Greenland, a nation, not an American possession

With the Trump regime ramping up its threats against the Arctic nation of Greenland, it’s a good time to take a closer look at the history and culture of Greenland. Greenland is officially called Kalaallit Nunaat in the Greenlandic language, the language of the great majority of the country’s 57,000 population.

Greenlandic, or Kalaallisut, is the easternmost variety of the Inuit branch of the Eskimoan language family. The other branch of this family is more diverse and consists of the Yupik languages of Central, western and southern Alaska and the extreme east of Siberia. The Inuit and Yupik languages are quite distinct from one another. The speakers of Yupik languages are Eskimo in the traditional sense, but are not Inuit. The Inuit languages are all closely related and consist of a chain of dialects stretching from northern Alaska through northern Canada, all the way to Greenland. Within this chain, neighbouring dialects are mutually intelligible, but more distant dialects are not. The people of Greenland have especially close cultural and linguistic ties to the Inuit of Canada.

In 1977, the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC) meeting in Barrow, Alaska (now Utqiaġvik, Alaska), officially adopted Inuit as a designation for all circumpolar native peoples in North America and their relatives in Siberia. In Canada and Greenland, and to a certain extent in Alaska, the term Eskimo is seen as offensive and has been widely replaced by the term Inuit. However many Yupik speakers in Alaska continue to reject the use of the name Inuit.

Inuit and Palaeo-Inuit people have lived in the circumpolar region for thousands of years, the earliest known Palaeo-Inuit settlements in Greenland date to around 2500 BCE. They had a hunting gathering economy based on marine resources which was well adapted to the harsh conditions of the Arctic north. There were repeated waves of Palaeo-Inuit migration into Greenland from northern Canada. Survival was difficult due to Greenland’s remoteness and its harsh climate. Greenland was apparently uninhabited or very sparsely inhabited from around the year 1 until about 600 CE when a new group of Palaeo-Inuit arrived in western Greenland.

From around 986, the established Indigenous population of Greenland came into contact with groups of Norse people from Norway and Iceland led by Erik the Red. It’s thought that the Norse first arrived during a warmer period which was detrimental to the traditional hunting practices of the Indigenous people, leading to a reduced population in the areas settled by the Norse. The Norse founded three small settlements on the West coast of Greenland which prospered for several centuries and which had considerable interaction with the Indigenous people, whom the Norse called by the deprecatory name Skrælingi. This name was apparently borrowed by the Indigenous Inuit and in a much altered form gave rise to the modern Greenlandic name for a Greenlander, Kalaaleq.

Three Inuit traditional tales about the Norse were collected and published in the 19th century and record hostile encounters with the Norse. But it seems not all contacts were warlike. A DNA analysis of modern Greenlanders finds that about 75% of their ancestry is Inuit and 25% Scandinavian. Norse artifacts have been found in Inuit archaelogical sites and Inuit artifacts in Norse sites, which suggests regular trading ties.

In 1261 the Norse of Greenland submitted to the rule of the Kingdom of Norway. In 1380 Norway entered into a union with Denmark and so Norse Greenland, along with Iceland, the Faroe islands and Norway itself, became a part of the Kingdom of Denmark-Norway. The Norse settlements in Greenland remained in contact with Denmark throughout the 13th and 14th centuries and were a source of much prized narwal tusks and ivory from walruses.

Norse Greenland was in constant contact with Denmark until 1369 when the ship which regularly plied the trade route sank and was not replaced. The last recorded contact with the Norse settlements in Greenland was in 1408. In 1406, a Norwegian ship captained by Captain Þórsteinn Óláfsson arrived in Greenland Óláfsson stayed for a couple of years and married Sigríðr Bjarnardóttir in the church of Hvalsey, modern Qaqortukulooq, in 1408.

By this time the Norse settlements were struggling. Inuit settlements expanded as Norse settlements shrank in population. The most northernly Norse settlement was abandoned by 1350.

The climate had turned dramatically colder (the Little Ice Age, which lasted from about 1300 and persisted until about 1800). This made Norse agriculture and farming impossible, and the people who remained seem to have increasingly turned to an Inuit way of life which was far better suited to the colder conditions. The more southern Norse settlements were gradually abandoned as the survivors either moved to Iceland or assimilated into the Inuit.

