Sermermiut — the qivittoq country

OVERVIEW

Sermermiut was an Inuit settlement in Disko Bay, in the valley between Ilulissat and the icefjord. Excavations through the twentieth century — a significant dig in 1953 among them — showed occupation running back some four thousand years, through the Saqqaq, Dorset and Thule cultures. It was one of the largest settlements in the district and was abandoned in the 1850s when its people moved into the colony at Ilulissat. The area is now part of the Ilulissat Icefjord World Heritage Site and is reached on a boardwalk from the town.

HISTORY

The qivittoq — mountain wanderer, or mountain hermit — is the figure of Greenlandic belief who left the settlement for the wild: out of shame, out of guilt, after mistreatment or rejection. In the tradition such a person does not simply die out there. They lose their human qualities and take on others: they can move impossibly fast, take the shape of animals, and are held to survive conditions in which no ordinary person could. Some accounts have them taking people who wander too far.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

The qivittoq is the most widely held supernatural belief in Greenland and is not attached to one site; it is attached to the distance between the settlement and everything else. Sermermiut is the entry point most people have to that country — an abandoned village an hour's walk from a town, at the edge of a landscape where the stories start. The stories are told as cautionary ones: about what happens to a person cut off from the community, and about which plants not to eat, and about not going too far from the houses. The entry records a belief with a named function in a living culture, anchored where visitors actually meet the landscape it describes.

VISITING

A marked boardwalk trail from Ilulissat, about twenty minutes to the valley and the icefjord viewpoints. A World Heritage Site with archaeology in the ground: stay on the boardwalk. Do not walk on the ice or near the fjord edge — calving from the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier generates waves.