Heritage
Two authors and a beautiful mess
I don't own The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America. Hardly anyone in our crowd does. What floats around is a copy of a copy: a few…
Everything Has a Name
Our source is P. Scavenius Jensen's Den grønlandske kajak og dens redskaber. It's lovely and thorough, and it's almost entirely in Danish, w…
The Wood That Crossed an Ocean to Become Your Boat
Greenland has no forests, yet people built wooden-framed kayaks there for thousands of years. The wood came from Siberia, frozen into the se…
The qajaq came first
For millennia, seal hunters living close to the Great Ice Cap built boats to their own bodies. Every measurement in fingers, fists and forea…
The Count of Greenland
We're talking historical figures, numbers, digits, mittens, and a count(ing) system.
The Norsaq
A throwing stick for the harpoon that doubles as a rolling tool. The hunter kept hold of it when he threw, a hard throw could tip him over,…
What is an Avataq?
The Inuit hunter's float. It sat on the kayak, tied to the harpoon line, and was supposed to go overboard after a good throw. Sometimes it g…