) from now until infinity.10 Whether physically dismembered, digitally disembodied, or rendered into vast datasets, the mermaid’s capacity for survivance makes her an inspiring idol for marginalized identities everywhere. In USA afro-goddesses give rise to pop culture, as more and more female artists create hype around Black heritage. Famously Beyoncé paid homage to Yoruba water-goddess Oshun on her visual album in 2016, while her sister Solange often refers to the mermaid and sea-deity Yemaya, central to Afro-Cuban and Black diaspora in Latin America.

As an instant response to the Black Lives Matter uprisings of 2020 rapper Princess Nokia, called upon her:  “Maferefun Yemaya. I pray to you virtuous mother, on behalf of your beautiful children who so dearly need your help right now. I call on you Yemaya, to shield us with your Ashe.11 and light, and protect

  your children from the harm of white supremacy. Maferefun Yemaya todo el dia, I call on you selfless mother to bring your children into formation and give them the tools they need to succeed in dismantling the new world order and centuries long systematic racism that has ripped our families and cultures apart. Mother of all black children, mother of all life, water and sea, I call on you ! (...)”12 In times of increasing instability and fear, younger generations of Black Americans look East at their African roots, while Inuit Greenlanders look West towards their ancestors in North America, to find spiritual empowerment and artistic inspiration.

In a globalized world, where every physical and digital corner has been invaded by colonial capitalism, a shared resistance against white supremacy provides a different kind of hope than that of Hans Egede. Yet there are very specific vocabularies and aesthetics, local to every struggle, that call not just for statements but for particular actions. Just as nuclear waste is a multinational, multi-generational threat to all life, there is a need for multi-species thinking in what might be a final chapter of human life on Earth. Will Inuit heritage survive mainstream attention, like the sculpture of Sasuma Arnaa defies the

rising sea-level in Nuuk? Will the Little Mermaid evolve through planetary crisis, or is she nothing more than a racist fish? Returning to the harbour of Copenhagen, it is easy to ignore traces of past encounters, yet more and more stolen goods reach the surface as reconstructions bring up evidence of the exploitation of Greenland.13

The marble blocks from Maamorilik were buried under the Royal Greenland Dock until it turned tourist-attracting food-market. These stories of stones, places and people are deeply intertwined with colonization, but not in the dominant narratives which cast Denmark as a benevolent and civilized nation. Most stories, of women like the one arrested in Christiania, go untold, because rarely do we listen to how these stories end. The Danish state keeps quiet no matter the severity of the suicide crisis in Greenland, and it is hard to imagine just how deep the silence is. How long before we see our reflection in their suffering? What hiddem treasures will reveal themselves in the colonial soil? How many more statues will be dumped in the harbour?

Perhaps only when Greenland gains full independence, will the Danish prince wake up to find there is no kingdom left. Until then, the most urgent task is to minimize our contribution to the ongoing pain. Apologies are far from enough, but they are the very first step on the path away from ‘celebrating the colonizers’. No more concern should be paid to white fragility as white supremacy is indeed a threat to public health, harming those who have been left invisible to systems which deem them ‘unfit’. For inclusive systems to come into existence, designers need to dig deep into the terrain they engage with, and realize that creation and destruction goes hand in hand. In this context, respectful design is actively questioning existing paradigms, and one's own position and privileges within them. It is avoiding stereotypical and racialized aesthetics, and reversing the gaze to critically examine our own colonial habits, so that colonized bodies are no longer scrutinized in the eye of technology but actively reshaping it. As creative work becomes more precarious and art-history and design canons open up to non-conforming knowledges, perhaps survival can be introduced as an academic skill. New curricula have the potential to shatter the myth of white innocence, and educate about the toxic forces of “good intentions”.14

Greenland should by no means be compared to Denmark, and in positioning the Mother of the Sea in contrast to the Little Mermaid, I risk trivializing and confusing struggles which are incommensurable. Women’s emancipation does not equal decolonization, anti-racism does not equal decolonization, throwing old statues in the harbour does not equal it either—though it could be a step in that direction, it might also be a slick way to get rid of the evidence—an attempt to escape the discomforting guilt, a move to innocence. Nevertheless, what sea goddesses across the globe have in common

is their capacity for transformation and fertility. The mermaid as a storytelling device, has the ability to remould and dismantle narratives from below. Despite efforts to make the mermaid an innocent and powerless figure for white consumption, she resurrects at the intersection of human and animal, of life and death. Out of darkness and silence real change can erupt like bubbles in the deep rising to the surface to burst.15 We might not live long enough to see it, but the Mother of the Sea surely will.

“These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.” Lorde, Sister Outsider, 36-37.