Ellen K. Frederiksen tones appear on the screen where she joins from an online connection to Qassiarsuk.
It is June and the lambing season on the family’s sheep farm has just ended. It has gone well, she says.
– We tend to be very busy almost every year, but this year I think it has been quiet and peaceful. Good enough, we have been busy, but not as crazy busy as we usually are sometimes, she says.
1070 lambs have been born this season.
Ellen K. Frederiksen has been a sheep farmer’s wife on Illunnguujuk for over 40 years.
However, letting the seasons on the sheep farm rule life in part was not something that was foreign to her, as she 1984 moved to Qassiarsuk.
With a childhood in a small abode, her year has pretty much always been defined by the weather outside, the game that has been in season and by the crops that were ripe and ready to tear up from the ground.
– We actually lived from what nature gave us and from what was in season during the year.
Her heart beats for South Greenland and the way of life, and she hopes for a social development that can give generations after her the opportunity to live their lives in the same way.
Mud cakes and radishes in Saqqamiut
Ellen Karen Frederiksen – christened Ellen Karen Poulsen – was born on 21 October 1959 in Arsuk, where her mother, Adolfine Poulsen, is from.
Ellen K. Frederiksen is the oldest in a group of six siblings, and for the first years of her life she and her family lived in Saqqamiut, where her father, Sebulon Poulsen, is from.
In Saqqamiut there were only seven family houses. People made a living from fishing and catching – that was also what Ellen K. Frederiksen’s father and grandparents did.
There are so few of us, so there is a shortage of labor and no health and care staff. So if we don’t want to be a burden to our son, we’ll probably have to move somewhere else
Besides being prisoners, the grandparents also did a bit of farming. They had twenty sheep, two goats and chickens, and a small garden where beets, radishes and rhubarb grew.
– It was a really nice place, and it was the best childhood we had, she says.
In the spring, mussels were collected and fished for rockfish and ammassat. At other times they went bird hunting – among other things for cormorants.
Trout, dried cod and seal meat were smoked.
People lived from, with and in nature.
– We were almost never inside, she says.
In the lake where they had to fetch water, they caught dog stilts with milk cartons. In small waterholes down on the beach, they made mud cakes and decorated them with flowers.
With small stones that were shaped funny, they played father, mother and children.
– We had almost no toys. My parents weren’t rich or anything like that. So everything was simply something so sparse. But still, we lacked nothing. We didn’t starve because we had all the nature we can use.
Fell in love with a sheep herder
When Ellen K. Frederiksen was eight years old, her father suffered a back injury.
The doctor told him that he would have to find another profession.
Therefore, Ellen K. Frederiksen moved with her parents and five siblings to Qassimiut in 1968, where the father initially got a temporary job as a catechist in the church. In the late 70s, both parents were employed at the school as teachers.
Later the whole family moved to Narsaq, where the parents still live to this day.
However, Ellen K. Frederiksen already moved to Narsaq at the age of ten, long before her parents.
Here she lived with her grandmother, who, after holding out in Saqqamiut as the last one, ended up moving from the place when Ellen K. Frederiksen’s grandfather died in 1970.
At the primary school in Narsaq, Ellen K. Frederiksen – like many other Greenlandic primary school students – was sent to Denmark for a year, where she had to attend a Danish school and live with a Danish foster family.
She ended up on a small country estate in Vendsyssel, the northernmost part of Denmark – near a small town called Tårs. She went to a small school in a town called Lørslev, where she was the only Greenlander.
At first it was very hard to live so far from home.
She remembers how difficult it was for her to understand the family she lived with. The dialect was thick – when you had to go for a drive, you said ‘at tjøre’ instead. She also remembers the smell of cows and pigs.
– The first time I had to go out into the barn and opened the door, it was like being knocked over because of the stench.
A smell that was not at all reminiscent of the smells she had grown up with.
– But I got used to it.
When she returned to Narsaq, she completed primary school. At that time, a trial scheme had just started with a two-year HF education that could be taken in Nuuk. The opportunity to stay in Greenland and further her education prompted Ellen K. Frederiksen to apply, and she got a place.
She then took the teacher training course and graduated in the summer of 1984. A year before, she had met the sheep farmer Carl Frederiksen while she was doing an internship in Narsaq.
He lived in Qassiarsuk and was the grandson of Otto Frederiksen, who founded Qassiarsuk in 1924, when he – as the first Greenlander – established his sheep farm in the area.
With a stock of just over 150 sheep, he started what is today a family business – soon in the fourth generation.
An enterprise that Ellen K. Frederiksen also became a part of when she fell in love with Carl Frederiksen.
