Saqqummersitaq

Children and young people from the Inuit and Sami populations in the Nordic countries can be identified as a vulnerable group. Young Sami and Inuit experience a higher degree of violence, abuse, suicidal thoughts and suicide rates compared to their peers in the majority populations in the Nordic countries. Their living conditions are in most cases influenced by a limited access to welfare benefits such as the healthcare system, social services and educational opportunities. Career prospects in the Arctic region are also narrow compared to the more densely populated and central regions in the Nordic countries. In order to understand and act upon the challenges the populations face, an in-depth and systematic review of the existing literature and experiences of children’s and youth’s well-being and their existing living conditions in the Arctic Region is essential.

In Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, there have been a significant number of musical events in recent years that have been called ‘underground’. These have formed an underground scene that offered a cosmopolitan alternative to established ‘greenlandificated’ popular music. This paper accounts for the building of this underground scene by Nuuk youth, and asks why these young people valued musical change informed by a cosmopolitan outlook, while at the same time holding firmly to the conviction that their activities were a part of the dominant Greenlandic nation-building project. Social agents, which played key roles in building the Nuuk underground scene, described their activities as attempts to come to terms with a history in which Greenland has been perceived as a subaltern nation. This enquiry explains the nationalist logic behind a concern with performing similarity with Western nations in the Nuuk underground scene, as opposed to the more widespread romantic nationalist logic concerned with expressing a distinguishable national character. This further leads to an expansion of a position of cosmopolitan nationalism.