Family ties, Sisimiut, Greenland

Meet Tukumminnguaq Olsen. You can call her Tuku, and this is her great grandfather, Gustav Olsen.

Tuku’s from Thule, West Greenland’s northernmost community, and this is a monument to her great grandfather which stands outside the church in Sisimiut. He was a Greenlandic missionary, and the plaque commemorates him and his wife, Ane-Sophia Olsen. “The first missionaries told us to get Christian names, to get rid of our culture, and to burn our drums,” Tuku tells me. “But he was a good missionary because we could keep our names and drums. We still have drum dancing in the north because of him.”