Greenland’s Gen Z has a lot to say. This Arctic Games athlete could be one of their leading voices

When I meet Niels Arkaluk Heilmann over a Qajaq lager on the windy coastline of Nuuk, he seems tired. The 24-year-old tour leader has flown to meet me in the capital city, along with a group of other adventurous travelers on this Intrepid trip, directly from leading another group of tourists around his home country.

“Greenlandic people are generally reserved in public, and with people they don’t know,” he tells me, wincing at the clatter of restaurant hubbub around us. “The social norm in Greenland is that you don’t say anything unless your words carry meaning.”

Whether pointing out skyscraper-sized icebergs or sharing  the country’s history —Greenland was a Danish colony for more than 200 years, starting in the early 1700s, and became an autonomous district of Denmark in 2009— Heilmann proves to have quite a strong voice. He’s part of the next generation of the island’s tourism, the frontline of Gen Z residents who are welcoming travelers to learn about their home—on Greenlandic terms.

“It’s cool to know more about your country now, via the tourism industry,” Heilmann says to me. “It wasn’t like that before.” In years past, elements of Greenlandic culture were subdued: Intermarriage among Greenlanders and Danish people was forbidden, and traditional Greenlandic tattoos were taboo.

Today, things are changing, and even something as simple as Heilmann’s first name is a reflection of that. ‘Niels’ is Danish and ‘Arkaluk’ is Greenlandic. Increasingly, young generations of Greenlanders are adopting the use of both names in everyday use, a proud testament to Greenland’s rich cultural identity.

Raised in the small Greenlandic town of Qasigiannguit, Heilmann is now studying chemical engineering at Aarhus University, outside Copenhagen. Born in Denmark to parents of mixed Danish-Greenlandic heritage, his upbringing is like many of his peers, his coming-of-age shared between two different worlds. When Heilmann began attending high school in Denmark, he recalls, “It was difficult to adjust to Danish norms. They have different ways of communicating, whether it’s verbal, written, or even body language.”

“I think it’s very important that Greenland is coming onto the world map now, and not just as a part of Denmark.”

- Sascha Blidorf, jewelry designer

Today, he seems to walk this cultural tightrope with ease, identifying both places as home. “Even though I’m happy to be going to university in Denmark, it doesn’t mean that I’m happy to not be in Greenland,” he tells me. “Just because I value one thing doesn’t mean my value diminishes for the other.”

Heilmann has been working with tourists for more than a third of his life; mastering how to skipper a boat, lead day hikes, and run teams of Greenlandic sled dogs (the closest living relatives to wolves). In the 2018 Arctic Games—a competition which draws some thousands people from Arctic Inuit communities in Alaska, Canada, Norway, Finland, and sometimes Russia—he competed in the snow snake competition, a test of strength and aim in throwing a pointed object along a flat surface of snow. He won bronze, one of the highest-ranking achievements by a Greenlandic athlete in that category.

As our small group travels slowly through western Greenland, moving via small chartered powerboats and regional flights, his connection to the land and community is undeniable. Wherever we go, he seems to intimately know a large portion of people, seamlessly switching between Greenlandic, English, and Danish. We chance upon Heilmann’s mother and stepdad, who own Diskobay Tours, and his 21-year-old sister, Naduk, who began leading Intrepid trips this summer.

There are many in Heilmann’s community who are just as inspiring. When he leads us to Disko Island, I meet Ilasiaq B. Hansen, a 22-year-old videographer who worked on a documentary called Silama Siulersortarpaanga, or My Consciousness Leads Me, helmed by another young local, Ivik Brandt, and two friends.

“The documentary tells the story of Greenland from the perspective of a Greenlandic bone carver,” Hansen tells me, as we stand on a black-sand shoreline. Behind us, icebergs the size of cars lay beached in the lapping waves. Later, I watch the eight-minute doc, which received an Honorable Mention at the 2024 Nuuk International Film Festival. It’s a meditative look at art and Greenlandic culture, steeped in quiet pride and self-identity as craftsman Aksel Sandgreen Brandt talks about the important bond between creative expression and nature. He urges the next generation to develop their own consciousness based on traditional values.

