Early Settlement and the Question of Legitimacy

“Colonial Greenland” generally points to the Danish presence in Greenland since 1721, but contact with outsiders had a long pedigree, resulting in encounters and relations that each acted as a kind of baseline for the next. The history of Inuit settlement on the coasts of Greenland began some 4,500 years ago, when small groups of Paleo-Eskimos crossed the narrow strait between Ellesmere Island (now Canada) and northwest Greenland.Footnote ⁵ They were seal, reindeer, and muskox hunters and simply followed the herds across the ice, and continued to do so along the northern coast of Greenland. Other waves of immigration followed, yet by about AD 100, Greenland was devoid of humans. Around AD 800 a small group known as the Dorset people entered northwest Greenland from America. Finally, a last wave of immigration from the Americas took place around 1200, subsuming the Late Dorset who had remained in the northwest.

The newcomers were the Thule Inuit, hailing from the Bering Strait and populating the coastal regions of Arctic North America from west to east over a couple of centuries; they became the ancestors of the modern Inuit population of Greenland. They were hunters of whale, seal, and walrus and had highly developed technologies, including large communal boats (umiaks) and kayaks, and the formidable dog sledge.Footnote ⁶ They were very mobile, gradually settling along the entire west coast and parts of the east coast of Greenland, adapting their technologies as they met with new ecologies. In the broad sense of the term, the southward bound and adaptive Thule Inuit colonised all of the Greenlandic coast from 1200 onwards.

Before the entry of the Thule Inuit in the north, Norse immigrants from Iceland and beyond had settled in two smaller areas in southern Greenland. When they first arrived in AD 982, they found a land devoid of people, and settled in with their cattle, their church, and their entire Norse way of life, much like the parallel process in Iceland. They colonised the southerly tracts up to the present site of Nuuk and the neighbouring fjords, and went on to make smaller colonies on the American continent, predating Columbus by five centuries. The Norsemen in Greenland soon began hunting walrus for their tusks, ivory being a valuable trading item in Europe. In their search for this commodity they went north along the west coast, and sometime during the thirteenth century they met the southward bound Thule Inuit, whom they called Skrællinger (Skraelings).Footnote ⁷ This encounter was described in the Icelandic sagas, notably Grænlendinga saga.Footnote ⁸ Eríks saga rau∂a notes how the Norsemen also met Skraelings in Vineland.Footnote ⁹ Rumours of the Skraelings circulated widely in the Nordic countries, where the term “Greenlanders” invariably referred to the Norse settlers, always known to be Christian and part of the ancient Norwegian kingdom—to which the Icelanders had submitted in 1262. In 1397, Greenland, Iceland, and Norway became united with Denmark under the reign of Queen Margrethe I.

When ivory from Africa became available in Europe, the market for walrus tusk collapsed, and with the onset of the Little Ice Age from around AD 1350, the colonies were hardly viable as sailing became more difficult due to changing winds on the northern seas.Footnote ¹⁰ Communication across the North Atlantic dwindled and then stopped; the last record of contact relates to a marriage at Gar∂ar, the bishopric of Norse Greenland, in 1408.Footnote ¹¹ Greenland became isolated even from Iceland, and all but forgotten. The last Norse Greenlanders presumably disappeared around 1450, leaving only traces of their houses, workshops, churches, and fields.

With the immense overseas adventures set off by Columbus's “discovery” of America in 1492, all of Europe began dreaming of the new lands in the west; in the same year, the Pope decreed that a new bishop be sent to Gar∂ar, where eighty years had passed without contact.Footnote ¹² Although the bishop never arrived, interest in the Western Hemisphere accelerated. In 1521 Christian II, the king of Denmark, Norway, and Iceland, was advised to send vessels towards Greenland, where Basque whalers were now in evidence. It proved impossible at the time.Footnote ¹³ A generation later, in 1551, the mayor of Kiel (still Danish), who had been commissioned by the king (now Christian III) to buy books and maps in Europe, sent back a couple of world maps. These maps allowed King Christian to see how his land, Greenland, stretched towards the New World and those islands that the Portuguese and the Spaniards had found, so that one could actually get directly from Greenland to the New World, and possibly even from Lapland to Greenland.Footnote ¹⁴

It was for the succeeding king, Frederik II, to prompt and support numerous expeditions to Greenland in the 1560s and ‘70s, explicitly to find and reconnect with Greenland and the lost subjects of the kingdom. His envoys did not succeed in landing, let alone find any traces of people on the shores. Meanwhile, the English were getting closer to success in the Arctic seas and in 1582, King Frederik II approached Queen Elizabeth, who had bestowed the Most Noble Order of the Garter upon him, asking whether she would allow her captain and servant Martin Frobisher to serve him during further travels on the northern seas.Footnote ¹⁵ Frobisher was intent on finding a Northwest Passage to Cathay (China), and made several journeys, “discovering” Meta Incognita (the North American continent), presumed to be rich in gold, and even landing on the coast of Greenland on one occasion. Gradually, world geography became politicised.

