Seal-Fur Undergarment (Natit)

Outside, it served as an undergarment; at home, it was the only garment worn. When an East Greenland woman entered her home, she would remove her furs and remain wearing only this. In their own language, they called it naatseen, meaning ‘short ones’; in books, it is referred to as natit.

The house was warm enough to allow for this. In the winter, several families shared a single-room house, and every married woman’s oil lamp - carved from soapstone - burned day and night. When guests arrived, or even at a neighbor’s house, no one wore anything more than a natit.

This garment, which guests also saw, was ornate: embroidered, with skin fringes, and beaded (See image 2). It used to be the same in West Greenland; Henrik Christopher Glahn, a Danish missionary living there in the 1760s, wrote the reason as follows: since it was the only thing they kept on at home, they took great care to make it beautiful.

The east coast, however, remained closed to Europeans for much longer: the first expedition did not reach Ammassalik until 1884. The Danish explorer leading the expedition, Gustav Holm, described a woman’s home attire as consisting of three pieces: a headband, a necklace, and a natit (See image 3). The beads on the necklace were made from the vertebrae of a small fish called the capelin. The name Ammassalik also derives from this fish: the place where capelin are caught.

Glass beads, on the other hand, came from afar. East Greenlanders would travel around the southern tip of the island to trade at Danish stations along the western coast. An East Greenlandic song recorded around 1860 lists what those left behind expected from these travelers: tobacco and iron, sewing needles and beads.

In the summer of 1888, strangers entered the tent of a party heading south: Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen and his team, who were setting out to cross the Greenland Ice Sheet on skis.

Inside, everyone was wearing only a natit. The explorer Nansen wrote that this garment was “practically invisible to the stranger’s inexperienced eye” (See image 4).

The natit was also a sign of age. According to the explorer Holm, young people began wearing it around the age of sixteen. Some time after a girl started wearing the natit, she would tie her hair - which she had previously left loose - into a bun on top of her head. The bun was a sign that she was ready for marriage. Married women, such as Tok - the wife of the explorer Holm’s guide - also tied their hair up in this way (See image 5).

This garment had one boundary: the threshold of the house. Outside, women would wear short outer pants over the natit, long boots trimmed with fur, and an anorak (See image 6). When Danish linguist William Thalbitzer, who spent the winter of 1905-06 in Ammassalik, asked a woman to remove her anorak in front of the tent for a photograph, her husband - a shaman’s apprentice - objected: Only the wives of the baptized undressed outside; their own women undressed only in the tent or at home.

The baptized did indeed dress differently. On the west coast, under the influence of the mission, this type of home attire had long since been abandoned; in 1884, women from the west coast rowing on the explorer Holm’s boats were stunned when they saw Ammassalik men running in natit.

A mission and trading station was established in Ammassalik in 1894 (See image 7). In 1899, the blouses of the first three women to be baptized were cut short so that the white cotton undergarments they wore underneath would be visible. According to museum researchers Cunera Buijs and Mariane Petersen, the women took pride in being able to afford these undergarments. A few years later, the linguist Thalbitzer wrote that Ammassalik women had begun wearing long white linen shirts at home. The reason, he noted in quotation marks, was “in order to resemble the European ladies”.

Skin fringes and beads · image 2