Many of the Greenlanders interviewed by media outlets recently have communicated an understated dignity, a particularly admirable poise given the verbal assaults from the White House.
In this Danish territory of just 57,000 people, 80 per cent of which is covered by a gigantic ice sheet, Inuits account for almost 90 per cent of the population and most of them are strongly disposed towards independence.
But Donald Trump’s covetousness and his sanctioning of violent encroachments elsewhere finds them looking to their Danish umbrella more than they would wish to, ensuring they are reckoning with tricky historical dispensations.
Charles Waldheim, a Harvard professor of landscape architecture, wrote in 2022 of Greenland as a territory “that has remained on the periphery of our awareness and understanding”; a place of “contested claims, competing agendas and contrasting futures”. These are the consequences of centuries of a challenged Arctic, a vast and extreme landscape, meaning various imperialists projected “their own fantastically radical vision of this place and its potentials”.
Amid this, adapting the traditional Inuit “sila”, described as a Greenlandic concept “for weather, the mind, consciousness – a universal order where man is in unity with nature”, has been a great challenge.
Trump, it is safe to assume, does not embrace sila. Danish academic Birgitte Sonne, whose 2018 book Worldviews of the Greenlanders: An Inuit Arctic Perspective, excavates the traditions and folklore of the region, writes of the ritual myth of the Moon or giant boulder descending, and the religious phenomenon of fighting down “the dragon”, or challenging chaos as spring approaches and jeopardises the movement of the world. Trump’s aggression is that boulder now.
The ancestors of today’s Inuits settled on the southern edge of the ice mass 500 years after Norse settlers had set up there. From that time, European, North American and Asian cultures sought to construct its future for their own ends.
Yet because of its extremity, Greenland to date, suggests Waldheim, has “persisted in a resilient state of ambivalent resistance to all but the most ambitious and durable of these various interventions. These various contested claims have reimagined Greenland as a site for resource extraction, strategic military advantage, shortened shipping routes, exotic tourist amenities, airport urbanism and postcolonial self-governance.”
Danish colonisation began in 1721 and changed settlement patterns, traditional reliance on subsistence hunting and, gradually, the urban landscape, to the extent that by the end of the 20th century renowned architects relished the challenge of innovative designs in a remote and difficult landscape, though collaboration with locals was not always enough of a feature. Greenland’s aviation structures also reflect American security needs as well as generating an economic dependency for local villages.
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The Greenland Home Rule Act in 1979 was followed by the Self-Government Act of 2013, stipulating its right to self-determination, but with Denmark retaining authority over foreign policy, security and international agreements. Greenland also depends on annual Danish grants to fund public spending.
Trump’s language about Greenland is an updated form of the Danish imperial attitude to the supposed limitations of the Greenlanders’ self-control, emphasising incompetence and cultural immaturity.
Some historians have argued that 19th-century colonial government in Greenland became increasingly about utilisation of Greenlandic traditions. But anger persists about the sending of Greenlandic children to Denmark in 1951 to “modernise” them, after which they were institutionalised, losing contact with their families, and the experience of Greenlanders in Danish prisons, while there was also the forced relocation of the population of Thule when the US expanded its military base. The stated reason for the 2013 commission of reconciliation established by the Greenlandic government was that “in order to distance our country from colonisation, it is necessary that reconciliation and forgiveness take place”.
Soren Rud, a historian of colonialism in Greenland, notes that: “In Danish media, film and literature, Greenland and Greenlanders are often depicted as one of two stereotypes: noble or primitive people; or lost and rudderless in the modern world. In both roles they are trapped in their culture, unable to escape and enter a world in which they are participants”.
Current impulses and controversies have brought a new media avalanche, but there has been constancy too, notes Bert De Jonghe in his 2022 book Inventing Greenland, and that is the persistent challenge of adapting to changing climates, both environmentally and politically. While Greenlandic Vikings drew on their Norse traditions and external resources, the Thule Inuit, the ancestors of the current Inuit, cemented their culture by working in tandem with the local landscape.
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Sonne suggests a common Greenlander saying- that they do as they have always done despite rules set by the Danes – “must be taken with a grain of salt” given the pervasiveness of Danish influence: “Instead the saying reflects the Greenlanders’ nonaggressive way of guarding their ‘interior’ life”.
It is sad and shameful that this interior life is now threatened by the US.