2024-2025 // Editie 1
De eerste editie van dit jaar is af en ligt nu in de rekken van het PCH!
“I’m so proud of who we are” – Qupanuk Olsen
It's mid-September 2024. I take the plunge and send an email to Qupanuk Olsen – better known as Q – from the well-known social media channel Q's Greenland, where she has been posting videos about life in Greenland since early 2020. I actually get a reply, too. Some emails are exchanged, the Zoom-link is shared, and on a cloudy Monday morning two weeks later, the moment finally arrives. For this edition of Noorderlicht, I have the privilege of interviewing Greenland's biggest influencer.
Images: Qupanuk Olsen
Dit artikel is binnenkort ook in het Nederlands te lezen.
After extensively thanking her for making time for me, I cannot help but mention that the Dutch can be quite… direct sometimes, so that she shouldn’t be startled by my questions. “I love honesty”, she answers confidently.
Over the years, Q has given many interviews in which she has shared why she started Q’s Greenland roughly five years ago. “I have travelled to so many countries in my lifetime, since I was a little kid, and there’s so many people around the world who know nothing about Greenland.” When I ask Q what the biggest misconception is that people have about her home country, she doesn’t have to think twice: “That there are no people in Greenland. In 2008, I went to Chicago without a visa, and I had to go through customs, but the few guys working there stopped me. They asked me all kinds of questions, like: ‘Why are you here? Why are you entering the country? When are you leaving again?’ On my passport it said South Greenland, but they had no idea where it was. Luckily, they had the world map behind them so I could point to South Greenland, but they just looked at each other and said “But nobody lives there…” That was such a crazy experience, like, how can I prove that I’m from Greenland?”
But that’s not all. “I have studied in Australia, doing a master’s degree in engineering, where I sat next to my best classmate for a year and a half. About a year after I got back to Greenland, I was planting my first potatoes out in my new garden outside our house, and I was so proud that I finally got my own garden. Then I got a video call from that friend, who’s from India but still lives in Australia today, and he was like ‘Q! Where’s the ice?!’ It hurt me so much that my best classmate thought that we have ice year-round. I just started wondering what I did wrong, why people have this imagination of Greenland, completely different than what it is.”
Though there are still many people that are ignorant when it comes to Greenland, Q does see changes happening. “I believe I have more than five hundred million views across my channels, across all of my platforms, so there’s definitely a big percentage of the world population that now knows there are people in Greenland and that knows much more about Greenland, just because of my channel. But also, do you remember when Trump wanted to buy Greenland? When he said that, Greenland got a lot more attention worldwide. So yeah, people definitely know much more about Greenland nowadays.”
Considering the amount of views that Q mentions and the fact that she has posted almost six hundred videos on her various social media platforms, I am curious about where her inspiration for new videos comes from. “It’s getting harder and harder to come up with new ideas,” she sighs, “but there’s so much out there. I also do cooperations with different companies, and depending on what they want me to tell, I tell their story.” The input from viewers is also really helpful. “One of the upcoming videos is going to be about how reindeer tastes, because recently I did a video on reindeer hunting and then in the comments people kept asking how it tastes. It really helps when people comment different things, ask different questions, or even send me messages with suggestions. Sometimes I actually have a long list of videos I could do; it just depends on how much effort and time I want to spend on each video.” This might have to do with the fact that Q’s Greenland is only one part of her activities: Q also owns her own company, Q’s Effect, which serves as an umbrella organization for everything she does. This includes not only her channel, but also – among other things – her work in consultancy. Q is certainly a busy bee.
To the question of whether she now has a whole list of ideas ready, she answers affirmatively. “It’s going to be Halloween soon, and one of the coming videos will also be about the scary things in Greenland. We have qivittoq, people who have left society to live alone by themselves out in the wild.” A little online research suggests that this is a death sentence in Greenland; especially in the parts with an extreme climate, it is difficult, if not impossible, to survive on your own. But for qivittoq, it’s different, says Q: “They have their whole own world, and they get powers from nature.” I find it very interesting, though I struggle to imagine it. The first thing that comes to my mind is somebody that is in some sort of trance, unaware of what they’re doing, but Q strongly refutes that idea. “No, they know exactly what they’re doing. They get abilities from nature, so for instance if they have eaten a raven, they get the ability of a raven. People say that they can even fly, but that they can also still return back to human form. So they become like a human animal. I haven’t seen one yet, but it is said that when you have seen them, they make you forget…” Q promises to tell more about it in the video.
