The Greenlandic oral story-telling tradition, Oqaluttuaq, meaning “history,” “legend,” and “narrative,” is recognized as an important entry point into Arctic collective memory. The graphic artist Nuka K. Godtfredsen and his literary and scientific collaborators have used the term as the title of graphic narratives published from 2009 to 2018, and focused on four moments or ‘snippets’ from Greenland’s history (from the periods of Saqqaq, late Dorset, Norse settlement, and European colonization). Adopting a fragmentary and episodic approach to historical narrativization, the texts frame the modern European presence in Greenland as one of multiple migrations to and settlements in the Artic, rather than its central axis. We argue that, in consequence, the Oqaluttuaq narratives not only “provincialize” the tradition of hyperborean colonial memories, but also provide a postcolonial mnemonic construction of Greenland as a place of multiple histories, plural peoples, and heterogenous temporalities. As such, the books also narrativize loss and disappearance—of people, cultures, and environments—as a distinctive melancholic strand in Greenlandic history. Informed by approaches in the field of cultural memory and in the study memorial objects, Marks’ haptic visuality and Keenan and Weizman’s forensic aesthetics, we analyze the graphic narratives of Oqaluttuaq in regard to their aesthetic dimensions, as well as investigate the role of material objects and artifacts, which work as narrative “props” for multiple stories of encounter and survival in the Arctic.

格陵兰口述故事传统Oqaluttuaq意为“历史”、“传奇”和“叙述”，被认为是北极集体记忆的重要切入点。图形艺术家 Nuka K. Godtfredsen 和他的文学和科学合作者使用该术语作为 2009 年至 2018 年出版的图形叙事的标题，并专注于格陵兰历史（从萨卡克时期、多塞特晚期）的四个时刻或“片段” 、北欧定居和欧洲殖民）。这些文本对历史叙事化采用零碎和情节式的方法，将现代欧洲在格陵兰岛的存在视为向北极而非其中心轴的多次迁移和定居点之一。我们认为，因此，Oqaluttuaq叙事不仅“省级化”了超北方殖民记忆的传统，而且还提供了格陵兰岛作为一个拥有多重历史、多元民族和异质时间的地方的后殖民记忆建构。因此，这些书还将人、文化和环境的丧失和消失描述为格陵兰历史上独特的忧郁线。受文化记忆领域的方法和研究纪念物、马克斯的触觉视觉以及基南和魏茨曼的法医美学的启发，我们分析了Oqaluttuaq的图形叙事的美学维度，并研究了实物的作用和文物，它们作为在北极遭遇和生存的多个故事的叙事“道具”。