However, it was not until early in the seventeenth century, now under the reign of King Christian IV, that the effort to reconnect with the Greenlanders resulted in finding their traces. The king commissioned the English pilot James Hall, who had earlier sailed in the waters of Frisland (a phantom island in the North Atlantic, maybe referring to an unmapped part of the east Greenlandic coast) and the lands to the “American side.”Footnote ¹⁶ Over the summer of 1605, Hall succeeded in mapping large tracts of the southwest coast of Greenland, and was awarded the title of His Majesty of Denmark's Pilot. Hall's investigations showed that the Norse settlers had lived on the western coast, directly opposite America, between latitudes 60^o and 66^o north, where he found some of their harbours and several houses and huts in which the Greenlandic colonists had lived and worked.Footnote ¹⁷ Hall brought back some of the current inhabitants of this distant part of the kingdom, who had no relation to the Norsemen. It may have been a first encounter, but the relationship was preceded by a long history of imagining the Eskimo through the eyes of the Norsemen, as circulating in the sagas.

Apart from the general Enlightenment quest for mapping, the incitement to reconnect with Greenland was amplified by the notable Basque interest in whaling in the seas off Greenland, apparently yielding no small gains, and not least the increasing presence of English and Dutch sailors. The latter established trading ports on the southerly part of the west coast of Greenland, where the natives eagerly congregated. The archival material shows that Greenland was perceived as a natural extension of the kingdom of Denmark (including Norway and Iceland) and while the Nordic kinsmen were no longer in evidence in Greenland, they were present in the minds of the rulers, who also took an interest in the new Greenlanders, although not (yet) as national subjects.Footnote ¹⁸ Thus the contact zone was inhabited before it was found.

On the occasion of the Columbus quincentenary, Robert Paine drew attention to “the most intriguing question for anthropology coming out of the scholarly literature of that occasion, namely how, in the West, the unknown is apprehended, then and now.”Footnote ¹⁹ This is still a pertinent question. Encountering the New World, the observers first classified the unfamiliar by its resemblance to something known: pumas as lions, jaguars as tigers, and so on.Footnote ²⁰ In the long run, it was impossible not to acknowledge difference, however, and gradually not only new species but also new words entered into the European vocabulary. The natural categories expanded, if within an already established classificatory scheme, with which the world (surprisingly) still lives. Classifying humans proved more difficult.

In rediscovered seventeenth-century Greenland, the Inuit were classified as humans, if of a particular kind. A practice of kidnapping or enticing the new Greenlanders on board ships bound for Copenhagen soon emerged, and shifting kings would take pains to meet with them; the first time was in 1605 and it continued for more than a century. Michael Harbsmeier suggests that the kidnapping of “savages,” and “taking them home and presenting them for the king as well as the public was a fairly widespread practice during the first centuries of modern European conquest and expansion.”Footnote ²² The “spectacle of submission” staged a contact zone outside of Greenland; or better, perhaps, the contact zone widened through the literal displacement of the new Greenlanders and events like their performing in kayaks on the canals of Copenhagen.Footnote ²³ In the process, the emerging colonial subjects were being shaped.

A number of questions arise out of this early history of contact; the first and obvious one is what “colonisation” might mean in these days. The Norse Greenlanders had certainly established colonies, in the old sense, in Greenland from around AD 900 that lasted for at least five hundred years in empty tracts a couple of thousand kilometres south of the distant northwest Greenland where the Thule Inuit entered some three hundred years later. Who are the aboriginals in this case? How do we measure legitimacy of settlement in a pre-national era, and were not the Danish kings’ expeditions laudable attempts at reconnecting with lost subjects in the northern wilderness, if soon turning into a commercial competition with the Dutch?

