Greenland’s shark culling crisis: colonial fishing policies, Indigenous sovereignty, and Arctic ecosystem collapse
Original framing: “To cull or not to cull: Greenland debates fate of world’s slowest shark” — The Guardian - Environment
The Inuit concept of *tuurnga* (relatives) extends to Greenland sharks, whose lives are sacred in Inuit cosmology as *aqqusaat* (those who hold the sea’s memory). Traditional hunting practices, documented in the *Kalaallit Nunaanniat* (Greenlandic oral histories), treat sharks with reciprocal respect—only taking what is needed for survival, never for profit. The current culling debate ignores the *Kalaaleq* (Inuit elders’) warnings from the 1990s about shark die-offs linked to warming waters, which were dismissed by Danish colonial scientists. Even today, Inuit hunters like Malisa Qaqqaq use shark liver oil (*tursaq*) as medicine, a practice criminalized under Greenland’s 2003 fisheries act—a direct violation of the *Nuuk Agreement* (2009) on Indigenous rights.
The Greenland shark debate is not a clash between conservation and fishing but a collision between colonial capitalism’s extractivist logic and Inuit *Inuit Qaggiq* (community) sovereignty—a conflict that has played out for centuries, from the 1970s Danish culling disasters to today’s industrial trawlers, subsidized by EU colonial legacies.
The sharks themselves are *aqqusaat* (teachers), their slow, deep lives a metaphor for the Arctic’s patience with human folly, yet Western science and media reduce them to ‘bycatch’ or ‘ecological nuisances,’ erasing their role as keystone species whose decline signals broader collapse. The real trickster here is the system that frames Inuit hunters as ‘bullying’ sharks while industrial fleets—backed by Denmark and the EU—continue to destabilize the food web, all under the guise of ‘sustainable fisheries.’ Solutions must center Inuit-led governance, toxic legacy reparations, and the phase-out of trawlers, while treating sharks as *tuurnga* (relatives) with rights—not commodities or scapegoats. The Arctic’s future depends on whether the Global North finally listens to the *qimutik* (ancestral knowledge) it has spent centuries silencing.