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Thematic Article
Orsugiak: cryolite, epistemic dispossession, and Inuit narrative sovereignty
Naja Dyrendom Graugaard*†
ndg@hum.ku.dk
Abstract
Public discourse in Denmark remains committed to the narrative of colonial benevolence, in which Danish presence in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) is remembered primarily through care, development, and economic generosity. The story of orsugiak – renamed ‘cryolite’ by Danish geologists – unsettles this narrative. Regarded as Greenland’s ‘white gold’, cryolite became essential to global aluminium production and was mined intensively by Danish companies between 1854 and 1990. While this extraction generated substantial colonial wealth that funded infrastructural and institutional developments in Denmark, the local Inuit community in Kalaallit Nunaat bore the social and environmental costs. In 2025, the documentary film Orsugiak – The White Gold of Greenland brought this history into public view, challenging established accounts of Danish colonialism. The backlash and subsequent deplatforming of the film reveal how colonial hierarchies continue to shape whose knowledge and narratives are granted legitimacy. As a Danish-Kalaaleq researcher and the main narrator of the film, I conceptualise this as `epistemic dispossession’ and argue for Inuit narrative sovereignty as a way of knowing and storying on Indigenous terms. This article is published in the Thematic Collection ‘On Greenland’, edited by Tim Ingold.
Keywords
cryoliteDanish colonialismcolonial extractionepistemic dispossessionInuit narrative sovereigntyIndigenous knowledgestorytelling Article Outline
Introduction
From the centre of cryolite
Cryolite colonialism
The epistemic dispossession of Orsugiak
The epistemic disobedience of Orsugiak and Inuit narrative sovereignty
Acknowledgment
Declaration of conflict of interest
AI disclosure
References
Introduction
This past year, 2025–6, has revealed colonial fault lines which have long structured relations between Kalaallit Nunaat and Denmark, but are rarely named as such. Geopolitical pressures and Trumpian threats to Kalaallit sovereignty have coincided with public reckonings with histories that many Kalaallit families have carried for generations: the effects of reproductive coercion, child removals, foreign military presence, and extractive exploitation (Bryant 2025a,b; Jensen et al. 2025; Graugaard et al. 2026; Hegelund & Naamansen 0000). These developments raise a fundamental question: who gets to tell the story of Arctic colonisation, and which narratives are permitted to circulate publicly? Why are some histories embraced as part of national reckoning, while others are resisted or silenced?
In this article, I approach orsugiak—the Kalaallisut word for cryolite—as a prism through which to examine these questions. I argue that cryolite unsettles dominant narratives of Danish colonialism, and reveals how colonial exploitation operates not only materially but also epistemically: through the regulation and expropriation of knowledge, authority, and narrative legitimacy. From this, I propose what in Indigenous visual arts and film production is referred to as Indigenous narrative sovereignty: our right as Indigenous people to tell our own stories on our own epistemic terms (Graugaard 2025).
From the centre of cryolite
I do not remember when I first held a piece of cryolite in my hands, but I cannot have been very old. I remember its glassy, porous white surface, and the quiet sense of holding something precious from the motherland I had never visited. Our ningiju (grandmother) kept pieces of cryolite in her home, among a collection of Kalaallit rocks and herbs in the backyard of her suburban house in Aalborg, Denmark. My grandfather, who worked on the Royal Greenlandic Trade Company’s ships which transported cryolite from southern Kalaallit Nunaat to Denmark, brought them back to ningiju—perhaps to soothe her longing for her ancestral lands which she had left for a Danish education. At the time, I did not know the meaning of cryolite. I did not know that it had been extracted from the fjord of my ancestors for more than a century, nor what it had meant to my family’s village of Arsuk. I could not yet fathom its role in Danish–Kalaallit colonial history, or what it would later mean for my own. I only knew that it carried weight due to the solemnity of ningiju’s voice whenever she said the word ‘cryolite’.
