Mobility, materiality, and memory: Silas Sandgreen and the construction of Kalaallit cartography in the 1920s

Abstract

Summary: In 1925, Silas Sandgreen sent a map to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Instead of ink on paper, Sandgreen’s map featured strands of sinew binding painted driftwood islands to an animal hide, articulating the islands Kitsissut and Imerissoq of Disko Bay off the western shore of Kalaallit Nunaat. In the near century since its completion, the map’s materials have become indexical of their maker’s Indigeneity, functioning as erroneous evidence of “authentic” Inuit cartographic practices. A repeated fetishizing of alterity has divorced the object from its original conditions of creation, obscuring its origins and cultural meanings. This paper seeks to restore the historicity of Silas Sandgreen’s map by taking a new approach to its materiality. Taking cue from recent scholarship that frames the map as an artwork, we locate the object at the intersection of various social, political, and environmental ideologies sweeping Kalaallit Nunaat, and Sandgreen’s particular home islands, in the 1920s. In order to do so, we restore the maker’s biography composed from new findings in Indigenous-language archives, and juxtapose that biography alongside a visual and material analysis of the most prominent media of the map: sealskin and driftwood. By charting these material histories alongside social and ecological ones, we aim to provide a template that advances multiple interdisciplinary methodologies in the nascent field of Arctic art history.