Mette Newth's The Abduction, The Transformation and Arctic Colonialism: A Postcolonial Perspective

Abstract

Norwegian author, Mette Newth addresses issues of colonialism in relation to the Inuit in Greenland in her novels, The Abduction (1989) and The Transformation (2000). Through an analysis of Newth’s texts in the context of postcolonialism, Crew shows that Newth’s fictional narratives construct a history and perspective of arctic colonialism that is, for the most part, absent from informational books published for children and young adult readers. Crew concludes that Newth’s novels have the potential to bring to young adult readers a deep understanding of colonialism and how it has been practiced in a specific cultural context.

Norwegian author Mette Newth addresses issues of colonialism in relation to the Inuit of Greenland in two of her three young adult novels available in translation in the United States. In The Abduction (1993),Newth writes about the kidnapping of two young Inuit from Greenland to Norway in the seventeenth century. In The Transformation (2000), Navarana, a young Inuit woman, saves the life of Brendan, one of the monks sent by the Holy Church in the fifteenth century on an expedition to rescue the remnants of the Christian community in Greenland.

Beginning with Erik the Red's voyages to early Norse settlements in Greenland in the ninth century, the island became increasingly important to European trading, missionary, and exploratory expeditions.¹ From about 1260, when the Norse communities began paying taxes to the King of Norway, Greenland was considered a part of the territory of the Danish-Norwegian kingdom, which lasted from 1380 to 1814 (Petersen). The early colonization of Greenland was built around its importance as a trading center. The town of Bergen was a particularly important trade center for the valued commodities of walrus hide and ivory, sealskins, and narwhal tusks (Arneborg 304). Writing about the experience of colonialism from the perspective of Greenlanders, Robert Petersen points out that in contrast to examples of colonialism that are associated with military power, "military power was never used against Greenlanders, not even in the beginning." The Danes in the 1720s "used the term 'colony' as synonymous with mission and trade station" (Petersen).

Greenland, argues Petersen, did not have a "real history of oppression by force" that is associated with imperialism and colonization in other places. Nevertheless, Greenland was regarded as an "inherited dependency";² and it was under "Dano-Norwegian oppression" that Greenlanders were abducted from their homes (Newth, Abduction 244). Norwegian and Europeans traders were not the only explorers involved in arctic colonialism. In 1897, six Eskimos were brought back to the United States from the Arctic by Captain Robert Peary and housed for display in the basement of the American Museum of Natural History (Huhndorf 122). They were regarded as curiosities; when four of them died in captivity, their dead bodies were dissected for scientific study.

In this essay, I discuss informational books about Norway and Greenland published in the United States to raise issues about how arctic colonialism is being represented in texts for young readers. I proceed to demonstrate, through an analysis of Newth's novels The Abduction and The Transformation, that her fictional narratives have the potential to open up for young adult readers a deeper understanding of what colonialism means for the colonized, and how it has been practiced in a specific cultural context, in contrast to that found in the majority of informational texts examined. In a discussion of arctic colonialism in Newth's afterword to The Abduction, she sets its historical context: "From the middle 1600s to the middle 1700s, approximately fifty Greenlanders were abducted by ships sailing under the Norwegian and Danish flag" (244-45). Descriptions of the kidnappings, Newth explains, were found in the logbooks of captains involved in this aspect of the European slave trade (245).

To what extent do informational books document arctic colonialism? Madelyn Anderson's Greenland: Island at the Top of the World (1983) is the only children's informational book among several examined on Greenland and the arctic that documents the kidnapping of individual Inuit from Greenland by Norwegians. Anderson refers specifically to "three...