The period described above witnessed multiple encounters, making southwest Greenland in particular a powerful contact zone. The encounters were mostly peaceful and there was little or no struggle over resources between Inuit and Norsemen. While the latter disappeared, a group of newcomers with distinct claims to the region contributed to a gradual displacement of the local population, conceptually, economically, and mentally, all while the locals remained their own masters. We are left with questions of legitimacy in a premodern world, and of the right to expansion in the contemporary political geography when the spatial practice of colonialism took off.

Civilising Zeal and the Question of Scalability

Commercial whaling around Greenland was in retreat in the late seventeenth century due to overhunting, while trading seemed to gain momentum, and a new kind of “colonial” interest grew up in the early eighteenth century. A trading company in Bergen (Norway) was the first to venture towards Greenland, and their interest paired with a new missionary quest that would bring the natives even closer to home, so to speak, if also alienating them from their own beliefs.Footnote ²⁴ Hans Egede, a zealous priest in northern Norway, kept pleading for permission to go, wanting to seek and save the descendants of the Norsemen, whom he still hoped to find against all hope. It took some time for his request to be accepted, but in the end it was granted, as it was regarded as potentially advancing commercial interests as well. Egede and his family went with the first Bergen trade ship available in 1721 and they became pioneer settlers in the second wave of Nordic immigration to Greenland, making their lasting home in the fjord of Godthåb (present-day Nuuk, the capital of Greenland). Here, Egede encountered the descendants of the Thule Inuit and set about to convert them. It was not easy, he complained, as they were still steeped in magical thinking and devilry of all kinds.Footnote ²⁵ Even if some were quick to be baptised, for Egede it seemed an outward gesture, serving the purpose of ingratiation with the Danes.

One of the reasons for the administrative support of Egede's missionary quest was the Danish wish to control the Dutch whalers who for almost a century had dominated the whaling and soon also the trading with the natives in the Davis Strait.Footnote ²⁶ The mission became part of this effort, and the Danish sovereign purposefully established a series of settler colonies on the Greenlandic west coast in the course of relatively few years. In the process, the (new) Greenlanders were gradually categorised, going from simply interesting natives to subjects in need of their Danish compatriots, and “Greenland began to grow into Denmark.”Footnote ²⁷ Phrased differently, a new degree of entanglement between the parties began to affect both parties.Footnote ²⁸

The Danes wanted to monopolise commerce, under threat of warfare against the Dutch whalers; this affected the colonial impulse, and soon the region of Disko Bay, the hotbed of Dutch whaling and trading, saw several new colonies emerge. The number of colonisers was very small (often just a handful per colony), as was the entire population, which amounted to an estimated maximum of eight thousand people in the entire country in the eighteenth century,Footnote ²⁹ and possibly as low as 5,122 in 1789, according to contemporary (local) counts.Footnote ³⁰ The successive Danish trade companies were never really successful; trade was upheld only because it was nationalised, so to speak, and hence subsidised.Footnote ³¹ The colonies were but tiny conglomerates in a vast nomadic landscape, where one after the other of the monopolised trade companies went broke. Meanwhile, the life of the Greenlanders became increasingly affected by new paternalistic bents, as well as new cravings.

By comparison to the mediaeval settlements, the colonies had been redefined in response to new international realities of whaling, shipping, and trade. The contact zone had shifted, now reflecting the continued presence of the ever-so-small contingencies of missionaries and traders. In 1782, an elaborate Instruction for traders and settlers was issued, serving as the backbone for Danish-Greenlandic interaction for a long time.Footnote ³² The key issue was to make sure that the Greenlanders continued hunting and sealing, since this was their primary source of nourishment and income. The Instruction also stressed how proper relations between new settlers and locals should be maintained; the rules were rather strict. Both parties were “displaced” within the framework of proper contact; thus if a Dane employed by the colony married a Greenlandic woman, they could not go (back) to Denmark.

Meanwhile, the Enlightenment had reached the Nordic countries, and nature was being classified. In the eighteenth century, allegedly much to the consternation of the Pope, Linnaeus included people in his classification of animals, and invented the term Homo sapiens as distinct from Homo monstrosus.Footnote ³³ By 1758, Homo sapiens had been divided into six classes, each with distinct physical features: the Wild Man, the American, the European, the Asiatic, the African, and the Monster. Concerning the difference between the American and the European, the former was regulated by customs, the latter by laws. “Social” facts manifestly creep in upon the physical appearance in this classification.

