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When you take away the knowledge of who you are,

you get into a state of despair.

That's what we see today.

If you do not have the link between you and the spirits,

the one who can see what's wrong,

we go on blindly.

We have forgotten the Inua,

the life within everything.

You see a plant, the plant sees you, recognizes you

knows that you are family

when you see a rock,

this rock has been there before humans.

They have seen us grow here on earth,

evolve into what we are today.

Who are we in this world? Who are Inuit,

when the structure is built for someone else?

We are still Inuit.

And we need our roots.

We have a birthright,

we have a heritage.

It's still yours to take.

(singing)

If you look at our surroundings, we live in the Arctic

and in the winter we cannot survive alone.

We have only been able to survive

because we have a community.

And the way people were back then,

they were very holistic and community based.

The first colonists would say that we were very simple,

but that's like a survival technique.

We spare as much energy as we can to survive.

We have to keep our mind light.

If you have a heavy mind,

the chances that you won't survive are greater.

In our culture, everything is just interconnected with each other.

In Inuit worldview, Inuit are equal to all animals.

Killing a bear is not different from killing a human.

Our closest relationship is the Nanoq, the polar bear.

It taught us how to hunt the seal.

We wouldn't have survived arctic without the polar bear.

Sometimes we hunt it, sometimes it hunts us,

we have an equal relationship to each other.

Greenland has been a colony of Denmark for 300 years, last year.

We were forced to get baptized.

Many say that we chose to, that we went to church for salvation,

that they are our saviors.

That's the role they want to have.

In reality, the truth behind it all

is that they took away food.

They took away human rights, basic rights.

They punished the families that didn't get baptized

and they shamed the Angakkut.

It's not natural to shame the ones who take care

of our relationship with the universe.

A shaman is one who is trusted.

A shaman is one who is respected and loved and cared for.

The shamans were forced to abandon their people.

That is a curse.

I did struggle a lot with identity.

I grew up with a Danish father and an Inuk mother,

and for Inuit I was too Danish,

and for Danish people I was too Inuk.

We have been taught that we have nothing to be proud of.

The way we learn about our culture in school is through Danish eyes.

The idea of being civilized is by living like Danish people,

but in our language, being civilized, 'atugartuunngorsarneq',

that means becoming a big spender.

And the more individualistic you become,

with outside influence,

the more lonely people get.

I think that's also why we have so many social problems

with alcoholism and suicide.

Because Greenland has the highest suicide rate in the world.

It's because there's all of these unspoken things

of the consequences of the colonialism

that is very difficult to talk about and address.

My grandmother, because she was brought up during the colony,

she felt less than Danish people, like, she felt unworthy.

This shaming and making our culture evil

and telling the story of how we fled our culture to get saved by the church,

that lie, and also,

the hurt.

We are hurt

because we are ashamed of who we are.

And that shame goes into every fiber of your body,

into the bones,

changes how you speak to the universe.

So the universe only responds to your trauma

instead of your hopes and dreams.

We started internalizing our own colonization.

Are we Danish enough?

Are you living your life according to what the Danes tell you to?

And that destruction and disruption of community, individualizing us,

and taking our soul away.

My mother's generation was the one who was sent

to Denmark for a year for boarding school.

I think she was 10 or 11,

but I can see how it has changed my mother's value sets.

I was four years old when I was sitting

underneath the stairs in a house in Ittoqqortoormiit

with my cousin, and he was like, "I'm a hunter".

And I looked at him. I knew it was true he was a hunter,

and I got up, I looked at my mom, I said,

"uanga Angakkoq."

"I'm a shaman", to my mom.

And she looked at me.

No.

Because nobody wants to be a shaman

because you live between living and dead.

I was seven years old when we moved to Denmark

because my big sister

had turned in my father for rape.

And people were getting

aware of what he was doing to the children in this city.

My father was a pedophile.

So was his father, and so was his grandfather.

It was generational.

And I know he came to Greenland because he had an opportunity to abuse children.

The colonies created opportunities for all kinds of people to come

and live out the darkest parts of them.