The Inuit of Greenland had by this time adopted the classic Arctic hunting culture from Arctic Canada which is familiar from more modern times and which is well suited to life in the ice bound north. Inuit bearing this culture spread south from Northern Greenland where they found the abandoned Norse settlements. All of these had been definitively abandoned by 1500 and contact with Denmark lost.

In the early 1700s, fearing that any surviving Norse might still be Catholic or pagan, the Norwegian Lutheran minister Hans Egede petitioned the Danish monarchy for funding to travel to Greenland and re-establish contact with the Norse settlers he believed were still there. The Danish King Frederik IV gave permission with the twin intentions of establishing Lutheranism amongst the Greenlanders and reasserting Denmark’s by then nominal control of the territory.

Egede arrived in Greenland in 1721 with his wife and four children and founded Hope Colony, Haabets Colonie, on a small island near the site of modern Nuuk, the capital of Greenland (known as Godthåb. Egede found ruins now known to be an abandoned Norse settlement but failed to identify them as Norse. For months he searched in vain for the Norse Greenlanders but eventually abandoned his search and turned his efforts to evangelising the local Inuit. In 1728 a Danish fort and settlement were founded by the newly appointed royal governor Claus Paarss who relocated Egede’s settlement to the mainland and named it Godthåb (Good Hope), the colonial name for Nuuk.

Paarss brought European colonists from Denmark, convicts, soldiers convicted of mutiny, and prostitutes. Most of these failed to survive more than a few years, succumbing to scurvy and the harsh climate. A few years later a smallpox epidemic devastated the colonists and the Inuit, killing Egede’s wife, whereupon Egede returned to Denmark. His work was continued by his son Poul, who had been brought up bilingually in Danish and Greenlandic. Together with a Greenlandic woman called Amarsaq, he translated the New Testament into Greenlandic.

In 1814 as a result of the Napoleonic wars, Norway entered into a union with Sweden, as a result, Norway’s former colonies, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland were formally integrated into the Kingdom of Denmark. The Inuit continued their traditional way of life. Northern Greenland maintained close ties with the Inuit of Northern Canada from where Inuit groups continued to cross the Davis Strait to hunt and settle in Greenland. The last group from what later became Canada arrived in 1864.

During this period, Greenland was directly governed from Copenhagen as a colony. Democratic elections for the district assemblies of Greenland were held for the first time in 1862–1863, although no assembly for the land as a whole was allowed.

By the outbreak of WW1, the population of Greenland was around 15,000 and was slowly recovering from the epidemics of the 18th and early 19th centuries. During WW2 when Denmark was occupied by Nazi Germany, the Danish ambassador to the USA, against the wishes of Copenhagen, signed an agreement with the USA to hand over defense and control of Greenland to the United States on 9 April 1941. Greenland was effectively independent during the war years, and allowed the United States to build military bases on its territory, in spite of the Danish pre-war neutrality. After the war, Danish control was restored but the American bases remained. The United States offered to buy Greenland from Denmark for $100,000,000 in 1946. Denmark firmly rejected the offer, as the island was seen as an integral part of the Danish kingdom, important to its history and national identity. In 1951 Denmark and the United States signed the Greenland Defense Agreement, which allowed the United States to keep its military bases in Greenland, and to establish new bases or “defence areas” if Denmark agreed and if deemed necessary by NATO.

Having had a taste of self-government, the Greenlanders were reluctant to lose it. Following an investigation and report by a Danish Royal Commission, in 1953, Greenland was raised from the status of colony and became a part of Denmark as a special amt (county) of the Danish Realm, albeit with very limited powers of self-government equivalent to those of a Danish county. The Greenlandic population boomed, more than tripling to over 40,000. Greenland’s current population is 57,000, some 90% of whom are Inuit.

Danish rule may have avoided the genocide and ethnic cleansing which characterised European contacts with Native peoples elsewhere in North America, but it was deeply paternalistic and colonial with unequal laws and economic stagnation. The Danes saw their mission as being to assimilate the Greenlanders into a European way of life and identity. One of the cruelest aspects of Danish rule came between 1966 and 1970, when nearly 4,500 Inuit women, many of them teenagers, had IUDs inserted without their knowledge or consent. This campaign was carried out by Denmark in order to limit Greenland’s population growth and thus limit Danish subsidies. In September 2025 Denmark issued an official apology to Greenland over the scandal. Although Greenland had achieved a limited measure of self government in 1953, Denmark oversaw the Greenlandic health system until 1992.