The story of qivittoq makes me wonder what special things Q has experienced since starting Q’s Greenland. So many things have happened in those five years that she can hardly choose. “I can definitely mention three things. Like in 2022, there was a sports event, and I got to spend a few minutes with the audience. I made a thousand people say ‘Takuss!1 with me, and that was such an amazing feeling. The second thing was in 2023, in September, when I went to Qeqertarsuaq, Disko Island, where there’s spring water coming out of the mountain. I went there and drank that, and the water there… it was the best water I have ever tasted in my entire life. Drinking that water was such an indescribable experience, and I get to do all this because of Q’s Greenland…” The channel made it possible for Q to travel to all kinds of special places.
“This year in May, I went to the ice sheet near Qaanaaq, together with four scientists from GEUS.2 We went two hundred kilometers inland, almost to the center of the ice sheet. That was such an amazing experience, being on top of the ice, where you can see nothing but ice… Ice into eternity, like, you can’t see any mountains or anything, only the sky and the ice. It was just magical.”
It’s an active choice of happiness
All of Q’s experiences made possible by Q’s Greenland are largely shared on her social media. While doing this, Q always seems to be able to keep a big smile on her face, but in a world where there is often nothing to smile about, I find that very special. I ask Q how she always manages to see the positive side of things, even when discussing serious topics – like in the video on Greenland’s high suicide rate. “I didn’t smile in that one. But how I stay so positive is a good question.” Q takes some time to think. “I don’t know what my main force is, but there are so many negative stories from the media: the journalists, the newspapers, the news on TV and so on. They’re so good at telling negative, bad stories about us, but I’m so proud of who we are. We need to talk so much more about how great we are, how lucky we are to be Greenlanders.” On second thought, Q suspects that to be her motivation. “I have traveled so much around the world, and seen so much, that I’ve really realized how lucky we are. That pride is just shining through in my videos, I believe. At the end of my videos, I always say ‘Life is amazing, no matter what’ or ‘Life is amazing, tulliani takuss!’3, because life is amazing, no matter what. No matter how hard or bad times we go through are, life is still amazing.” She couldn’t be more right.
However, that positivity doesn’t come easy. “I have chosen to be happy in my life. I strongly believe that you, by yourself, can choose to be more happy in life by limiting negative people and negative effects on your life. I’m very careful with my friends, close friends and so on: as soon as they start to have a negative impact on me, I simply cut them off. It’s just because I believe that you become your surroundings. If you stay with happy people, you become happier. But if you are around negative people all the time, of course you get more negative.” She gives a personal example. “I have chosen to not ever move back to my hometown in South Greenland, because there’s so much negativity in the town. It’s just a small community, so there are rumors going around and all these negative things. I’ve chosen not to be in that, and I will always choose not to be in that in the future. It’s an active choice of happiness. And I think that has a positive effect on my videos.”
Unfortunately, one cannot always escape negativity. Especially when it comes to internet hate: keyboard warriors around the world bring the misery right into our homes, Q’s included. “I get more hate in some periods, also depending on what I’m doing or what kind of video I’ve been making. For instance, last June, I was in the middle of a huge shitstorm when some Greenlandic women, who were jealous of me, started to make fake news about me. They said that I’m supporting Israel, that I support the killing of 15.000 children in Palestine, that I’m getting blood money… There were so many things I was accused of, which I do not stand for.” Luckily, the storm passed just as quickly as it had begun. “The whole thing started on Monday, and on Friday I released an explanation on the news: after that, nobody ever said anything to me again about it. But I couldn’t go out of my door for two days, because I didn’t know what would happen if I went outside.”
Was she afraid that people would be standing outside her door? “No, it was mostly just online. When you experience shitstorms like that, a lot of it is just in your mind. You drive yourself crazy. Luckily, it was just happening locally, and I got out of it quite fast, but those were tough days. Of course I was sad for a longer period after that, but that’s just how life is. Anyone who becomes famous goes through these shitstorms.” In the end, Q also has a positive view on this. “I’m really looking forward to my next shitstorm,” she says with a laugh. “I’m so much more prepared now.”
In her videos, Q not only pays attention to the details, the little things that make Greenland so beautiful, but she also discusses the bigger picture. Thus the relations between Greenland and Denmark are regularly discussed. I cannot help but ask about the new Danish banknotes, on which famous Danes will be pictured in a few years’ time. Among them, however, is Arnarulunnguaq, the Greenlandic woman that made a significant contribution to Knud Rasmussen’s fifth Thule expedition. To me, this seems a rather sensitive issue, so how do the Greenlanders respond to this? “The artist of the face, who is a Greenlandic woman, was recently interviewed here”, Q says, “and she said: ”It’s great that Arnarulunnquaq is being put on the bank notes, but why is it first happening now? Why haven’t we been on them before?” I think Denmark is starting to realize how they’ve been treating us and how we haven’t been included in so many things over the last three hundred years.