European supremacy is here backed by “natural” classification, and we shall see how it fared in Greenland by unpacking a particular colonial encounter, featuring Otho Fabricius, a Danish naturalist who served as a missionary in Greenland from 1768 to 1773, and who wrote a manuscript describing Greenland that was found and published only in 1946. He brought with him a copy of Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae as his only reading, and this set him thinking about the “Greenlandic man.” In his own Fauna Groenlandica (1780), he put man first among the living creatures in Greenland, immediately followed by the walrus; he thus disregarded Linnaeus’ taxonomic scheme but confirmed the Christian idea of man's primary place among the living. He linked Homo groenlandicus to the Homo americanus referring to the Esquimaux of the Hudson Bay area; even so, the two categories remained distinct. About the Greenlandic man he says: “A human being, who moves by day, dirty red in colour, with black, straight, thick head hair, almost beardless.… They call themselves Innuit (singular Innuk), which is a common term for them and other peoples, and Kalalik (singular Kalalek), a term specially for them.”Footnote ³⁴ Fabricius goes on to describe their physical appearance in further detail, their habitat and their food, and ends by describing how they live in a natural state: “Without god and without ruler they are governed by rules.” Fabricius is hitting the nail here; they are living by rules that are truly their own, as he well knew from his close acquaintance with the Greenlanders as demonstrated by his ethnographical works.Footnote ³⁵ In that sense, they could be placed between the law-abiding Europeans and the custom-bound Americans of Linnaeus.

His classification was based in a close acquaintance with the Greenlanders, enabling him to make a first, wonderfully detailed description of all the implements used by the Greenlanders for catching seal, their foremost occupation and without which they could not exist.Footnote ³⁶ Fabricius notes:

Fabricius was an atypical missionary; he was committed to the task of converting the Greenlanders, but found that inducing them to gather around the small colonies, with their tempting shops and ill-fitting white manners, was not the right way. He himself moved out of the colony and settled in a small hunting community, where he lived in a Greenlandic house and observed a marked difference in people's condition. As Thalbitzer puts it, “It has always been detrimental to the free-living Greenlanders to have to be bound to stay at one place for the sake of trading or schooling. The seals do not stop migrating for that reason, of course.”Footnote ³⁸ Fabricius’ unusual move gave him the opportunity to fully apprehend the ingenuity of the Greenlandic hunters, if measuring it up against another traits: “All who, like myself, in Greenland are able to accompany them on the sea must also credit them with great dexterity in the use of these implements and in correcting possible defects in them, which is all the more strange, as the same people's apathy in other matters is so deplorably evident.”Footnote ³⁹

Something happens at the level of interpersonal relations here; there is a leap from a sincere notion of respect for the Greenlanders’ way of life to a derogation of their mind. Fabricius learns from them—their language, their hunting practices, and their kayaking skills—yet they are reluctant to learn from him. The asymmetry is blatant, and amplifies the need for unpacking the actual encounters. In the emergent contact zone, beyond the colony, only Fabricius seems displaced. While granted some degree of citizenship among them for his practical skills, he is not one of them. They remain their own masters, at least outside the colony.

For Fabricius, the praise of the Greenlanders’ skills is radically different from his assessment of their reception of Christian morals, where he cannot but see them from the point of view of the Church and its own measure of success. This underwrites Clifford's point that the contact zone is already relationally constituted before people even encounter each other. Fabricius knew that the Greenlanders were heathens before he even arrived, while he knew nothing about their extremely refined hunting practices and technologies. He made it his duty to note and to write down the unknown, and stressed his particularly fortunate position, both by speaking the language, and “because I also accustomed myself to rowing in their kayaks and thus was able to accompany them on hunts of all kinds and there see, indeed learn for myself, the usefulness of every single contrivance.”Footnote ⁴⁰

The inconsistency in his appraisal takes us towards Anna Tsing's discussion of scalability and nonscalability. She calls for a theory of the latter, which “recalls attention to the wild diversity of life on the earth,” in contrast to the conceptual basis of colonialism as bound up with an idea of scalability, that is, “the ability to expand—and expand, and expand—without rethinking basic elements.”Footnote ⁴¹ Her model case is the plantation designed for colonial extraction, possibly the archetypical view of colonial enterprise, and illustrating how “scalable projects are those that can expand without changing.”Footnote ⁴² In such process of expansion, biological and cultural diversity are excluded. “Scalability is possible only if project elements do not form transformative relationships that might change the project as elements are added. But transformative elements are the medium for the emergence of diversity. Scalability projects banish meaningful diversity, which is to say, diversity may change things.”Footnote ⁴³ In the case of Fabricius—and the colonial moment that his arrival on the Arctic shores engendered—we sense a tension between the scalable, tradable, and universal on the one hand and the nonscalable, local, and particular on the other, that are not equally translatable into a colonialist vocabulary.

