Through my work with Good Organisation, I’ve been fortunate to collaborate with academics from both the University of York and Ilisimatusarfik University in Nuuk on a research project exploring climate change, tourism and a host of social issues across Greenland.
It’s been fascinating to learn about the country’s rapidly growing tourism sector, the unique challenges posed by climate change in the Arctic region, and range of broader social issues in a country where around 1% of the population is experiencing homelessness.
While the full research findings will be published soon, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on my own experiences during my visits there.
I generally make a point of buying hand-made crafts when travelling to destinations, whether that’s knitwear from Shetland or a piece of pottery in the Mediterranean, and Greenland was no exception. However, the nature of my trip caused me to think more deeply on the structural dynamics behind the products we so often celebrate as ‘authentic’ cultural souvenirs, and the ways in which economic value flows back to those producing them.
Tourism marketing loves the image of the remote artisan carefully carving souvenirs by hand, and the sense that by purchasing these objects you are helping a culture survive. In Greenland, traditional art forms such as bone and stone carvings, sealskin goods, jewellery referencing Inuit mythology, and handcrafted textiles are often presented as quintessential items that connect visitors to place, heritage and the remarkable resilience of Arctic life.
Yet on closer inspection, this appealing narrative becomes troubling, as economic value is drawn away from communities and concentrated elsewhere through processes that seem benign or even celebratory.
Applied to heritage tourism, it helps explain how cultural knowledge, identity and skilled labour can be transformed into marketable assets whose highest returns go to retailers, brands, property owners and tour operators advertising ‘cultural encounters’. The craft remains local, but the economic benefit often does not, and the authenticity that tourists pay for becomes the intellectual property in someone else’s portfolio, leaving the maker with a modest and precarious income.
This is not to dismiss the skill embedded in those crafts, which are technically complex, culturally rich and deeply expressive of a different worldview. However, tourism economies often restructure such skill into lower-value labour within a larger supply chain. The artisan offers the authenticity that others monetise in retail spaces far removed from the workshops where they were made. While Greenlandic artists are rightly gaining international attention, the value captured at the level of direct sales often pales in comparison to the profits made by intermediaries and tourism operators.
There is also a subtler dispossession at work, through the narrowing of imagined futures. When a region is branded as a destination for traditional crafts, its economic identity can harden around cultural consumption rather than diversification into higher-value sectors. Young Greenlanders may be encouraged to preserve tradition, to maintain the craft economy and ‘keep the cultural legacy alive’ for visitors. Meanwhile, high-growth sectors like technology, research, renewable energy development and advanced manufacturing cluster in distant metropolitan centres with far greater access to investment, infrastructure, education and global markets. The result can be a form of peripheralisation in which Indigenous communities are structurally positioned as suppliers of culture and experience rather than innovation and high-value production.
This critique edges into uncomfortable territory, because celebrating culture can, without careful structuring of benefits, become a way of defining communities by what they have been rather than what they might become. In the Arctic context, it resonates with broader histories of colonial extraction and economic dependency, including debates around autonomy from Denmark, and Donald Trump’s desire to control Greenland’s natural resources and governance.
None of this means that traditional crafts should be abandoned or that tourism is inherently exploitative. The point is structural. When heritage becomes an economic strategy, we must ask how value chains are organised, who controls branding and distribution, and whether artisans have robust pathways into ownership, scale and diversification. If a carved piece of Inuit jewellery commands a global premium, do the Greenlandic makers share proportionately in that premium? Are profits reinvested in local education, apprenticeships, cultural institutions and entrepreneurial ecosystems, or siphoned outward to external stakeholders?
This is where the framework of Community Wealth Building becomes crucial.
Community Wealth Building begins from a simple but radical premise, that local economies should be organised so that wealth generated within a place is retained, recirculated and democratically controlled by the people who live there. Rather than relying on external investors or tourism capital that is mobile and extractive, it prioritises local ownership, anchor institutions, cooperatives and inclusive supply chains. In a Greenlandic context, thi approach shifts the usual focus from attracting more visitors to asking who owns the assets and where the surplus goes.
