The three bundled up figures, puny against the vastness of miles of snow, trudged toward a hole they had cut into the ice.
Their sled was parked nearby, and the woolly dogs that pulled it were huddled on the frozen ground, barking for food.
Man and dog had to move carefully out here. In some places the ice was three feet thick, in others, it cracked like crystal.
This trio of Greenlanders, and their hungry, howling sled dogs, were following a tradition — ice fishing in a glacier fjord — that members of the Inuit community have been doing for eons. And this moment out in the clean, white snow was a quiet respite from a world changing around them at dizzying speed.
One of the bundled up Greenlanders — Laila Sandgreen — had just hired 10 Filipinos to work at her cafe.
Her husband, Hans Sandgreen, a hardcore ice fishermen of few words, is investing in a growing fleet of expensive snowmobiles for the family tourist business, which faces more and more competition.
Their son, David, was accepted to a top flight economics program in Denmark. But he recently dropped out, saying he “missed the snow, the fishing and the hunting.”
In their town on the west coast of Greenland, the Sandgreens shop at well-stocked grocery stores and have high-speed internet, a nice house and a beautiful kitchen. But each of them still knows how to shoot a gun, steer a sled and skin a seal.
“I feel free out here,” Ms. Sandgreen said. “I don’t have a phone dinging in my pocket.”
Their family story is, in a way, Greenland’s story. It’s a place trying to hold on tight to its culture while racing forward into a new era, and Greenlanders say they don’t want to have to choose either/or.
Even before President Trump catapulted this enormous island, the world’s largest, into the news by suggesting that the United States take it over, change has been sweeping through.
New international airports are opening, immigrants are streaming in and the island’s deeply buried minerals are attracting feverish interest. There are more hotels, more cars — and more cruise ships disgorging thousands of tourists to throng tidy, windy streets in search of that perfect sealskin souvenir or iceberg tour.
All this change is becoming a test of how intact Greenland’s unique heritage will emerge, and it connects with the island’s politics, too.
A recent opinion poll found that 85 percent of Greenlanders do not want to join the United States. Yet many people said in interviews that they didn’t want to keep relying on fishing and Denmark forever, either.
Denmark colonized the island more than 300 years ago and still controls the police, the courts, foreign affairs and defense issues. Increasingly, Greenlanders are pushing for full independence and their own trade relationships.
Beyond that, climate change is remaking the landscape. Every Greenlander has his or her own story about the rainier summers, the thinner ice, the glaciers melting and the permafrost getting squishier, which sometimes collapses a road. The whole island is warmer and more accessible.
Ilulissat, where the Sandgreens live, is a good place to witness all this. The town’s icebergs are attracting a surge of tourists and outside labor to serve them. A local legend, backed up by Danish geologists, is that the specific iceberg that sank the Titanic might have floated south from around here.
All this growth and attention brings its challenges. Small communities on the island’s fringes continue to wither away, as people gravitate toward bigger towns like Ilulissat where there is work.
In the capital, Nuuk, which looks like a little Danish town and which recently opened an impressive new international airport, Greenlanders are having the same big conversations about how to navigate the transitions.
“We’re really good at adapting to new environments,” said Qupanak Olsen, a champion of Indigenous rights who lives in Nuuk and was just elected to Greenland’s Parliament this month.
Mrs. Olsen has stepped away from her career as a mining engineer to become one of the most powerful voices on Greenlandic culture. She travels around the island making 59-second videos celebrating Greenlandic language, Greenlandic food, Greenlander beliefs and her own “personal decolonization process.”
She told a story about how, when she was making a video last year in a remote community, a man came up to her to thank her for honoring Greenlandic traditions. He quickly apologized for bugging her, saying he had no education and that he was “just a hunter.”
“Just a hunter? How can you say you’re just a hunter,” she remembered thinking.
The short exchange bothered her for weeks. She eventually tracked down his number and told him over the phone: “Never, ever say you’re just a hunter. You are the most important people in our culture. I’m here today, and my ancestors survived thousands of years, because of you.”
For a long time, Greenlanders got everything they needed from the animals they killed. Most of the island has little vegetation. There are almost no trees. Whale skin is a rich source of vitamin C, and by eating it, Greenlanders held off diseases like scurvy.
Fishing remains the biggest industry, and many Greenlanders make money off it. Even people with white collar jobs, like Jens Peter Lange, a dental technician in Ilulissat, still go ice fishing in the fjords and stalk reindeer (called caribou elsewhere in North America).
Talking to him reveals the wounds of Danish colonialism.
“Oh, man, I used to get into so many fights when I was studying in Denmark,” he said. “The Danish man is always above the Greenland man — always.”
He recounted a scandal from the 1960s and 1970s, exposed only recently, when Danish doctors inserted IUDs into Greenlandic girls without them knowing they had been fitted with birth control. He shared stories of being passed over for jobs in favor of Danes with fewer qualifications.
“We need to get rid of them,” he said, swiping a thick hand through the air.
On Ilulissat’s snowbound hillsides, new hotels are popping up and new faces appearing: the Filipino cafe workers, a Czech waitress, French, Swiss and Australian climate researchers. Ilulissat is building a new international airport that will bring in even more foreigners.
Mr. Lange says he likes all this. The other night he grilled reindeer for his family (and a few guests) that he himself had shot. The topic of independence came up around the table
“It’s a hard one,” said his wife, Nielsigne Rosbach, a special-education teacher. “We don’t even have enough Greenlandic doctors. We still rely on the Danes. We’d have to begin completely from scratch.”
Hearing this, Mr. Lange grew frustrated and cited the example of the local fish cooperative, started by fishermen sick of selling their fish for low prices.
“Look at those guys,” he said. “They don’t have education. But they figured it out.”
He leaned back in his chair, as the winds swirled outside and the kitchen smelled of rich sauces and grilled meat.
“Even if we don’t know everything right now,” he said, “we will learn.”
Maya Tekeli contributed reporting from Ilulissat, Greenland.