Uanga Naja (I am Naja), and I write from within this history. As a Danish–Kalaaleq researcher from the Inuit diaspora in Denmark, my academic inquiries are inseparable from my family’s experiences of Danish colonialism and Inuit resilience. I situate this work within feminist and Indigenous traditions that understand knowledge as embodied, situated, and relational. Such approaches remain marginalised within the epistemological hierarchies that continue to shape dominant analyses of Danish colonialism (Bjerre et al. 2025). Yet this is precisely why we need them: the wisdom held in our bodies, lived experiences, and practices is not superfluous to analysis but intrinsic to the process of knowledge creation itself (Simpson 2017).
This positioning entails risk, as I discovered for myself in the making of the documentary film, Orsugiak - The White Gold of Greenland (Pilehave & Rosing 2025). As the film’s main narrator, I became the principal target of the public backlash which followed its release in Denmark, and had my analysis read by critics as too invested, too emotional, and lacking in objectivity. My position as an Indigenous researcher with roots in Kalaallit Nunaat was mobilised to frame my perspective as founded in bias rather than expertise. Rather than resolving this discordance through distance, I approach it as analytically generative. As feminist and decolonial scholarship has long shown, claims to objectivity are never neutral, but grounded in specific locations and power relations. The controversy surrounding Orsugiak not only concerned its interpretation of the history of cryolite, but the very terms of knowledge production itself: who is authorised to tell it, and which forms of evidence are granted legitimacy. Drawing on Māori historian Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s (1999) call to ‘research back’, I treat the case of cryolite as an opportunity to reclaim analysis itself as an Indigenous intervention. From this position, cryolite emerges as a prism through which these dynamics come sharply into view.
Cryolite colonialism
The history of cryolite challenges the long-standing narrative of Denmark’s colonial benevolence in Kalaallit Nunaat, which continues to shape Danish public memory, policy discourse, and self-image. According to this narrative, Danish presence in Kalaallit Nunaat has been characterised by care, development, and economic generosity. Yet Danish cryolite extraction was driven by motives of economic exploitation, with enduring social and ecological consequences for Inuit communities.
Cryolite was mined by Danish companies, most prominently Kryolitselskabet Øresund A/S in Ivittuut, in the Arsuk fjord in southern Kalaallit Nunaat, from 1854 to 1990. Over this period, four million tons were extracted until the deposit, comprising the world’s only commercial source of natural cryolite, was depleted. The mineral, often described as the ‘white gold’ of Kalaallit Nunaat, was essential to the industrial production of aluminium, especially during the Second World War (Bondam 1991; Hansen 2018; Secher 2002). Yet the wealth it generated flowed outward, primarily to Denmark and the United States. In Denmark, cryolite revenues supported investments in major corporations, research institutions, and public infrastructure. Cryolite literally helped build monuments of Danish modernity, while the local Inuit community in Arsuk, neighbouring the mine in Ivittuut, was left to bear the social and environmental costs. In particular, the mine limited Kalaallit access to ancestral hunting grounds, which had sustained the local communities for centuries. When the mining operations ceased, machinery and waste were reportedly dumped into the fjord, contaminating the local waters. Today, the fjord continues to be monitored for elevated levels of zinc and lead.
The Danish mining town in Ivittuut—employing Danish workers and importing Danish goods and equipment—was not simply an ‘asset’ to the local Arsuk community, or a site of ‘cultural encounters’, as often portrayed in historical accounts (e.g., Hansen 2018). Pronounced racial and gendered hierarchies fostered a ‘man-camp’ culture, not unlike in other Inuit communities across the Arctic (Nightingale et al. 2017). Local testimonies describe alcohol abuse, sexual predation, and disruptions to community safety when Danish miners visited Arsuk on weekends. Kalaallit women, positioned at the intersection of colonial, racialised, and gendered inequality, were particularly vulnerable. In response to the spread of venereal diseases brought by Danish miners, colonial authorities established isolation zones separating Arsuk from not only Ivittuut but also the rest of Kalaallit Nunaat. Framed as public health measures, these policies restricted Kalaallit women’s mobility, policed morality, and reinforced stereotypes of promiscuity and shame (Grønlands Styrelse 1914; Albrechtsen 2010). Oral accounts speak of families left impoverished and children fatherless when Danish workers returned to Denmark.
