New Snow People

“They are a snow tribe, like snowboarder. Both tribes are waiting for fresh snow,” explains Japanese photographer, Tsutomu Endo. He’s just laid his new photo book, MIAGGOOTOQ, in front of me while his wife, Yuki, clears the dinner table.
The book covers the daily of the 30 or so people who inhabit Siorapluk, the most northern village in Greenland, where snow and hunting are life. Endo lived with and documented this tribe of arctic hunters over a five-year period, his last trip taking place in 2022.
Japan in January is as good a dice roll any snowboarder can make when betting on fresh snow. Home was not providing. Smartwool athlete, Mary Rand, and myself had been talking about Hakuba. I am always trying to figure out how to go ride Hakuba and see my friend Endo…

Endo and our crew, including lensman Tyler Ravelle and Liam Gallagher, have built our lives around snow. When it falls, we go hunt. Our version of a hunt. It is not to procure food for our tribe to stay alive. Food is easily acquired for us. Fresh snow to track prey across the ice. Fresh snow to track mountains. Abundance has led to domestication, or domestication to abundance, either way, hunting for food and fur, something that could kill you, is now unnecessary. But I have found it hard to shake an intense evolutionary drive to seek out things that could kill me. I’ve teamed up with like-minded individuals around the world. We are an international tribe. Instead of risking injury or even death to bring home a polar bear, or walrus, we lay it out there for snowboarding. When setting out to hunt down a narwhal or twisting spine line, anticipating both success and disaster, adrenaline pumping, anxious and fearful and excited all at once, does the nervous system know the difference of what is it we aim to kill?
It snows about 90cm the day and into the evening we arrive. Hammering. We sharpen and ready our sticks and try to prepare our minds…