Contest for the best new Piseqs (traditional song-poems) intends to spotlight Native Tribes’ Grit in the face of adversity
COPENHAGEN, DENMARK, January 22, 2026 /24-7PressRelease/ — Calling 2026 a year of ‘flux’ for Greenland hardly captures the scale of the shifts currently on the horizon. NGO Greenland Rising is celebrating the character, culture, and toughness of the Arctic island’s Kalaallit people by mounting a Piseq (traditional song-poem) contest. According to co-founders Ivalu Kajussen and John Toomey, this is a way to spotlight the actual accomplishments of the native Kalaallit culture, currently overshadowed by the machinations of Europe and America.
Twice a week the group elicits the help of ChatGPT, Vibe, Pond5, Gemini, and Claude Cowork to create a video of native peoples going through a life transition: birth, wedding, return from a fishing trip, Mitaartut (Greenland’s ‘Halloween’), funeral, tribal conclave around a campfire, Meeting of the Elders, or Arctic Palerfik (dogsled race).
Contestants write 2 or 3 sentences expressing in their own style the emotional and psychological essence of the video. Greenland Rising translates these into Kalaallisut and formats them as Piseqs, with the aid of AI. They are then posted in both languages to the group’s Substack and to siku.org, the indigenous website for Inuit in Greenland, Canada, and the U.S.
Judges evaluate the submissions, and winners are honored with the Angakkoq Prize, named after the Kalaallit word for Shaman.
Historically, some of the most powerful piseqs emerged from song-poem ‘duels’. Traditionally, when two Kalaallit had a dispute, rather than solve it with violence, the tribe arranged for a poetry stand-off. The two disputants faced each other, sometimes inches apart, and voiced insults, each trying to top the other. The rival who ‘lost his cool’ first, according to a vote of the observing tribal members, won the dispute. The result had permanent legal standing, and became an oft-quoted piseq, part of the tribe’s oral tradition.
Greenland Rising would like to see Europe and the U.S. solve their disagreements in this way.
https://theheroaward.substack.com/p/helping-greenland-and-you-too
siku.org
For more about Piseqs and Greenland’s literature, see Collections of Ammassalik Songs by Knud Rassmussen, Greenlandic Oral Traditions: Collection, Reframing, and Reinvention, by Kirsten Thisted, and Inuit: the Story of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, by Aqqaluk Lynge.
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