Obviously, the Arctic seas are radically different from tropical plantations, but this in itself is a point. Colonial relations are neither uniform nor stable. In Greenland as in America, attempts to turn the new people into modern subjects rested on an assumption that somehow the two worlds could be made compatible. In Greenland, the colonisers met with people whose longtime success in surviving in this arid landscape implied an ability to capture the moment, any moment, that was replete with potential—for a successful hunt, a promising journey, a well-trained dog, or some new commodities. The volatile social order, and the inability to cultivate and expand colonial interest beyond the small and cramped colonial settlements, where an overseer neither could nor would bully people to catch more seals than needed for consumption, undermined any scalability project allowing for expansion. Also there were only so many whales and places where their oil could be amassed.

Colonialist lives, as exemplified by Egede and Fabricius, never “add up” to any scalable format of colonialism in a landscape where the locals are masters and the newcomers more or less lost. The overarching missionary zeal of these two men did little to bridge the scalability gap, and it certainly did not give the missionaries the upper hand in practical matters of survival. While both were missionaries, their relationships with the Greenlanders were very different, Egede being the harsher judge of their limited minds, Fabricius admiring their skills and implicitly acknowledging their practical superiority to the Danes. The latter would never occur to Egede, who insisted that all souls had to be aligned and scaled to fit a stern Lutheran doctrine. The process of conversion was doomed to fail, however, as it was based on an impossible equation of souls, as if free-floating above practical concerns of survival and the need to follow the ways of animals before the ways of god. Nevertheless, the mission has been seen as having united the Greenlanders, through their becoming part of the Lutheran Church early on.Footnote ⁴⁴

With the Instruction of 1782, the comprehensive obligations of the Danish contingent were specified, as were the proper relations between Danes and Greenlanders.Footnote ⁴⁵ Yet the long and often abrupt process of displacement in the wake of new encounters, new missionaries, new winds on the North Atlantic, new European realities of war or peace, and changing expansionist visions in the process of industrial development could neither have been foreseen, nor necessarily contained within such framework; “proper” relations were ever changing. The worlds were basically nonscalable. This adds a serious complication to the notion of “colonialism” as a wholesale quest, finding that it is always emergent and plays out in particular moments, even if driven by one overarching zeal—here of civilising through evangelisation—beyond the craving for new (im-)possible resources.

Emerging Citizenship and the Question of Autonomy

From rediscovery and settlement, mapping and mission, the colonial quest became more broadly perceived in the late eighteenth century, to further accelerate during the nineteenth century along with new political realities in Europe. The first trading companies in Greenland were private, and most of them had pulled out broke, leading to a takeover by the Danish state in 1774. The Royal Greenland Trading Department had a monopoly on the trade through the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century. This made the presence of Denmark more noticeable than ever before, in spite of their small numbers. Around 1800 the population was about one hundred Danes to some eight thousand Greenlanders.

Governance changed along the way. In the Instruction of 1782, two royal inspectors were appointed for south and north Greenland, based in Godthåb and Godhavn, respectively. These were the two major ports and social conglomerates on the west coast, and the formalisation of the inspectorates can be seen as part of a larger process towards seeing Greenland as a whole to be governed, even if its unfathomable size and the enormous distances still required two observation posts. The most important task of the inspectors was to regularly visit all of the colonies in their district and note down the stores of provisions and the reliability of the accounts. Along with a sense of duty towards the Danish state, the inspectors were supposed to see to the interests of the Greenlanders.Footnote ⁴⁶ The tides brought with them a new perception of citizenship, if not (yet) nationality. The inspectors would remain pivotal emissaries of the Danish kingdom until well into the twentieth century. Meanwhile, the authorities also worked hard towards educating the Greenlanders, establishing two seminaries in 1845 to train catechists and teachers, and began sending Greenlanders to Denmark for education as midwives, carpenters, printers, and so on.Footnote ⁴⁷ Before that, in 1804, the possibilities for establishing higher education in Greenland had been discussed, but soon the Napoleonic wars in Europe cut off the connection and left Greenland isolated and impoverished.

