After dinner, Mr. Olafsson stopped into a white church on a hill to listen to a men’s choir that Amaroq is sponsoring to perform in Iceland. A small model of a fishing boat hangs from the ceiling beams over the church aisle. Fishing is still one of the biggest businesses in southern Greenland, as it is across the island, but the local economy has struggled. A lot of people leave for Nuuk or Denmark. Many in Qaqortoq hope that mining, one day, will give people a reason to stay.
After the group ran through songs including an excellent rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” in Greenlandic, one choir member, Ajo Christian Lynge Hard, had a question. “What do you think of your new president?” he asked me. I asked him instead what he thought of my new president. He responded with two thumbs down. “You can tell him we are not for sale,” said Mr. Hard. “Trying to buy a land and its people is not right.”
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On a Saturday, the dinner shift was getting ready to start in Sarfalik, a high-end restaurant in downtown Nuuk. Aggu Broberg, a sous chef, held up a small, diaphanous sphere on a string: the gizzard of a ptarmigan, a small game bird, that’s been dried and inflated. Traditionally, Greenlanders removed the herbs that ptarmigans eat and store in this tiny organ to use for tea and freshen up their homes, says Mr. Broberg, who is 31. These days, he and his colleagues use the herbs to make schnapps and ice cream. “We’re just trying something new.”
Mr. Broberg is part of a local food scene that’s gaining traction thanks in part to a community of chefs doing interesting things with traditional food, and also to the growing number of visitors who want to eat it. Mining may be decades away from being able to transform Greenland’s economy, but tourism is already taking off — and fast. Thousands of cruise ship passengers pour into Nuuk and smaller towns each summer; this year, an American airline is set to start direct flights to Nuuk from the United States for the first time. There’s a short window to make sure the people who benefit from the boom are Greenlanders — for tourists to eat local food, hire local tourism outfits and fly home with a deeper understanding of the island and its Inuit culture.
“People always talk about, ‘How can Greenland actually become independent?’” said Casper Frank Moller, the chief executive and a founder of Raw Arctic, a new tourism company based in Nuuk. “I think one of the things that we can actually offer and lift ourselves is the tourism.”