Within a Community Wealth Building framework, traditional craft would not be treated merely as a quaint attraction but as part of a locally embedded production system. Indigenous artists might organise cooperatives that collectively own branding, online retail platforms and distribution systems rather than selling wholesale to distant intermediaries. Local residents, social enterprises and cultural institutions could prioritise procurement of Indigenous art and craft products, stabilising demand beyond the unpredictable tourist season and creating year-round economic opportunity. Training programmes could combine traditional skills with design innovation and e-commerce expertise, enabling Greenlandic artisans to capture more value directly and build sustainable businesses on their own terms.
Crucially, it also insists that heritage should not define the limits of aspiration. Retaining wealth locally means investing it strategically across sectors. Revenues generated through tourism and heritage based crafts could fund coding academies, renewable energy projects, research collaborations or creative industry incubators, especially vital in a region where climate change and geopolitical pressures are intersecting with community development. Instead of encouraging young people to choose between tradition and departure, communities could offer plural futures that honour heritage while embracing innovation.
Seen this way, accumulation by dispossession and civic wealth creation represent two diverging paths for Greenland’s Indigenous economies. In the first, culture is extracted, packaged and monetised in ways that reinforce structural inequality. In the second, culture becomes a lever for local capital formation and democratic control. The difference lies not in the tupilak on display in a craft market, but in the ownership structures behind it, the governance of cultural assets, and the reinvestment of profits into community controlled futures.
The romantic image of the Arctic artisan will always have power. Visitors will continue to seek connection, narrative and authenticity in pieces that carry centuries of history and meaning. The question is whether that desire entrenches economic asymmetry or supports redistribution. If heritage tourism is to be more than a soft-edged form of extraction, it must be embedded within strategies that consciously resist dispossession and ensure that when visitors purchase a piece of heritage, they are not only taking home a story but contributing to a future in which the makers own more than the myth.
Culture Homelessness Inequality Local Community Social Commentary Tourism
Heritage for Sale: The Commodification of Culture
Through my work with Good Organisation, I’ve been fortunate to collaborate with academics from both the University of York and Ilisimatusarfik University in Nuuk on a research project exploring climate change, tourism and a host of social issues across Greenland.
It’s been fascinating to learn about the country’s rapidly growing tourism sector, the unique challenges posed by climate change in the Arctic region, and range of broader social issues in a country where around 1% of the population is experiencing homelessness.
While the full research findings will be published soon, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on my own experiences during my visits there.
I generally make a point of buying hand-made crafts when travelling to destinations, whether that’s knitwear from Shetland or a piece of pottery in the Mediterranean, and Greenland was no exception. However, the nature of my trip caused me to think more deeply on the structural dynamics behind the products we so often celebrate as ‘authentic’ cultural souvenirs, and the ways in which economic value flows back to those producing them.
Tourism marketing loves the image of the remote artisan carefully carving souvenirs by hand, and the sense that by purchasing these objects you are helping a culture survive. In Greenland, traditional art forms such as bone and stone carvings, sealskin goods, jewellery referencing Inuit mythology, and handcrafted textiles are often presented as quintessential items that connect visitors to place, heritage and the remarkable resilience of Arctic life.
Yet on closer inspection, this appealing narrative becomes troubling, as economic value is drawn away from communities and concentrated elsewhere through processes that seem benign or even celebratory.
Applied to heritage tourism, it helps explain how cultural knowledge, identity and skilled labour can be transformed into marketable assets whose highest returns go to retailers, brands, property owners and tour operators advertising ‘cultural encounters’. The craft remains local, but the economic benefit often does not, and the authenticity that tourists pay for becomes the intellectual property in someone else’s portfolio, leaving the maker with a modest and precarious income.
This is not to dismiss the skill embedded in those crafts, which are technically complex, culturally rich and deeply expressive of a different worldview. However, tourism economies often restructure such skill into lower-value labour within a larger supply chain. The artisan offers the authenticity that others monetise in retail spaces far removed from the workshops where they were made. While Greenlandic artists are rightly gaining international attention, the value captured at the level of direct sales often pales in comparison to the profits made by intermediaries and tourism operators.
