VILLAGING

DIILERILAAQ, EAST GREENLAND

"In East Greenlandic you say 'Diilerilaaq,'" Geerti explains as he pronounces the village place-name for "the strait that runs dry when the tide runs out." We've been saying "Tiniteqilaaq" as printed on our map in dominant West Greenlandic. Geerti, who manages the Pilersuisoq and rents us his hut on the ridge, is the first villager we meet. After work at the store, he grabs his camera and takes us out in his boat to look for seals, whales and polar bears. Mostly we cruise icebergs. Shape-shifting and light-capturing, they draw us further up the fjord till we're aching with cold.

Max, "the Frenchman" and hunter-cum-teacher, invites us to share the "outside world" with his four senior students. We try to interest them in details about our home in Canada. How can we? They're more at home in the outside world than any Canadians we know. But when we show them an illustrated 1960's ethnographic study of the village, how keenly they recognize their pipe-smoking elders in sealskin kayaks laden with freshly harpooned seals.

We scramble down the ridge to visit Chiho, a geophysicist-cum-artist who left Tokyo to join Max. When not playing the organ for the local parish, she's fabricating traditional clothing. Thomasine, a village elder and master seamstress, mentors her in curing, cutting and stitching sealskin kamiks, anoraks, mitts and women's summer shorts. Chiho's genius for making things dazzles like a tundra sunrise.

Despite its seal-rich life Diilerilaaq is losing its youngers to more modernized economies. Mobile Greenlanders ride globalization's latest wave to the high-wired city. Overwired metropolitans take flight in the opposite direction. Where, if anywhere, do they meet?