For the majority of readers without personal familiarity with the country, the name ‘Greenland’ is likely to bring to mind an image from the atlas, of an insular landmass, wedged between Arctic Canada on one side and Iceland on the other, white all over apart from a little green around the edges, fronting the North Pole at the top and pointing into the Atlantic at the bottom. Its size, although grotesquely exaggerated by the Mercator projection, is nonetheless vast.
This image, however, is already freighted with a number of assumptions about the Earth, and its lands and oceans, the roots of which lie in the rise of modern cartography, navigation, and statecraft. The first is that the Earth presents itself, in the eyes of an all-encompassing humanity, in the form of a globe, at once continuous, homogeneous, and finite in extent. Secondly, every land mass is taken to be a territory, extending over a determinate portion of the global surface, and contained within the irregular outline of its coast, where it borders the sea. On the atlas, every land is defined by its outline, whereas the sea appears borderless and incontinent. Third, it is assumed that the destiny of humankind is to take possession of these lands, to occupy them and rule over them. History is thus rolled out across the globe, as a story of human exploration, conquest, and colonisation. But, fourth, there are still regions of the globe beyond the reach of settlement. Covered with ice, and shown white on the map, they remain as relics of an epoch before history began.
Framed by these four assumptions, Greenland seems to be suspended between the Ice Age and the Space Age, at two ends of a history that, from time to time, has washed up on its shores from elsewhere. At one end, what is perceived as an Arctic wilderness affords virgin territory for scientific research, with has yielded a climate record from cores drilled in the mile-thick ice-sheet extending back some 130,000 years. At the other end, the country offers prime locations and key mineral resources of immense strategic significance in a game of hemispheric domination played by global superpowers, whose vision for future millennia is already fixated upon supremacy in space and the colonisation of other planets. Excluded from these visions of Greenland, however, whether as an archive of the geophysical past or a stepping stone to a geopolitical future, are the Kalaallit—people of Inuit descent whose ancestors first populated Greenland’s coasts around the 13th century CE (following a series of earlier Paleo-Inuit incursions dating back to 2,500 BCE), and who today make up some 88 per cent of the country’s population.
It would be a mistake to think that Kalaallit Nunaat—literally, ‘the lands of the Kalaallit’—is merely an Indigenous equivalent of what the atlas calls Greenland. For the world, in Kalaallit perception, is not the globe of modern cartography but a cosmos formed of the union of earth, ocean, and sky, in a mêlée of weather and currents which at once envelops and infuses all who find themselves in its midst. The lands of the Kalaallit, then, are not territories, nor do they stand out against the sea. Every land is rather a dynamic manifold of earth, ice, and open water, not delineated by its borders but differentiated by its horizons, as experienced by those who inhabit its places and travel along its ways. Woven into these heterogeneous lands are the stories of the beings, both human and non-human, who have lived there. History, in this sense, grows from the land itself, in practices of habitation, rather than being rolled out over it in a story of colonisation. And for the same reason, there are no empty spaces waiting to be taken. The land is all in one.
For today’s Kalaallit, however, the apparent incommensurability between this Indigenous view of country and the view imposed upon them by their one-time colonial overlord, the Kingdom of Denmark, poses something of a dilemma. Along with its Nordic neighbours, Denmark likes to present itself as a pillar of Enlightenment and a bastion of democracy. Yet Kalaalliit are all too aware that behind the cloak of Danish benevolence lies the aggressive pursuit of extractive and eugenic policies towards its Greenlandic subjects, all in the name of civilisation, which have left a toxic legacy—one to which the majority of Danes prefer to turn a blind eye. Kalaallit know that liberal democracy and colonial oppression are two sides of the same coin. Yet at the same time, they want their country, granted home rule in 1979 and since 2009 a self-governing polity with a majority Indigenous population, to be able to make its way in the family of nations. One means of doing so, which they have applied with some success, is to extend the hand of friendship to their Inuit cousins in Arctic North America, and more broadly to Indigenous peoples from around the circumpolar North, while keeping their distance from the arenas of global geopolitics. But in a world wracked by armed conflict, this stance of peaceable non-interference, known as ‘Arctic exceptionalism’, has become increasingly hard to sustain.
The menacing spectre of America’s President Trump has brought this dilemma to a head. There is no doubt that the often offensive posturing of the President and his acolytes has exacerbated an already inflammatory situation. But at the end of the day, he may care more about his gilded ballroom than annexing Greenland.
1 Of far greater significance than his words, uttered largely on impulse, are the tectonic shifts in the world order to which they give expression. These lie in an authoritarian backlash, financed by the mega-rich but fuelled by the despair of the downtrodden, against liberal cosmopolitan elites who are perceived to have cornered the benefits of global wealth creation for themselves. It was these elites, principally in Europe, who howled with outrage when Trump declared his intention to acquire Greenland, as if it were a piece of real estate to add to his portfolio, and rallied to the defence of Denmark. But the reaction in Kalaallit Nunaat was more nuanced. While jealously guarding their right to self-determination, and categorically rebutting American designs on the country, attitudes towards Denmark remain ambivalent. Despite the bitter aftertaste of colonisation, most Kalaalliit are not averse to the possibilities of future collaboration.
In the articles that follow, Ulrik Pram Gad begins by reminding us that in the experience of Kalaallit, over many centuries, Trump’s desire to ‘take’ Greenland is but a variation of an old theme. Is it any less paternalistic for Europeans to wish that the country should eventually fall into line, in the community of nations, as a liberal democracy, once its citizens have grown up enough to do so? For Kalaallit, argues Naja Dyrendom Graugaard, what matters is that they should be able to tell their own stories. These are stories that belong to the land, to families and communities, and telling them is a practice not of representation but of renewal. As Mark Nuttall shows, for Kalaallit to reframe sovereignty over their lands and stories on their own terms, rather than those of the European Enlightenment, means starting from the places where people are leading their lives, determining the directions they should take, and, through their stewardship of the land, creating the conditions of habitation for generations to come. Yet in doing so, they face formidable obstructions, not least from overseas mining corporations, greedily sizing up Greenland’s reserves, especially of so-called rare earth elements critical to today’s high-tech industries.
Behind the façade of offering technological solutions to the climate crisis, the real aim of these corporations, as Gérard Duhaime and his colleagues explain, is to amass vast private fortunes. In this situation, Kalaallit Nunaat’s politicians find themselves having at once to uphold their commitment to the values of Indigeneity while also seeking the recognition that would allow the nation to hold its own on the world stage, in the defence of vital interests against external corporate predation. To pull this off, as Rasmus Leander Nielsen and Jeppe Strandsbjerg show, entails striking a fine balance. Yet, Oran Young concludes, much of the hyperbole swirling around the future of Greenland, whether its source lies in the USA, Europe, or elsewhere, bears little relation to the facts. It is surely time for Western nations to stop speaking on behalf of Kalaallit, as if they knew what was good for them, and to embark instead on a sensible and realistic conversation. With liberal democracy on the ropes, and the prospect of catastrophic climate breakdown, could another, more caring way of relating to one another, to non-humans and to the land, which manages to reconcile an Indigenous sensibility with contemporary statecraft, be Kalaallit Nunaat’s gift to the world?
Declaration of conflict of interest
The author declares no conflict of interest.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research and authorship of this article.
AI disclosure
The author declares that no AI was used in the preparation of this work.