In these ways, the cryolite mine in Ivittuut deepened already inequitable relations between Kalaallit and Danes, which determined who decided, who gained, who was dispossessed, and who was left to cope with the mess. Cryolite extraction in Kalaallit Nunaat forms part of a broader global pattern of colonial capitalist development, in which wealth was generated in the metropole, while social and ecological debt accumulated in Indigenous homelands. This history moreover reveals how such asymmetries were not only material, but also structured the terms under which history itself could be understood and narrated. I call this ‘cryolite colonialism’: a formation in which material extraction and epistemic authority are inseparably intertwined.
The epistemic dispossession of Orsugiak
On 9 February 2025, the Kalaallit–Danish documentary Orsugiak—The White Gold of Greenland (Pilehave & Rosing 2025) premiered on Danish television. The film revisits a central claim in Danish historiography to economic benevolence, namely, that Kalaallit Nunaat was a ‘deficit colonial enterprise’ for Denmark. Through an archival investigation of cryolite extraction and sales, the film challenges this claim by suggesting that cryolite played a significant role in generating wealth in Denmark. The film also follows my family’s entanglement with cryolite and my return to Arsuk to inquire into local experiences of the mine and its consequences.
Within ten days of its release, Orsugiak was aggressively delegitimised in Danish media and effectively deplatformed when the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) removed it from public viewing and fired the chief editor responsible (Bryant 2025a). Danish politicians, economists, and media commentators dismissed the film as ‘misleading’, ‘flawed’, and ‘manipulative’. The film was criticised primarily for its findings and interpretations of an estimated 400 billion DKK (in today’s value) turnover from cryolite sales in Denmark, and a similar sum in the United States (Pilehave & Rosing 2025). Critics argued that viewers might confuse ‘turnover’ with ‘profit’, and that turnover is an inappropriate measure of colonial wealth. The critique extended beyond economics: the film was also framed as ‘damaging’ to the Danish Kingdom at a geopolitically tense moment, and criticised for centring a Kalaallit perspective, including my role as a narrator and researcher (Schmidt & Graugaard 0000).
In this backlash, I was cast across Danish media and political commentaries as an ‘activist researcher’ with a ‘political agenda’, and portrayed as biased, emotionally unstable, and academically incompetent. Three days after the deplatforming, DR aired the mockumentary Grønlands Brune Is (‘Greenland’s Brown Ice Cream’) on the comedy show, Tæt på Sandheden (‘Close to Truth’). It staged a caricature of me as a girlish, crying, angry, and irrational imposter, performed by a Danish actress in racialised costume, including fake Inuit facial tattoos and repeated use of the E-word, considered a racial slur among Inuit people. This caricature was contrasted with a figure of a composed, white, male economist, presented as the voice of reason, attempting to bring the researcher to her senses with numbers and facts. The mockumentary offered a stark illustration of the epistemic hierarchy, which codes white masculinity as rational, objective, and authoritative, and Indigeneity as emotional, biased, and politically subversive (Schmidt & Graugaard 0000).
The aftermath of Orsugiak reveals that cryolite colonialism has to do not only with the organisation of colonial extraction in the past, but also with how knowledge of it is regulated in the present. According to Puerto Rican philosopher Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2007), ‘the coloniality of being’ entails the persistence of colonial structures in present-day forms of knowledge, cultural manifestations, and self-images. As several scholars observed, the aggressive dismissal of Orsugiak testified to the contemporary disciplining of Kalaallit critiques of colonialism and efforts to restore the comfortable public self-image of Danish benevolence (see Danbolt (2025), Juselius & Koch (2025), Sandré (2025), Volquardsen (2025), and Loftsdóttir (2026)).
The Orsugiak controversy was not an isolated event. It was rather a contemporary enactment of the same colonial dynamics which the film sought to expose. If cryolite extraction dispossessed Kalaallit Inuit communities materially, the delegitimisation of Indigenous knowledge about it may be understood as a form of epistemic dispossession: the systematic undermining of Indigenous authority to interpret and narrate our own histories. Recognising this calls for critique and accountability. There is a need to expose the ways colonial hierarchies continue to shape research, representation, and the very conditions of knowledge production. To me, as a Danish–Kalaaleq researcher, it also calls for reclamation: the articulation and assertion of Inuit narrative sovereignty, as a way to knowing, speaking, and storying on Indigenous terms.
