Greenland's cultural institution celebrates 150 years

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This June, Rosine Augustussen will live what is only a dream to many Indigenous people around the world. She will graduate from college and return to her home town to teach her neighbors' children in their Native language.

Incredibly, it's a dream that's been coming true in Greenland for 150 years.

When Augustussen leaves the city of Nuuk and returns to the town of Kangaamiut on the eastern shores of Greenland, she will be one of hundreds of Native Greenlanders who since 1845 have been able to teach in Greenlandic because of a place called Ilinniarfissuaq -- "The Big School."

"It has always been the school's purpose to train Native people to teach in the Greenlandic language," says Birgitta Wallstedt, the head of

the school's teacher-training program. For much of its long history the

school's purpose was complicated by a chicken-and-egg kind of dilemma.

"The problem has been that is been difficult to get teachers to the

teacher-training college who speak Greenlandic because first they need

to have a higher education to be trained as teachers," Wallstedt says, pointing out that higher education was primarily available in Danish. "But we're getting better every year and now 65 per cent of our teachers in Greenland are Greenlandic-speaking".

That percentage should edge still higher as Wallstedt and her staff of 16 teachers, five of them school alumni, graduate another 30 or so teachers this spring.

Wallstedt says that, until about 30 years ago, Ilinniarfissuaq was the only high-level school in Greenland, and so "all the people who are now over 40 or 50 -- nearly everyone who has an education -- have gone to this school."

So, in addition to playing a key role in the preservation of the Greenlandic language, "it has played an immense role in the culture of the country, because people came from all over Greenland and met here and lived here together for three or four or five years and got to know

each other."

She says that, especially before the relatively recent introduction of advance-communications technologies, the school was key to forming and nurturing a Greenlandic identity: "The music, the arts and so on. But today you have many other opportunities and many other educations are

available to young people, so it doesn't have the same status in culture

as it used to."

On the other hand, its important historical position is indicated by

the fact that the Greenlandic post office authority is issuing a

commemorative stamp for its 150th anniversary.

It remains the only teacher-training college serving Greenland's 70,000

people, however, and the loss of is status as the huge island's only

advanced school doesn't sadden Wallstedt.

"It's quite a burden to be the only cultural institution," she laughs.

In addition to the four-year program for Greenlandic-speaking teachers

offered at the school in Nuuk, Ilinniarfissuaq has recently begun

offering field-based training in Greenland's more remote communities.

It was in this area that the much younger teacher-training program

serving Canada's Eastern Arctic communities was able to lend some

experience.

Neil McDermott is principal of the Nunavut Teacher Education Program,

the program responsible for ensuring that Inuktitut-speaking teachers

will be available when Nunavut becomes Canada's third and only

Aboriginal-dominated territory in 1999. McDermott visited Nuuk in 1989

to brief Ilinniarfissuaq's staff on the Eastern Arctic approach to

field-based training.

But, while several teachers have been exchanged over the years and the

two cultures share similarities and many of the same goals, McDermott

says the two peoples face somewhat different challenges.

"Greenlandic is the working language there," McDermott points out.

"While here in Iqaluit, for instance, though more than 60 per cent of

the population is Inuit, the working language is still English."

That difference reflects in part of the fact that the Inuit of Canada's

Eastern Arctic converse in a diverse setof dialects, while Greenlandic

is relatively homogenous. It reflects also that the two peoples are at

different stages in their political evolution. Whereas Nunavut won't

become a reality for another four years, Greenlanders won their autonomy

from Denmark in the form of a home rule government in 1979.

Wallstedt acknowledges that because Greenlanders were subject to

intense European influence on their culture up to two centuries before

Canada's Inuit, the preservation of traditional cultural elements

outside of language is not as central a goal as it is for teachers on

Inuit in Canada.

"I believe that among Canadian Inuit teacher-training programs there is

a concern to get Elders and traditional culture openly represented in

the program, while we here in Greenland are centred more on today's life

and tomorrow's need."

The original "big" school is no longer around, but Ilinniarfissuaq's

students continue to use what has been the main building since 1907.

So, when Greenlanders from every corner of the island return for

150th-anniversary celebrations in Nuuk this September, young and old

will share memories of the same halls and classrooms.

"There's going to be a lot of partying," says Wallstedt.

Rosine Augustussen, the teacher graduating this June, won't be there.

Away from home for too many years, she will be in a classroom in

Kangaamiut, doing what she says she's wanted to do "since a long, long

time ago" -- teaching young Greenlanders in their own tongue.