A brief note: I don’t claim to be an expert on any of the things I write about here. I encourage you to do your own research and form your own opinions. However, on the topics of colonialism and the historical erasure of indigenous knowledge, I think it’s important for anyone from a colonizing country to discuss and face the true basis of their society. With that in mind, read on!

As humans, we don’t know everything. We will never know everything. But perhaps we don’t know as much as we should, because we have forgotten things, and we have ignored things.

The first human cultures of North America, or Turtle Island, as it more accurately may have been known by the natives of the continent, knew much about its environments. There is a tendency to portray the indigenous of North America as noble savages and romantic spiritualists in touch with the land. This is a stereotype, and it’s unsurprisingly incomplete. The “noble savage” narrative only worsens the tendency to put indigenous cultures into a box of people that existed only in the past, in the days of hunter-gatherers.

The native people who inhabited Turtle Island still exist, and still live throughout the continent. They live in all sorts of places, including cities, suburbs, and reservations. They are not one people or one thing. They are not primitive, or people of the past. They are modern human beings.

Of course, those of European descent have historically marginalized these people, and disregarded all the things they knew and still know. We (I speak as someone with entirely European heritage) assumed we were right, and that we knew everything, and that we were superior. We were wrong.

Take, for example, the disastrous state of the environment today. The tons of greenhouse gas emissions that we’ve emitted into the atmosphere, by way of vehicles, agriculture, manufacturing, and conveniences. We obviously don’t have things under control. Wildfires, in the past several years, have wreaked havoc on drought-ridden lands across the west coast, and they’re only expected to get worse. These fires have been so disastrous at least in part because of decades of fire suppression, which has led to buildups of fire-fueling material on forest floors. Only now are firefighters regularly attempting to reduce the amount of fuel on forest floors with prescribed burns.

However, it was not always this way. Before the invasion of the continent, the indigenous people did not fight fires, and according to M. Kat Anderson’s 2005 book, Tending the Wild, many natives used prescribed burns to clear areas for crops, which may have helped reduce fire fuel buildup. Interestingly, Anderson writes, “California Indians have never advocated leaving nature alone.” Instead, Anderson suggests, the indigenous peoples tended towards intimate interactions and coexistence with the land around them, seeking to balance their appropriation of nature with its ability to renew—though she admits that not all indigenous interactions with nature were perfectly balanced, leading to the degradation of some species.

The ultimate point is that the indigenous people of today’s Americas understood things about the ecological functions of the environment. This was not just some religious, spiritual connection to the land that made them understand these things intuitively. Rather, these methods of land management were the result of thousands of years of observation and experimentation. To put it another way, these methods were the result of science. While modern science is understood as an institution for those with degrees, science, or at least the scientific method of understanding the world, has effectively existed since the beginning of humanity.

Thus, it should be clear that indigenous cultures have known, and do know, much about the world that we still fail to see. As Cutcha Risling-Baldy, Native American Studies professor at Humboldt State University, has repeatedly told me and her Introduction to Native American Studies class, she likes to keep a folder for “all the things natives have been telling white people for years that they haven’t figured out yet.”

This kind of knowledge has a name: traditional ecological knowledge, or TEK. The name is fairly self-explanatory, but there is much to learn about it online and elsewhere. However, the name isn’t without its critics. As Cutcha says, the word “traditional” signals a primitive knowledge that may or may not have some relevance in the modern world. However, in Cutcha’s opinion, TEK is science, plain and simple. TEK is based on centuries of observation and experimentation, making it just as valid as any modern science. Labeling this knowledge as traditional undermines its potential to help all modern humans establish a sustainable, smart society.

TEK thankfully brings me to the book I am ostensibly reviewing: Peter Høeg’s (pronounced like “who”) Smilla’s Sense of Snow. Smilla’s Sense of Snow is a 1992 Danish novel that digs deep beneath its cover as a detective thriller and delves into a cultural examination of the colonial relationship between Denmark and Greenland. Historically, Greenland has been colonized (or at least attempted to be colonized) and claimed as Danish land. Importantly, while most of Greenland’s population is Inuit, the country still exists as a part of the Kingdom of Denmark. Needless to say, this has created a longstanding tension between the Greenlandic Inuit and the Danish.

Smilla, the protagonist of the novel, stands with one foot in both Greenlandic and Danish worlds. Her mother was a Greenlandic Inuit, and her father is a wealthy Danish doctor. Growing up from a young age in Denmark, Smilla never quite fit in, instead living a mostly alienated life as she tries to understand her place in Denmark with her mixed heritage.

The novel kicks off with the death of a young Greenlandic child, Isaiah, whom Smilla had befriended. The Danish police quickly conclude that Isaiah fell off a snowy roof while playing, but Smilla is suspicious. Smilla knows snow, and she believes Isaiah’s footprints show that he was chased off the roof. Troubled, Smilla seeks answers, but the police ignore her and obstruct her investigations.

From there, the novel spirals down into an ambiguous Danish conspiracy. Despite facing constant discrimination and sexism, Smilla struggles, sneaks, and manipulates her way to the truth, at which point the novel ends.

Smilla repeatedly relies on her intuitive environmental knowledge and senses—things she learned from her Greenlandic mother as a child—to uncover the cause of Isaiah’s death. The truth, as Smilla eventually realizes, lies within a certain colonial impulse to constantly grow, objectify people, and relentlessly dig into the earth. Thus, the conspiracy behind the murder mystery serves as a metaphor for the destructive mentality behind colonial imperialism and ideas like manifest destiny.

As Peter Høeg and his novel suggest, colonial claims to other lands have destroyed environments and cultures, leaving behind centuries of accumulated wisdom while devastating future environments. Peter Høeg himself is Danish, so the novel, I imagine, is very much an exploration and attempt at reconciliation with his own culture’s history of colonialism over Greenland.

While Høeg promotes some fairly radical views for a novel from 1992, he also fails to provide any concrete solutions. The novel ends ambiguously, with the reader unsure of how the story resolves. The ending feels purposeful, and perhaps it’s a glance at our own modern setting, in which the repercussions of colonialism and its companion ideologies still reverberate throughout the world. While colonialism as an active process may be over, the effects are still seen in lost cultures, marginalized minorities, and wasteland environments.

The novel, unsurprisingly, leaves you feeling cold. However, as one of my peers stated in the class I read the novel for, “reading Smilla’s Sense of Snow is kind of like watching a horror movie—you know you’re going to get scared and hate it in the moment, but by the end, you’ll be glad you watched it.” (I’m sure my memory is distorting those words, but that’s the essence of what the classmate said.) Høeg’s story is not particularly enjoyable as you read it—it’s gloomy, dark, and uncomfortable—but it keeps pulling you along, both with its mystery and its underlying cultural conflict. Much like reading about an atrocity in a history book, you hate to discover the details, but you know it’s something you ought to do. Høeg makes you think about some rather disturbing possibilities—for example, I found myself wondering if colonialism is simply a result of a natural human impulse toward exploration, exploitation, and domination. If so, can we trust our selves to explore in ways that do not destroy?

In any case, in 1992 Høeg wrote an important novel that still contains relevant critiques. While there are certainly other ways to look into the repercussions of colonialism—including reading indigenous authors, rather than authors of the dominating culture, like Peter Høeg—Smilla’s Sense of Snow makes a necessarily harsh critique of colonialism and all that it has stood for. In the context of the modern aftermath of colonialism, and the ways in which imperialist societies have trampled upon centuries of legitimate knowledge and understanding, Smilla’s Sense of Snow is simply a book you ought to read.