The epistemic disobedience of Orsugiak and Inuit narrative sovereignty
The decision to deplatform Orsugiak revealed not only the mechanisms of epistemic dispossession in Danish–Kalaallit relations, but also how easily Danish and international media and publics can overlook, or ignore, Kalaallit realities. In Denmark, the controversy was framed as a question of accuracy and objectivity; in Kalaallit Nunaat, it was understood as a collective injury (Volquardsen 2025). Orsugiak was never just about one film, one mine, one number, or one researcher. It was about all of the people and lands of Kalaallit Nunaat, our history, and our contemporary reality. In stark contrast to its reception in Denmark, Orsugiak was recognised in Kalaallit Nunaat as a shared story, which resonated deeply and felt long overdue.
This contrast reveals the unequal terms on which our realities are allowed to be spoken and known, and how narrative authority is organised and disciplined along colonial, gendered, racialised lines of whiteness and privilege. To counter these epistemically dispossessive narrative structures, Inuit narrative sovereignty asserts the right to articulate our own stories and histories on our own epistemic terms, without requiring external authorisation. Expressed in decolonial thinking as ‘epistemic disobedience’, this means changing the terms of the conversation by calling into question the control of knowledge (Mignolo 2009: 5).
The word orsugiak itself captures this. In Kalaallisut, it means ‘that which looks like blubber’ due to the rock’s resemblance to seal fat. Orsugiak already had multiple meanings and relations in the lands and lives of Kalaallit communities (Graugaard 2020), long before Europeans renamed it as cryolite and classified it as a mineral for extraction. Orsugiak was used as sinkers for fishing rods, pegs for summer tents, and as a component of snuff. It lay in the landscape of Ivittuut, which means ‘the grassy place’, home to summer hunting camps and settlements. Since the documentary was deplatformed, orsugiak has featured in Kalaallit jewellery and carvings, signalling both Kalaallit pride and the determination not to forget the story of cryolite despite attempts to silence it. And orsugiak has circulated as a hashtag together with #donatedbythepeopleofGreenland and #qujanaqillillu (‘you’re welcome’) on the waves of memes which emerged in the wake of the film’s deplatforming—memes that circulate images of Danish monuments and brands with a historical legacy steeped in cryolite money. Orsugiak thus remains as a reminder that cryolite was not discovered by Denmark, but renamed and revalued through its colonial gaze. In these ways, orsugiak continues to carry our stories, beyond the epistemic confines of Danish historiography and contemporary mediastorms.
Thinking with First Nations scholar, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2011, 2017), who employs Indigenous story as her ‘algorithm’, I suggest approaching orsugiak not just as a mode of expression, but as a mode of thinking, relating, and generating knowledge. As a practice of Indigenous narrative sovereignty, orsugiak insists that Inuit stories, memories, lived experiences, and relations to land are not superfluous to knowledge creation; they are intrinsic to the constitution and production of Inuit theory, method, and ways of knowing.
Telling our stories is more than an act of representation. It is a practice of resurgence and renewal, and a means to restore knowledge and relation to place. The story of orsugiak, then, does not belong to the archives of Danish national television. It has always belonged, and continues to belong, to the land, to the fjord of Arsuk, and to the families and communities who carried it and continue to do so. Attending to orsugiak not only offers a historical account of colonial extraction; it also illuminates the political, cultural, and epistemic conditions which continue to shape stories of Kalaallit Nunaat in the present.
Acknowledgment
The author would like to thank the Flax Foundation and the Institute of Human Sciences (IWM, Vienna) for granting the author with the Emma Goldman Award and the Emma Goldman Fellowship which made the research and writing of this article possible.
Declaration of conflict of interest
The author declares no potential conflict of interest.
AI disclosure
The author declares that Copilot Enterprise was used for linguistic proofreading and editing in English.
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Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/014.a29
Published on: 30 September 2026
Volume: 14
Issue: Issue 3
Article view count: 990
Article download count: 73
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© The author(s) 2026. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Graugaard, N. D. (2026), ‘Orsugiak: cryolite, epistemic dispossession, and Inuit narrative sovereignty’, Journal of the British Academy, 14(3): a29 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/014.a29Crossref
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July 2023
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