The improvement of the Greenlandic lot spurred a new scientific interest in Greenland in the nineteenth century. A key figure was Hinrich Rink (1819–1893), a glaciologist who made an important contribution to the study of glaciers and to the “discovery” of the Ice Age based on fieldwork in Greenland, supplementing the work of Agassiz in Switzerland. While so doing, Rink worked closely with the Greenlanders, relying on their observations and collaboration. Apart from the ice, Rink was also keenly interested in minerals and mapping, and he pleaded for a proper position in Greenland that would allow him to remain. He was granted a stipend, and later became royal inspector in Godthåb (1857–68). While there, he established a printing press and launched the first Greenlandic newspaper in 1861. Rink sensed that the future of Greenland depended on education and the sharing of information, and he was to have great impact on the country's development.Footnote ⁴⁸ Significantly, Rink supported the Danish trade monopoly in the interest of the Greenlanders,Footnote ⁴⁹ on whose ways of life and thought he published in English.Footnote ⁵⁰ There was no politics of invisibility or unreadability here, as has been the target of much postcolonial scholarship.Footnote ⁵¹ Rather, Rink (and others) pursued a very specific colonial project “based on a difficult negotiation between the urge to protect the traditional culture and the urge to modernise and change this same culture.”Footnote ⁵²

Rink was also the moving force behind the establishment of a board of leaders of all the colonies (Forstanderskaber) in 1862. The idea had been nurtured in conversations with Samuel Kleinschmidt, an early Herrnhut missionary who headed one of the seminaries.Footnote ⁵³ Kleinschmidt made the first Greenlandic grammar, which could not be captured in the conventional Latin grammatical terms. This was a major step towards recognition of Greenlandic, which had been sidestepped by the Danish authorities to this point.

The board of leaders of each colony was headed alternately by the missionary to and the manager of the colony, and included the leading catechists (Greenlanders) and the doctor in each colony, as well as ten to twelve independent Greenlandic men. They were to oversee the distribution of public economic support, badly needed in the mid-nineteenth century due to epidemics and an increasingly impoverished and diminished population, and establish a legitimate, secular authority based on both Danish and local points of view. In many ways it was modelled upon the idea, flourishing in Denmark at the same time, that the common people should be educated to be able to take social and political responsibility. The “colonial” here is on its way towards the national, and people increasingly seen as emerging citizens. This again underscores the idea that colonialism is composed of significant moments and particular national visions, rather than uniform ideologies.

Scientific practices and new knowledge played an important part in the fashioning of Greenland in Danish minds, supported and disseminated through state institutions such as the National Museum and the University of Copenhagen, part of an increasingly important network of Nordic and European institutions. In 1878, a commission for the direction of geological and geographical investigations in Greenland was established; it was the result of a joint effort by Rink and J. F. Johnstrup, professor of mineralogy at the University of Copenhagen.Footnote ⁵⁴ The curiosity-driven spectacles of submission had been replaced by equally curiosity-driven research that furnished the Danish and the international audience with learned treatises on Greenland. Greenland as such was no longer a site for (potential) commercial gains only; it was also a site for new knowledge. The commission remained a touchstone for all research in Greenland until 2012 when it was closed down, having increasingly lost its purpose, not because research in Greenland was less relevant, but because the relations between Greenland and Denmark had outlived the scientific monopoly allotted to the commission.

The general development in education and outlook also affected political perceptions. The two inspectorates run by individual Danish inspectors were transformed into two regional councils (Landsråd), based on a 1908 law about the government of Greenland, remaining in Godhavn and Godthåb. Members were appointed through the local municipalities, and until 1925 only Greenlanders could be elected. In 1950 the two councils were amalgamated into one national council (Landsråd) for all of Greenland, in force until 1979, when it was replaced by the new home rule parliament—the Landsting, or national assembly. Between 1950 and 1979, the Danish government would not pass any law without the support of the council, thus becoming a major co-player in the modernisation of Greenland. There were also two Greenlandic representatives in the Danish parliament.

The population of Greenland around 1800 was more or less stagnant at about eight thousand, and was even decreasing a little in the mid-nineteenth century, when new diseases hit even the remotest corners of the vast island. A concerted effort at closing off Greenland to travellers and fishermen from other regions contributed somewhat to a small population rise, but the development was slow. In 1918, the entire population consisted of 14,643 individuals, of whom 13,761 lived on the west coast, 646 on the east coast, and a mere 236 in the privately-owned Thule District in the northwest. Three hundred of the total were Europeans, predominantly Danes.Footnote ⁵⁵