There is also a subtler dispossession at work, through the narrowing of imagined futures. When a region is branded as a destination for traditional crafts, its economic identity can harden around cultural consumption rather than diversification into higher-value sectors. Young Greenlanders may be encouraged to preserve tradition, to maintain the craft economy and ‘keep the cultural legacy alive’ for visitors. Meanwhile, high-growth sectors like technology, research, renewable energy development and advanced manufacturing cluster in distant metropolitan centres with far greater access to investment, infrastructure, education and global markets. The result can be a form of peripheralisation in which Indigenous communities are structurally positioned as suppliers of culture and experience rather than innovation and high-value production.
This critique edges into uncomfortable territory, because celebrating culture can, without careful structuring of benefits, become a way of defining communities by what they have been rather than what they might become. In the Arctic context, it resonates with broader histories of colonial extraction and economic dependency, including debates around autonomy from Denmark, and Donald Trump’s desire to control Greenland’s natural resources and governance.
None of this means that traditional crafts should be abandoned or that tourism is inherently exploitative. The point is structural. When heritage becomes an economic strategy, we must ask how value chains are organised, who controls branding and distribution, and whether artisans have robust pathways into ownership, scale and diversification. If a carved piece of Inuit jewellery commands a global premium, do the Greenlandic makers share proportionately in that premium? Are profits reinvested in local education, apprenticeships, cultural institutions and entrepreneurial ecosystems, or siphoned outward to external stakeholders?
This is where the framework of Community Wealth Building becomes crucial.
Community Wealth Building begins from a simple but radical premise, that local economies should be organised so that wealth generated within a place is retained, recirculated and democratically controlled by the people who live there. Rather than relying on external investors or tourism capital that is mobile and extractive, it prioritises local ownership, anchor institutions, cooperatives and inclusive supply chains. In a Greenlandic context, thi approach shifts the usual focus from attracting more visitors to asking who owns the assets and where the surplus goes.
Within a Community Wealth Building framework, traditional craft would not be treated merely as a quaint attraction but as part of a locally embedded production system. Indigenous artists might organise cooperatives that collectively own branding, online retail platforms and distribution systems rather than selling wholesale to distant intermediaries. Local residents, social enterprises and cultural institutions could prioritise procurement of Indigenous art and craft products, stabilising demand beyond the unpredictable tourist season and creating year-round economic opportunity. Training programmes could combine traditional skills with design innovation and e-commerce expertise, enabling Greenlandic artisans to capture more value directly and build sustainable businesses on their own terms.
Crucially, it also insists that heritage should not define the limits of aspiration. Retaining wealth locally means investing it strategically across sectors. Revenues generated through tourism and heritage based crafts could fund coding academies, renewable energy projects, research collaborations or creative industry incubators, especially vital in a region where climate change and geopolitical pressures are intersecting with community development. Instead of encouraging young people to choose between tradition and departure, communities could offer plural futures that honour heritage while embracing innovation.
Seen this way, accumulation by dispossession and civic wealth creation represent two diverging paths for Greenland’s Indigenous economies. In the first, culture is extracted, packaged and monetised in ways that reinforce structural inequality. In the second, culture becomes a lever for local capital formation and democratic control. The difference lies not in the tupilak on display in a craft market, but in the ownership structures behind it, the governance of cultural assets, and the reinvestment of profits into community controlled futures.
The romantic image of the Arctic artisan will always have power. Visitors will continue to seek connection, narrative and authenticity in pieces that carry centuries of history and meaning. The question is whether that desire entrenches economic asymmetry or supports redistribution. If heritage tourism is to be more than a soft-edged form of extraction, it must be embedded within strategies that consciously resist dispossession and ensure that when visitors purchase a piece of heritage, they are not only taking home a story but contributing to a future in which the makers own more than the myth.