They have been controlling everything from above without including us, and I think they’re starting to try to make it up by adding us on those banknotes and by including us more.”
Yet Q believes that is not the entire story. “I also think it has something to do with the fact that Greenland… that some of us want to become independent.” Of course, I would love to know her personal view on this. “I strongly believe that Greenland will become independent within the next ten years. And I think… no, I don’t think, I know we deserve to be independent. Like, our whole fishing industry is sold through Denmark, so Denmark is earning money off our fishing industry. And the Thule air base, which is an American military base up in North Greenland… The Americans are paying Denmark a lot of money every single year to have their military base there, and us Greenlanders never ever see that money. So, when you look at it overall, it almost seems as if Denmark is actually earning money off Greenland.” Money that could also go directly to Greenland, I imagine. “Yeah, exactly. And tourism is booming and is going to boom so much more in the coming years. So we are like the next Iceland: what Iceland has been experiencing the last fifteen years, is now going to happen to us.”
We are nearing the end of the interview. I’d love to ask a few short questions before Q heads off to another appointment. Considering that our education in Scandinavian Studies is strongly linked to language, and also that Greenlandic is so drastically different from the Germanic languages, this is precisely something I’d like to ask Q about. She has shared many videos on the Greenlandic language and its dialects, and that’s why I would love to know what her favorite word or saying is. “Illit ullu alla Alluitsup Paaliarumaarputit. That double L sound…” she says with a tender and warm tone. “And also because it’s South Greenlandic, it’s in my accent, or dialect. It means: You will go to Alluitsup Paa on another day.” Who knows, maybe one day I will get to see this South Greenlandic village with a little over four hundred inhabitants.
Given the fact that there are some diehard language lovers among our students that will not shy away from a challenge, I ask Q for some advice on how these enthusiasts can get the hang of Greenlandic. “The only way you can learn proper Greenlandic is to stay among Greenlanders who speak Greenlandic. So you have to go to a smaller village, some smaller settlement, to be able to learn the language. There’s a young guy here in town, he is from… I don’t know, Denmark? Or Finland? But he’s self-taught in Greenlandic. He speaks almost fluent Greenlandic now. Of course, you can always hear that he learned it as an adult, but it’s just so great to see that it’s possible if you really want to. I’m thinking to include him in one of my videos.” Although she admires the young man’s efforts, in her videos she also acknowledges that, because of the many small details and nuances, the Greenlandic language can only fully be mastered by native speakers. But if you want to give it a try anyway, you’re going to have to cross the ocean.
If traversing a world sea is (still) a little too ambitious, listening to Greenlandic music might be a great start. Since our editor Rick has written about rapper Tarrak in an earlier edition of Noorderlicht,4 I wonder whether Q has some recommendations too. However, she seems to understand my question slightly differently than ‘which Greenlandic artist should Dutch people know about’, because she answers: “We have qilaat, the drum. We’ve almost lost it, but now it is starting to come back. I got my first drum this year: I hadn’t learned to play it properly yet, but I’m learning… It’s just so important that we learn our old traditional music, so we all have to do it. I also think it’s just a matter of time before we’re all going to practice it at school, anywhere… Any arrangement, any family get-together, I think we’re going to start to use our drum again.” When I ask if she knows a qilaat artist on Spotify, she shakes her head. “There’s not really any material yet, so I’m actually planning on being one of them, teaching the drum. I’m going to start to record while I’m learning the drum by myself. I’m going to do it in Greenlandic, so I can teach others as well how I’m learning and… yeah, just the whole thing.”
Lastly, I ask Q about what she has in store for us in 2025. “I actually don’t know what my plans are for Q’s Greenland. Of course I’m going to continue my content creation, but in the near future I’m going to be focusing on another huge project, which isn’t about content creation. It’s a physical thing. So yeah, I’m going to be quite busy with that, but I’m not going to tell you what it is. You will get to see it. You will get to follow the start of the process: I will probably make a weekly documentary of the whole thing happening, so you will get to follow that. Maybe it will even get its own platform.” Q will keep us in suspense for a while, but it sounds really promising.
I thank her again and end the call.
Takuss, Q.
Did you get curious about her videos?
Check out Q’s Greenland on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and YouTube!
- ‘See you!’ in Kalaallisut.
- Full name being De Nationale Geologiske Undersøgelse for Danmark og Grønland, which is a geological research institute that falls under the Danish Ministry of Climate and Energy.
- ‘See you next time!’ in Kalaallisut.
- This article can be found here (only in Dutch).
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