Robert Petersen (1928-2021)

Professor Emeritus Robert Petersen, who passed away in Odense (Denmark) on October 23, 2021 at the age of 93, was a prominent Greenlandic Inuit scholar known internationally for his research and publications on traditional and contemporary Inuit culture, society, and language. He was a founder and the first president of Ilisimatusarfik, the University of Greenland. In 1992, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Université Laval in Québec City, and in 2010 received a second one from Ilisimatusarfik. Born on April 18, 1928 in Maniitsoq, on the central west coast of Greenland, Robert Petersen was the son of Ole Petersen, an office clerk, and Jakobine Rosing, and younger brother to Hans Christian Petersen, who would become a noted specialist of Greenlandic folklore. From an early age, he was curious about studying his environment. One of his childhood mates remembered him spending his spare time examining rocks, plants, and insects with a magnifying glass (Lene Kielsen, personal communication, 1994). It is no wonder that after completing his elementary schooling in Maniitsoq, where he began learning Danish as a second language, he was admitted to Ilinniarfissuaq, Greenland’s teachers’ college in Nuuk. As a leisure activity, he developed a talent for drawing cartoons, some of which later appeared in local newspapers. Following his graduation from Ilinniarfissuaq in 1948, Petersen moved to Denmark to pursue his training, and received a Danish teaching licence in 1953. He then went back to Nuuk, where he taught at Ilinniarfissuaq from 1954 to 1956. As he later reminisced in an interview I did with him in 1994, during those teaching years, he was struck by the fact that a majority of his students were unable to write Kalaallisut without making spelling errors. In actual fact, the official orthography at that time had been devised by linguist and educator Samuel Kleinschmidt in the middle of the 19th century. However, the spoken language had much evolved over the last 100 years and no longer fit the Kleinschmidt spelling. As Petersen had decided to go back to Denmark to further his education, part of his motivation became helping to solve the ongoing problem with orthography. He therefore studied linguistics and anthropology in Copenhagen, completing his terminal Magisterkonferens degree (the former Danish equivalent to a PhD) in 1967, under the supervision of Eskimologist Erik Holtved. In 1957, he had married Inge Hansen, a Danish nurse originally from the Odense area in Funen. In 1969, Robert Petersen was hired as a lecturer at the recently established Department of Eskimology (Institut for Eskimologi) of the University of Copenhagen, and became full professor in 1975, the first Greenlander to achieve this feat. He also sat on a state committee that planned an orthographic reform for Kalaallisut. The proposed spelling system, much better adapted to present-day pronunciation standards, became official in 1973. Petersen had thus reached his original goal. Of course, this was not a reason to cease his university teaching, nor his research and published works. With the revised orthography now adopted, Petersen and the committee set to the task of compiling a new Kalaallisut-Danish dictionary. A first version was published in 1977 and a second enlarged one appeared thirteen years later (Berthelsen et al. 1990). When Greenland acceded to Home Rule in 1979, it was decided that the country should have its own higher-level teaching institution. In 1983, Petersen was invited to move back to Nuuk to chair a newly created Inuit Institute, which awarded degrees in Greenlandic and pan-Inuit studies. Under his chairmanship, the Institute rapidly increased its academic activities to become a fully-fledged university (Ilisimatusarfik/University of Greenland) in 1987, with Petersen as …