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Author(s)

Ania Mauruschat

Title

The Heartbeat of the Drum. On the Sonic Agency of the Inuit Qilaat in the Decolonization of Kalaallit Nunaat in Greenland

Description

Peer-Reviewed Audio Paper

"The Heartbeat of the Drum. On the Sonic Agency of the Inuit Qilaat in the Decolonization of Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland)"

Abstract:

For over 4000 years, the Inuit in Kalaallit Nunaat, as Greenland is called in Greenlandic, have been living in an intimate relationship with nature in the Arctic. Their knowledge of how to survive under such harsh conditions has been preserved and passed on via sound through the millennia. For the Inuit, storytelling and frame drum singing and dancing have sonic agency. They give them the energy they need to survive and thrive in the cold. The powers of these sounds and their misconception by missionaries and colonizers as addressing pagan or even evil forces led to the ban of the qilaat, the Inuit frame drum, from churches and public spaces. After the suppression of these sounds for around 300 years, in December 2021 Inuit drum dancing and singing has been inscribed as UNESCO intangible cultural heritage. But despite this huge acknowledgment, the fight for the revitalization of the qilaat is far from over, as the case of the Greenlandic ex-priest Markus E. Olsen shows.

In the German tradition of the O-Ton-Hörspiel (documentary radio play), this audio paper traces the sonic agency of the qilaat: people and sounds tell the story themselves. Thus, this audio paper tries to answer the research question: In what ways does the qilaat still have sonic agency today? 

The people we hear are in chronological order the famous drum dancer and singer Anna Kûitse Thastum (1942–2012), Randi Sørensen Johansen, curator for the intangible cultural heritage of Kalaallit Nunaat at the Nunatta Katersugaasivia Allagaateqarfialu (National Museum and Archives of Greenland), the frame drum dancer and singer Anda Poulsen, the ex-priest Markus E. Olsen and Aleqa Hammond, former prime minister of Kalaallit Nunaat.