“I want young people to ask themselves, ‘What is the land I’m stepping in? What is going on in my surroundings?’” Brandt says in the film. “[Western influences] judged the Inuit who carved and called it a forbidden ritual. But art has no rules, art has no limits; it is free.”

Another creative Gen-Z’er is Sascha Blidorf, a 25-year-old who juggles Danish university with managing her company, Jewellery By Blidorf. Her elegant pieces blend Inuit inspiration with modern style, incorporating tufts of fox fur, moonstones from the Nuuk fjord, and small-scale, gold-plated posts and hoops. Some of Blidorf’s pieces have been worn by 26-year-old Inuit-Canadian model Willow Allen, who has appeared in publications such as Vogue. This connection holds a special significance for Blidorf.

Like Heilmann, Blidorf splits her time between Greenland and Denmark. I meet her in the welcoming Café Inuk north of Nuuk, where she tells me, “Willow isn’t only using her platform to have an aesthetic and be popular. She’s also using it to inform people of the conditions Indigenous people are living under. I love that about her, and I also like seeing the similarities we have. She’s an Indigenous person who doesn’t always ‘look Indigenous,’ like me.”

As she speaks, Bliforf’s pale-eyed gaze drifts to a nearby window, to the captivating view of blue water and ice. “When I was a kid in Greenland, I was always teased and told to move back to Denmark,” she says. “But when I was in Denmark, I wasn’t Danish enough. So to see an influencer being proud of her Indigenous side–I really like that about her.”

Later in our conversation, I ask Blidorf for her take on the future of Greenland’s tourism. “I think it’s very important that Greenland is coming onto the world map now, and not just as a part of Denmark,” she says. “But tourists need to respect the people here, and the nature. We are a very small community, and we are Indigenous. We live within nature to this day.”

Some of Heilmann’s contemporaries are also guides themselves. 26-year-old Danny Mølgaard, a certified Arctic Adventure guide and co-founder of Disko Adventures, leads us around the town of Qeqertarsuaq on Disko Island. He’s a natural, sharing historical context and fun facts, waggling his eyebrows to comedic effect.

In this small town of just 800 inhabitants, Mølgaard sees potential in tourism, even though he acknowledges that many of his peers have moved away in search of alternative work. He, on the other hand, is interested in sharing his culture as well as ongoing research of wind power on the island, which could harness the ferocious wintertime gales toward empowering the community. And he relishes being outside in the quiet nature, naming the wild birds we see with a fond familiarity: The gyrefalcon, the king eiders, the red-necked pharalope.

“I’m not worried. We’ll take things as they come,” Mølgaard tells me, when I ask about tourism. “There is a word in Greenlandic—ajunngilaq. That means ‘it is what it is.’”

For all the potential of this engaged, proud Greenlandic Gen-Z, it’s uncertain if Niels Arkaluk, along with many of his peers, will commit to tourism full-time.

On the day I meet him, Mølgaard is accompanied by Hans-Henrik Suersaq Poulsen, a suave actor-musician-clothing designer who casually sports an outfit that would receive appreciative looks on the streets of Berlin or London. Poulsen shows me the stitching on his sky-blue anorak, which he fashioned himself. Hans is tagging along because he’s considering working in tourism, although it’s clear he values his creative pursuits too.

“In my generation, there are a lot of young people starting to become guides and take pride in that,” Heilmann tells me toward the end of our trip. “And I think we’re doing a great job, all of us. We all have different approaches, but we all have open arms.”

Yet for all the potential of this engaged, proud Greenlandic Gen Z, it’s uncertain if Niels Arkaluk, along with many of his peers, will commit to tourism full-time. Currently, he, like others, works in tourism as seasonal summer work when he’s not in school. And while operators like Diskobay Tours offer tourism experiences almost year-round, visitation to Greenland generally decreases in the autumn and early winter–and Greenland has eight months of winter.

As I travel in Greenland, invigorated by the architecture of ice and the warmth and openness of the people we meet, I find myself feeling hopeful–a sentiment shared by so many young locals.“I know I’ll always follow tourism, because it’s close to my heart,” Heilmann says when I ask about his long-term plans. “What’s important is that we, all of us in the new generation, get to choose how we share it.”

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