And the abuse towards my mom continued,

but all of a sudden, she had the possibility to get away.

So she ran away from him.

I stayed with him, but,

as I got closer to puberty, my body started changing,

and with that, I was more and more scared of him,

and I didn't know why completely at the time.

The first time, I was 15,

and I had tried to commit suicide.

I started already when I was eight.

But nobody believed me. I was just a child.

And, I took knives

and said to my big sister, "I'm going to kill myself",

and she was like, "no, of course you're not."

But I meant it.

I wanted to die. But we were kids,

they didn't understand the deep traumas that I had.

I didn't know at the time,

but I started to connect with spirit.

And that way I could suddenly

have room for my soul.

When I was 16, I had my first relationship,

and suddenly I was pregnant.

And the moment I realized I was pregnant, I was so scared.

I wasn't ready, and I knew that.

But I also saw it as, you know,

Inuit see children as a gift from Sila, from ancestors.

So I called home to my mom and stepfather, my father, and I told them: "I'm pregnant".

And they were so happy.

And then I told his, my son's father,

and he was like: "You're going to get rid of that".

And I was like: "Okay, I will. I will do what you say".

And I put myself in the mental institution and said: "I'm going to have this abortion

and I know that I want to die after that."

And then I had to go to the doctor's appointment

and the doctor felt my stomach and I was proud.

I was so proud of the life that was in me and I hoped he could feel it.

The next day I was supposed to do the abortion

and I put the pills in the trash can

and I called my parents and said, I'm coming home.

And I called his father and said, I had the abortion.

And I left Denmark

and I hid him so that he could be born.

He came,

and I remember seeing him thinking how I had been treated.

How can anyone do this to a child?

I was like that. How could anyone treat me so bad?

I did well the first year,

and then my sister died

and I lost it.

And I got weaker and weaker and weaker.

In the end, I was...I had to...

let go of my child

because I had promised to never harm him.

And I would give my trauma to him.

I could see the patterns come.

And I remember laying next to him while he slept for his nap,

he was two years old.

And I knew that when he falls asleep, I would leave him.

I loved him more than I loved me.

I wanted to take care of him.

I never wanted to leave him, but I had to.

He should live happy.

Not the way I lived, not my childhood. Never.

And quite honestly, I was so

lost in medication that I do not remember everything.

My trauma ruined it, and I had no chance.

I didn't have a chance against

this deep, deep, deep trauma that goes even beyond this life.

So I didn't care if I lived or died anymore.

And when I did the last suicide attempt,

I actually left this world

and went to the realm of the dead.

I had smelled the last blood leave my body.

It smells like deep forest.

I remember closing my eyes

and I went to a place where I thought, what is this?

And then this peace was there.

And this peace, I was like, wow.

And I closed my eyes again and I felt it,

but this time I met something

and I opened my eyes and I had peace in this world.

Something else came.

This tiny flame, like in the qulleq

this tiny flame in the igloo that just lights up everything.

It was there.

What I realized when I got my drum is that

I had to accept that I had a power.

I come from a shamanic lineage.

My great-grandparents were shamans

and my mother has the ability.

I have been brought up to not say.

We all have a power within,

we have a life force.

We have so much trauma

and we are still here.

That's power. Take that power and play it.

Let your heart beat and the drum unite with the universe.

Feel it. It's the uterus. It births so much for you when you play that drum.

In our worldview, our body contains many souls

where our Angakkut has the responsibility to

remove foreign souls from places they don't belong,

and bring souls that belong there that have left, to bring them back.

The shamans had the responsibility for the souls

of his humans.

There are different kinds of shamans.

We have different personalities, different abilities.

Different ways of working, seeing.

That's just Sila's way of working.

A shaman was the one who had to uphold the relationship with spirits.

Those who have been writing about our ancestors have come from a patriarchal society.

You are taught to learn that men are more important and stronger.

So when they come to people who have a different spirituality

and the woman is a keeper of that spirituality,

she's just put in the back and they focus on the man, on the hunter.

Even though the man wouldn't survive without his woman, or his partner.

