The Missionary, the Catechist and the Hunter examines the role of Protestantism in the Danish colonization of Greenland and shows how the process of colonization entails a process of subjectification where the identity of indigenous population is transformed.

Petterson convincingly argues that the Greenlandic intelligentsia, seeking to distance themselves from the local hunting lifestyle, created an abstract, and quintessentially Inuit, hunter identity in Greenlandic literature.