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Seasons shift, as the songs of distant whales are swallowed by the fog. Henriette Rasmussen explores the brittle and tender edges of masculinity in her community.
By Henriette Rasmussen for RANA / Radiophonic Narration (2009)
Born in 1950, Henriette Rasmussen lived in Nuuk, Greenland. She worked at KNR (Greenlandic Broadcasting Corporation) in the 1970’s before entering politics where she served as cultural minister between 1991 and 2005. From 1993 she was involved with the UN, where she was a key figure in promoting the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, an agreement which was adopted in Greenland in 1992. As well as one of the central forces behind the creation of a permanent UN group for indigenous peoples. A member of the Earth Charter Commission, she also helped to create a global plan for the environment. She returned to KNR in 2008 where she was a familiar voice on the air until her death in 2017.
A Circle of Men was produced by Henriette Rasmussen with Rikke Houd and mixed by Rikke Houd. It was featured at the Prix Europa in 2009.
Created as part of RANA/Radiophonic Narration, an 18 month-long practice based education in sound narrative and radio feature making, aimed at professionals working from remote and small societies in the north. The course ran from 2007-9, taught in Iceland, Greenland, Sweden and Denmark by a range of international feature-makers, sound artists, journalists, composers and anthropologists. The project was run by the Icelandic Filmschool and managed by Rikke Houd.
In October 1998, Henriette wrote about sound, storytelling and her culture for Le Cercle Polaire – a think tank working to encourage the preservation of the polar environments.
“As an 8 year old in 1958, I remember my hometown hosted the visit of a delegation from Canadian Inuit. Since the migrations over several thousand years, this was the first time in modern times we Greenlanders saw and met Canadian Inuit. Their parkas became fashionable later, and we could understand their dialect. We also learned that they enjoyed listening to our radio. Old villages have been recovered in Disco Bay, my native area. Stories are told about events in these villages, passed on orally to ears eager to listen on the long and lonely winter nights, through the last 4,000 years. Many of these stories were collected and written down when we Greenlanders got our first writing system in the mid-19th century. Our culture was sustainable, we used the entire product of whatever catch, leaving only the broken bones since the marrow was valuable oil for food or fuel. So when we say archaeological evidence we mean materials in stones, bones and old ivory. Recently I heard a radio documentary in which it is said that in our culture a great hunter who arrived to the community with a catch would, at the end of the day, have the same amount of food in his house as those who did not catch anything that day. That is also what we remember life was like. No one became rich, but nothing was wasted. Wealth was measured as in terms of your generosity, and respect was due to your skills as a hunter, and what it means to be a kayaker, to your physical strength or your talent as a seamstress for making clothes and boats for survival in the Arctic lands and seas. Or as a shaman with great knowledge, a storyteller, or a poet who could amuse others at our gatherings, women and men alike. We, the Inuit, still have one leg in our old culture and the other in the fast lane. Our language will survive climate change but the customary laws and skills related to our environment are being forgotten. For the world community, our culture, based on sharing not wasting, storytelling and poetry is important for the survival of human cultural diversity and is to be viewed as a good practice of sustainable development.”