In 2017 the population was roughly 55,800, including six thousand born outside of Greenland, mostly in Denmark, according to the Statistics of Greenland, accessible on the web. The population is slowly declining now after years of rising, which is related to a small but steady emigration to Denmark. The categories of Dane and Greenlander are not as absolute as they seem; intermarriage has been common, and many “Danes” have been born in Greenland. While earlier censuses had distinguished between “pure” and “mixed” Greenlanders, the distinction gradually faded.Footnote ⁵⁶ Ethnicity is, indeed, an unreliable tool for classifying the inhabitants of Greenland, not only because of Danish-Greenlandic intermarriage, but also because the island has been visited by sailors hailing from other parts of the world since the sixteenth century. As a curiosity, it has been noted that more than 80 percent of today's Greenlanders have some European ancestry, on average 25 percent of their genome.Footnote ⁵⁷ This says nothing about how people think of themselves, of course.

After the Second World War, during which Greenland had been isolated from Denmark and had relied on America for necessities that could not be produced at home, the time came to reconsider the relationship between Denmark and Greenland. The United Nations was established in the interest of world peace, and Denmark had to answer for the improvement of life in their “colony.” The Greenlanders were keen on changing their own position in the political order; neither being nor having a colony was any longer viable politically. The Danish prime minister, Hans Hedtoft, responded by establishing a commission to analyse the state of affairs and suggest improvements. The result was the G-50 (Greenland-1950) plan, uniting the two regional councils as one, reducing the sixty of so municipalities to sixteen, and suggesting a concentration of the population in larger conglomerates (closing down many of the small settlements, effectively, by closing shops and schools), improving the educational system more generally, and reorganising the healthcare and the legal systems.Footnote ⁵⁸ In South Greenland towns without permanent sea-ice cover during winter, the fishing industry would be developed. The infrastructure would also be developed, with proper roads in the towns, improved harbours, public waterworks, electric plants, and so on. Importantly, the Danish trade monopoly was to be abolished, allowing for an opening up of the Greenlandic market; but trade remained in the hands of the Royal Greenlandic Trade Company, which was under obligation to provide for all towns and settlement shops. While in some sense a significant moment in the process towards decolonisation, the implicit narrative of emancipation and the road towards sovereignty left many people with a sense of invisibility.Footnote ⁵⁹

In the spirit of the new times, and as voiced by UN General Assembly in 1951, the Greenlanders wanted to reshape their relations to Denmark more profoundly, and asked for representation in the Danish parliament. This was granted, but an even closer connection was wanted, and in 1953, Greenland was incorporated as a county of Denmark, aligned with other such counties in southern Denmark. This was done through a change in the Danish constitution, and at first it gave the Greenlanders an imminent sense of equal opportunities that was welcome in Greenland.Footnote ⁶⁰ The Greenlanders became full Danish citizens overnight, and while it at first seemed a direct path towards equality, it was a slow process, and was soon marred by the infamous “criterion of birth-place,” policy, in force from 1964 to 1990, favouring people who were born in Denmark over people born in Greenland when it came to salaries. While it may have been designed to attract a well-educated workforce from Denmark, it naturally poisoned relations between Danes and Greenlanders and left intense bitterness in its wake.

The Greenlanders were perceived as feeble by some Danes, resilient by others, but generally they were seen as “good,” and many Danes had deep feelings of guilt when considering the troubles the Danish colonial effort entailed for the locals in some periods. It is worth noting how, as Thisted has it, most Danish writings on Greenlandic colonialism are marked by “an almost flagellantic glee with which the sins of the government as well as individuals committed in Greenland have been depicted in every detail.”Footnote ⁶¹ This speaks to a particular vision of the present postcolonial moment.

Home rule was granted in 1979, yet this did not abolish the friction between the two populations in Greenland. Still, the friction led to new ways of thinking based on an implicit recognition that “Denmark and Greenland are part of each others’ history for better or for worse, and a far greater consciousness of the Greenlandic point of view on this history is necessary to really establish the kind of new, equal ‘partnership’ that is the goal of the current negotiations about an expansion of the Home Rule Act.”Footnote ⁶² Friction sometimes sets new processes in motion, as people agree to work across difference.Footnote ⁶³ In this case, it did result in the Act on Greenland Self-Government of 2009, thirty years after the Home Rule Act. The page turned again; the contact zone changed, all while earlier relations were enfolded into the document, and the question of autonomy was only partly solved.

The preamble to the Act on Greenland Self-Government (12 June 2009, Act no. 473) states:

The Act sets the frame for an entirely new relationship between the two partners, legally, economically, and administratively. It also stipulates that the official language in Greenland shall be Greenlandic (Ch. 7 § 20), and not least that “Decision regarding Greenland's independence shall be taken by the people of Greenland,” with the proper procedures specified (Ch. 8 § 1, 2, 3, 4).

