The sun is slowly disappearing behind the cliffs towards Siorapaluk now it is gone midnight, leaving whale-shaped Herbert Island awash in crimson. It is mid-August and it is my very first evening in the settlement.

A couple of tipsy hunters invite me into their wooden, A-framed house and quiz me on who I am and what my purpose is here. Stepping over the narwhal blubber spread out on newspapers on the kitchen floor, I am channelled into the corner settee in the chaotic living room and introduced to the various ancestors whose photographs line the walls, one of whom travelled with Knud Rasmussen to Alaska. I am asked repeatedly if I am a Norwegian from Greenpeace. There is paranoia in the community about Greenpeace and the threat they pose to their hunting culture. One hunter told me that he will be waiting at the shoreline with his guns when they come.

In subsequent weeks, I am asked if I am a spy and even if I am one of the 'Blond Eskimos'. The Inughuit are used to the handful of transient and socially invisible Danes that typically work for a few weeks or months at the school or hospital. But, an Oxford-educated Englishman who is present at every social gathering, lives in a small dilapidated, wooden hut on his own and whose aim is explicitly to learn and study their language is an unprecedented oddity whom they cannot easily compartmentalise.

In this closed, inward-looking society, the Polar Eskimos are sometimes wary of the outsider and the finger of blame is often pointed at the white man whose market capitalism, individualism and climate change are perceived as catalysts in the demise of their own traditional communal group culture, damaging social cohesion in the process. With the recent EU ban on all seal products, this is even more the case now that the export market for their goods has completely disappeared. The basis for this traditional society has always been the hunting of sea mammals. However, with the self-rule government's restrictions on hunting and the lack of a customer base for their goods, there is almost nobody left who is able to live from hunting alone. Ironically enough, one of the last hunters in this patriarchal society is a woman of Japanese ancestry.

The Polar Eskimos have always lived in harmony with nature, taking from the sea and land what they need to survive. But global warming has upset the equilibrium and in a centralising Greenland left the future of the isolated settlements uncertain. The climate in north-west Greenland has become very unpredictable in recent years and hunters no longer know when the sea ice will come or how long it will stay for.

Some Greenlanders had high expectations for the climate conference in Copenhagen, but after that disappointment few hold out much hope that the conference in Cancún, which begins tomorrow, will lead to an effective global response to climate change.

The transition to a consumer society in some of these settlements has been extremely rapid and has left a plethora of social problems in its wake, including among others the well-documented rampant alcoholism and one of the highest suicide rates in the world.

For centuries, the proud Inughuit (who the likes of Peary, Cook and Rasmussen were very dependent on) have overcome the problems of the severe cold, famine and isolation, but some have now fallen victim to apathy and Danish welfare dependence which has partially replaced an ancient system of production.

The trappings of welfare dependence and modern western society have inevitably taken their toll on the indigenous culture of story-telling, too. The loss of their rich oral heritage seems particularly sudden and jarring, given that it has been replaced in part by a diet of violent, expletive-packed American films and apparently addictive bingo. For the most part, the Inughuit no longer sit around reciting stories and myths to one another, but are instead glued to unsubtitled Danish television (Greenlandic words are too long to subtitle). Thus, few people understand the programmes, albeit the very popular Danish cartoons require ostensibly little translation.

This sudden shift in cultural norms makes the performance of the last remaining story-tellers all the more extraordinary. I have been documenting episodes of the life story of an 88-year-old man. This former hunter has a prodigious memory describing in great detail events that happened over 60 years ago.

Vast knowledge of the land, sea and ice are all stored orally; the Inuktun language has never been systematically written down. A 76-year-old woman sits in my hut, telling me a story about the semi-nomadic life they lived when she was growing up. I present her with one of the few texts ever written down in Inuktun and she looks nonplussed and confused: towards the end of her life, she has just seen her own language written down for the first time.

There is no doubt that the language itself can operate as something of a social trap. The Inughuit are not sure how to write Inuktun because it is not a written language, but some are not confident writing Standard West Greenlandic either as, orthographically, it is alien and does not represent spoken language.

Without being able to write Greenlandic, young people will have few opportunities elsewhere in Greenland. They are proud of their own language, Inuktun, as it underpins their distinct culture, but at the same time it offers young people no opportunities, and in fact deprives them of some. If they leave the community, they will have to drop their language and switch to the West Greenlandic language. If they do that, then they are to an extent severing their cultural ties with the homestead. As speakers of the Standard language, they may not be seen as real Polar Eskimos.

The Inuktun word for "winter" is "ukiuq" (the same word is used for "year" – presumably the two used to be more or less synonymous), and here, in the bosom of the Arctic, winter has now arrived. The cliffs to the east with their folds forming the shape of a granite accordion have previously been radiating hues of red and purple in the late evening summer sun, but are now uncompromisingly white. Now, the landscape and the sky form a patina of subtle blends of grey and white. Tilted-eyed huskies bay the rising gibbous, candles flicker nervously behind frosted window pains and wooden sledges jounce over the snow-covered scree tracks.

Two weeks ago the sea was a gelatinous, viscous grey soup, but the snow-covered sea ice now stretches for a few kilometres away from the settlement, with the open sea visible in the distance. Cathedrals of ice sit like protruding teeth from off-white gums – their passage through the Murchison Sound halted for several months. Two forgotten motorboats are frozen in place, the sea ice having closed in around them.

The temperature has plummeted and the battle is now on to heat the non-insulated wooden hut where I live. It is below freezing in the bathroom and I have on a number of occasions slept in sub-zero temperatures due to problems with the oil heater, losing already one computer to the cold. Each day is now colder than the last, and we are almost cloaked in 24 hour darkness too...

Stephen Pax Leonard is an anthropological linguist at the Scott Polar Research Institute and research fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He is living with the Inughuit people for 12 months. His research is funded by the British Academy and the World Oral Literature Project in Cambridge.