Singnagtugaq

Published in 1915, Singnagtugaq: A Greenlanders Dream, created both furor and literary history as the first original novel in Greenlandic. Initially the book was seen as an encounter between the historic clash of good and evil–Danish colonizers and the colonized Greenlanders. The book portrays this encounter in vivid, harsh terms reflecting the time. At the end of the novel comes a vision of a future, modern Greenland, freed from colonial humiliation and poverty: the first literary expression of the desire for progress which later became so prominent in Greenlandic poetry and politics. It also described the first required Danish education for primary school students, not to serve as subservient to the Danish, but as a necessary part of a Greenlanders education and growth. Later, this apparent contradiction came to characterize Greenlandic cultural policy.