Worth noting is the fact that all inhabitants of Greenland, including the considerable “Danish” minority (about one-fourth of the population), are equally part of the constituency. There is still some stony ground to cover, including the paragraph on the official language now being Greenlandic; while in principle it seems perfectly sensible, many Greenlanders, including politicians, do not master Greenlandic at a sufficient level for modern politics, having grown up with the notion of Danish being the more important language for political issues. Evidently, this will be a matter of time. While on the road to independence, Greenlanders are still equal Danish citizens, entitled to education, health care, and old-age pensions in Denmark, where between one-third and one-fourth of all Greenlanders live. The population of Greenland in 2018 amounts to around 56,000, including a large contingency of Danes (some 10,000). Ethnicity is increasingly blurred in Greenland as elsewhere on the globe, while citizenship matters more.

Concerning language, there is an increasing interest in having English as the second language. The Inuit Circumpolar Council (established 1980), of which Greenland is member with by far the largest constituency, has adopted English as their working language, in view of the fact that all the Inuit languages have evolved in their own direction, answering to the surrounding languages. What is unique for Greenland is a very long tradition of a written Greenlandic language.Footnote ⁶⁴ Parts of the Bible were translated to Greenlandic in the mid-eighteenth century, and during the nineteenth century fine grammars and extensive teaching materials were available. A Greenlandic newspaper was published in 1862. This is likely to have contributed to the strength of Greenlandic.Footnote ⁶⁵ Nevertheless, Danish will probably remain important for at least the next generation, whose education has been at least partly, if not mostly in Danish. Yet, as Greenlanders are acutely aware, they are now part of a much larger international community – demanding that the Greenlanders must (still) learn a second language, increasingly seen to be English.Footnote ⁶⁶

Colonialism may have been overturned, but old sentiments about the illegitimacy of the (Danish) state linger in the new postcolonial moment.Footnote ⁶⁷ Yet Greenland is no longer part of the Danish wilderness,Footnote ⁶⁸ but an important global partner in a world where nationalisms are no longer viable. The challenge is to face the ingrained postcolonial sentiments that keep the colonial alive. The contact zone shifts again.

Concluding on Cosmopolitan Visions

Colonialism was a scalability project that could succeed only in part, because everywhere there was something that did not fit, yet refused to go away. Even so diversity was not allowed to change the basic structure until the colonial project collapsed. Diversity outmanoeuvred scalable expansion, while new nation-states emerged out of the debris, emulating the failed national projects. In Greenland, foreign companies are invited and offered cheap licences to explore underground resources, such as minerals and oil. Thus, the postcolonial is fraught with colonial relations at the outset, aligning with the failed modern project, as described by Tsing:

In Greenland, the landscape was always on the side of the Greenlanders. The colonizers had little clue about its power and entanglements, and expansion was impossible within it. Even colonial critique remains muffled by the actualities of the motley and often failed colonial encounters in a contact zone of wild diversity. What is more, even on the road towards self-rule and political autonomy, the “colonial” relationship remains an ingrained part of how people think of themselves in the present. In fact colonialism is always contemporary, and postcolonialism is always “unfinished business.”Footnote ⁷⁰ In other words the colonial remains within new postcolonial configurations.

A way beyond this and the implied new nationalisms may be to embrace a cosmopolitanism that is global rather than national. Cosmopolitanism has many meanings, but I concur with Pnina Werbner, who says that whichever the definition, “cosmopolitanism has to be grasped as an ethical horizon—an aspirational outlook and mode of practice. Cosmopolitans insist on the human capacity to imagine the world from an Other's perspective, and to imagine the possibility of a borderless world of cultural plurality.”Footnote ⁷¹ Just as “empire” was effectively destroyed by “nationalisms,”Footnote ⁷² so a new cosmopolitanism faces the challenge of overcoming the intolerant principle of ethnicity-based nationalisms.

Such cosmopolitanism could foster an entirely new set of relations between Greenland and Denmark and even allow for a reassessment of past historical relations, all while (evidently) remembering that it is for the Greenlanders to decide on their independence—and acknowledging the vital role played by Greenland in Danish self-perception and the coauthoring of the High North.Footnote ⁷³ The time has come to decolonise the scholarly vocabulary and to insist on the analytical portent of scholarship beyond empirical details.