Please help me return to the people who taught me so much!
Please help me go back
It started with ice. I saw Chasing Ice in 2012 and couldn't stop thinking about a place I hadn't known was inhabited. I went to see it myself. Then I started photographing it. Then the ice stopped being the point and the people living beside it became the point instead.
I first went to Qaanaaq in 2019. It's where all of this really began, and I haven't been back since. I've built a life around Greenland in the years since then: I've visited nearly every town, studied the language and the worldview, taught what I've learned to cruise audiences and university crowds, written and lectured and fixed and consulted my way into a decade of relationships across some of the most remote communities on earth.
But I've grown a lot since 2019, and I want to go back to where it started with everything I know now. I understand Sila and Inuit worldview in a way I didn't then. I've spent three months total in Ittoqqortoormiit. I watched a beluga harvested and helped carry the mattak to family 900 kilometers south. I sat with a polar bear for twenty minutes on the sea ice and understood, finally, in my body and not just from a book, what it means when Greenlanders say the animals are kin.
This year, I've been invited back to Qaanaaq. Some of the people who shaped everything I know, hunters, scientists, elders, are going to be there at the same time. It's the kind of overlap that doesn't happen twice. I want to show up, in person, with everything I've learned, and cement the relationships that started this whole thing. I want to earn the trust to do the work I'm building next: helping protect the knowledge, the animals, and the people of these towns before any more of it is lost.
Some of my funding for this trip fell through recently. It would be a real loss to miss this after everything it took to get here, and after everything Qaanaaq gave me in the first place.
If you're able to help, I've listed the specific costs below. Thank you, genuinely, for reading this far.
This is the inspiration for the trip: Cultural Expedition Avannaa
Here is what’s funded:
United Flight Houston - Nuuk, Greenland on 4 August 2026 [Funded]
Nuuk meetings, ground transport, and accommodation 4 August - 7 August [Funded]
Sarfaq Ittuk ferry from Nuuk to Ilulissat 7 August - 9 August [Funded]
Accommodation Ilulissat, meetings, transport, food 9 August - 13 August [Funded]
Expensive 8500 DKK Flight on Air Greenland Ilulissat - Qaanaaq 13 August [Funded]
Air Greenland Helicopter Upernavik - Kullorsuaq Roundtrip September [Funded]
Flight from Nuuk Greenland to US or Iqaluit, Nunavut Canada 30 September [Funded]
Flight from Akureyri, Iceland to Constable Point and helicopter to Ittoqqortoormiit Inbound [Funded]
Flight from Iqaluit, Nunavut to Pond Inlet, Nunavut Roundtrip [Funded]
Flight from Iqaluit to Houston home base [Funded]
And here are the gaps:
Accommodation and food in Qaanaaq, Upernavik, Kullorsuaq, Iqaluit and Pond Inlet
Air Greenland flight from Qaanaaq to Upernavik and later Nuuk
Discretionary boat budget for hunters and fishermen that compensates them fairly