When she had completed her teacher training in Nuuk, she moved to Qassiarsuk, where she got a job as a teacher at the school together with two other immigrants. Ellen K. Frederiksen became pregnant and gave birth to a son in 1985. In 1987 she and Carl Frederiksen were married, and the same year she gave birth again.
Today, they have three sons and eight grandchildren together.
And the 150 sheep that Otto Frederiksen started with have today become 630 ewes and 20 rams.
Sheep farming and tourism
While it was nature and hunting that defined Ellen K. Frederiksen’s life and everyday life when she was a child, today it is the sheep that determine the annual cycle at the sheep farm in Qassiarsuk.
In the autumn of 2024, Ellen K. Frederiksen retired as a teacher and headmaster, and ever since she has been able to concentrate on helping out on the farm – with the sheep and with the fields that need to be sown and harvested.
– On 1 November, all the animals must come in, and then they must be fed twice a day right up to the middle of June, when they must go out again.
In the month of December, when the sheep are inside, the covering begins – where the ewes are mated with the rams. This is followed by the quietest period of the year for the Frederiksen family. In March the sheep are shorn and around May 10 the sheep begin to lamb (feed. ed.).
And it’s going great.
– There are really, really many sheep and lambs in the barn during that period, so it’s really, really busy. And we have to bring in staff from outside to help us, she says.
In fact, there is no time for anything else during that period – Ellen K. Frederiksen, her husband and their son must be in the barn 24/7.
This is how it is every year until mid-June.
The butchering season follows autumn, and when it ends sometime in October, the annual cycle begins all over again.
– Whoa. One moment – I’m going to talk to my son, says Ellen K. Frederiksen suddenly, interrupting the interview and disappearing from the screen.
A guest in the hostel that the family runs next to their farm has to check out, and Ellen K. Frederiksen has to help.
– Then I’ll be back, she says a few minutes later and smiles.
Because as if a life as a teacher, headmaster and on a farm wasn’t enough, in 1995 the family also started working with tourists.
Many tourists came to Qassiarsuk then. It has actually been like this for two decades now, says Ellen K. Frederiksen. In the late 90s, she and one of her friends thought it was a shame that the settlement did not have a place where visitors could get a cup of coffee or something to eat.
So they pitched a big tent and set it up with tables with tablecloths and lights on them.
– And then we buttered smørrebrød and baked cakes, she says.
Many people came and bought coffee and food in the tent, and in collaboration with their husbands, the friends opened a real café in 1997, where the two women started working during their summer holidays.
– It was only us who worked, because it wasn’t really worth having employees. So it was our free time that we used, says Ellen K. Frederiksen.
In 2003, Ellen K. Frederiksen and her husband expanded their tourism business when they opened the small hostel, Illunnguujuk, named after their sheep farm.
They ran the café until 2014. That year the school was hit by mold and had to look for new premises. The café was the only building in the area large enough to house the 12 or so students attending the school at the time, so they ended up selling the building to the municipality.
Today it still functions as a school.
Uranium mines and age concerns
Ellen K. Frederiksen is approaching her 70th birthday today, and age is something that can take a toll when she tries to look ahead.
– To grow old in a place like this, it’s not quite optimal, she says and continues:
– We are so few, so there is a shortage of labor and no health and care staff. So if we don’t want to be a burden to our son, we’ll probably have to move somewhere else.
However, she still loves life in Qassiarsuk.
When she thinks back, she probably always imagined that she would end up living like this. For her, the childhood village of Saqqamiut, with its few family houses, was an ideal.
– Even though we don’t have any berries here, because of the sheep, the area is still a big food basket. We can live off what nature and the animals give us, she says.
At the same time, however, there are things that worry her when she thinks about the future of Qassiarsuk.
There are approximately 60 kilometers between Kuannersuit and Qassiarsuk.
The thought that Qassiarsuk and the area around Narsaq will not always remain the beautiful natural area that she, her family and others hold dear, and base much of their way of life on, makes her uneasy.
– The uranium mine in Narsaq has been talked about for many years. I have a feeling that it has been a hindrance to development in South Greenland, she says.
– We need the nature around us and the animals we live on more than a mine. At least that’s my opinion.
Instead of investing the money in mining, she hopes that more will be invested in tourism and sustainability, and in that way try to reverse the ailing economy that has long dominated the municipality.
The next dream, which Ellen K. Frederiksen hopes to be able to fulfill, is a way to dispose of all the wool that they burn every year.
– That we can have our own spinning mill here in Greenland – so that we can have our wool made into yarn that people and tourists can buy, she says.
But until that day comes, the year goes on at Illunnguujuk. The sheep give birth and are let out in the mountains with their lambs – and before long they have to be slaughtered.
