Nomination Book

Nomination of Aasivissuit – Nipisat: Inuit Hunting Ground between Ice and Sea, for inclusion on the World Heritage List

By: Jens Fog Jensen, Paninnguaq Fleischer-Lyberth, Laust Løgstrup, Hans Holt Poulsen, Ólafur Rafnar Ólafson, Anne-Christine Løventoft-Jessen, Susan Barr and Morten Meldgaard.

The nomination document is the result of consultations with local, national and international contacts and extensive discussions. The Aasivissuit – Nipisat area is a unique landscape in an arctic setting and provides the most complete, along with the best-preserved, record of arctic hunting traditions from 2500 BC onwards, demonstrating sustainable land use that changes according to season.

Today, hunters continue these seasonal travels with their families. They go inland for the summer months to live off the abundance of the land and stay by the coast during winter for the wealth of the sea.

Within this huge area Inuit have left traces of a life based on marine animals, supplemented to varying degrees by hunting of land-based animals in the extensive hinterland. The same area also has visible evidence from early colonial times in the 18th century, through colonisation to the present. In spite of all changes, the old way of living is still understood and appreciated today; the same resources are used and hunted as in the past and the use of the landscape has not changed radically.

Link to Nomination Book 

Link to Management Plan

Photo by Bjarne Grønnow