During this period, Denmark imposed the Danish language and attempted to integrate Greenland into Denmark. This eventually backfired and created an increasing demand for self determination, a greater interest in Greenland’s Inuit culture, language, and identity, and a growing clamour for proper self-government. These demands grew more intense after Denmark joined the the European Common Market in 1972. This resulted in the Home Rule Act of 1979 which gave Greenland limited autonomy within the kingdom, with its own legislature taking control of some internal policies. Copenhagen maintained full control of external policies, security, and natural resources. The Danish monarch remains Greenland’s head of state. In 1985, Greenland left the European Economic Community (EEC), as it did not agree with the EEC’s commercial fishing regulations and an EEC ban on sealskin products.

In 2008 in a referendum, voters approved a proposal to greatly extend Greenland’s powers of self-government. These included expanded home rule in 30 areas, including police, courts, and the coast guard. Greenland was given a say in foreign policy; provided with a more definite split of future oil revenue, and the the Greenlandic language the sole official language. Greenlanders were recognised as a separate nation under international law.

Greenland sees itself as moving towards independence. Pro-independence parties dominated in the 2021 general election but in the March 2025 election facing increasing threats from Donald Trump to incorporate the country into the USA, the opposition Demokraatit party won a plurality of ten seats in the 31 seat Parliament. Traditionally skeptical of independence due to the small size of Greenland’s population and the country’s remoteness, the party’s position has shifted to remaining within the Danish Realm for the foreseeable future, but now supports independence as the end goal of a gradual process that starts with increased self-determination. The result was seen as a rejection of Trump’s demands and expressing Greenland’s wish to determine its own future at its own pace while maintaining its historic ties to Denmark. The Qulleq party, the only party whose leader voiced his trust in Donald Trump, won a mere 305 votes.

Demokraatit’s leader Jens-Frederik Nielsen, the current Prime Minister of Greenland, has been trenchant in his criticisms of Trump’s attempts to take the country, saying: “We don’t want to be Americans. No, we don’t want to be Danes. We want to be Greenlanders. And we want our own independence in the future. And we want to build our own country by ourselves, not with his hope.” He added that he wanted the vote to send “a clear message to him [Trump] that we are not for sale.”

Despite Trump’s claims that the people of Greenland want to abandon their free health care and join the USA, opinion polling shows a very low level of support for the idea. Polling in early 2025 shows an overwhelming majority of Greenlanders (around 85%) do not want Greenland to join the United States, with only about 6% in favour, according to surveys by Verian for the Danish newspaper Berlingske and the Greenlandic newspaper Sermitsiaq. However a poll in December of 416 Greenlanders carried out by an American company called Patriot Polling, claimed that 57.3% approve of moves to make Greenland part of the US. Patriot Polling is not rated as a reliable and accurate pollster by American polling analysts 538 who give Patriot Polling one out of three stars in its accuracy ratings. Nevertheless, the American right has seized on this poll as ‘proof’ that there is popular support in Greenland for the annexation of the country by Trump.

Greenland and the world eye the White House anxiously. America is in the grip of a befuddled and capricious avarious authoritarian with no respect for the rule of law or the sovereignty of other nations.

Trump’s demand to take over Greenland is nakedly colonialist and imperialistic. The USA already has military bases in Greenland with the full consent and cooperation of the Danish and Greenlandic governments. Trump’s claim that the USA needs Greenland for its national security is arrant nonsense. But even if it were true it does not legitmise the theft of an entire nation from its inhabitants.

In Venezuela Trump and his apologists had at least a fig leaf of an excuse in the argument that the Maduro government is illegitimate and was only in power due to massive vote rigging in Venezuela’s presidential elections of 2024. No such justification can be made regarding Greenland, a highly developed self-governing nation with better democratic safeguards than the United States, where there are no allegations of narco trafficking, governmental corruption, seizure of American assets or threats to American security. Just as with Venezuela, Trump wants Greenland so he can asset strip it in order to enrich himself and his cronies, and for his own aggrandisement as the president who expanded the territory of the USA in its 250th year.

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