Growing up, I had times in my life where

I didn't know it was my ancestors, but they came and I just knew.

I was 15 when I started to leave town and go to the mountains to die,

and, every time I got back from the mountains,

I was so happy.

It was odd because I left to die and I came back happy as I had ever been.

And when I started doing my shamanic journeys,

I had a spirit helper that came and talked to me and gave me peace.

And I remember sitting there

in the mountain with all I needed to not live anymore, and he was like:

"Not yet. You are not ready. You have so much you need to do."

But I got in contact with the source of life.

I didn't understand it,

but I had let go of everything,

and that's all that was left, was the spirit world.

I had been dancing with it my whole life without knowing it,

the struggle with myself and not letting go of me so the spirits could come.

That's the dance, told me to let go and I tried to hold on so I didn't break.

But you...

To break is the only solution.

Yeah...

The contraception scandal in Greenland.

A group of about 67 women now demanding compensation from the Danish government

after they say they were forced to undergo involuntary procedures as young teens to prevent pregnancy.

I would see drum dancers from East Greenland coming.

There was a sense of belonging and also a big sense of sadness.

Because I could feel that drum singing was very powerful,

but I didn't understand.

I didn't understand what the songs were about

because the tradition was lost for centuries.

I first learned how to do drum dance as an adult.

You have to follow principles when you do a drum dance.

You have to have the physical part, that's where the body

moves, dances and sings and beats the drum,

and you beat the drum after your heartbeat.

You have to have the mental part where the feeling of the song is,

because every drum song has a purpose.

And you have to have the spiritual part

because when you are doing drum dance, you are just being a channel.

And every drum song, they belong to what we call Sila.

It can be the weather, it can be your consciousness,

but it can also be your mind.

Sila.

I just need to wait for the song to come to me

Before I start doing a song, in here I think: "Sila, can I please use the song?"

and that is also why I send it back.

I send it back to Sila. Because it's not my song.

Sila is everything.

I see Sila as the creator,

as the being behind all religion, all life.

It's the breath I have. It's the words I speak.

It's the light, the consciousness in here, that's Sila.

Everything around us has a soul, or an Inua.

Sila is the Inua of the universe.

I understood the more I got deeper and deeper into the tradition,

became more and more balanced within myself,

and understood more and more that my role in this reality that we have created here is to

normalize the use of drum songs and drum dance among my people.

Make a way for people to have a sense of belonging.

Marking the body is an extension of the woman sewing practice,

and it's mostly done by a woman and carried by a woman,

and it's really much connected to her spiritual responsibility to the

Sila and her community.

The markings I'm working with make a bridge to our pre-colonial ways of living.

In the beginning of the colonization, all women were marked.

And when the missionaries arrived in 1721, in many Inuit regions, it was banned.

Within a hundred years it was gone.

And that's what we are relearning now.

It has been a healing journey, and I learned that

I couldn't wait for others to claim me, I need to define who I am

and I need to claim my own place of belonging.

We all have responsibilities towards ourselves and each other,

and that responsibility is a balance.

When you take away the responsibility, you take away the balance.

Only colonized people colonize people.

It's not just Inuit that needs to heal, not just the colonized.

The colonizers need even more healing than we do.

Now, the white people are looking for help

amongst the indigenous natives and aboriginals

because they do not remember.

We Indigenous people can help.

Use my roots to dive into your own culture.

Because I can awaken my ancestors, I did that in a ceremony, so could you.

In order to break that curse, we need to empower each other.

You need to acknowledge your pain, your anger. It's taking care of you.

It's protecting you from feeling the pain.

So healing is to take away all that's not supposed to be there.

All the stories that you have held onto, the emotions.

All the heavy energies go back to where they belong,

so that you can get your full power back into your body, so that there's room for your soul.

We have forgotten that we can go all the way to the first mother.

The first mother, the first conscious human being, they are still there.

It is the same consciousness we carry.

So it is about connecting to what you have forgotten to connect to.

It's there. It will never go away. We will always be souls.

We will always be humans.

And it will always come when we ask for help.