265. Danish Greenland: Eradicating Inuit Culture (Ep 3)

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0:29Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William de Rimpel. Why are you smirking? Back to Greenland. Back to Greenland. I love Greenland. You do love Greenland. I mean, honestly, those last two episodes with Eleanor Baraclough were among the most chaotic I have ever taken part in. I don't know why the Vikings sort of got us off on that chaotic. It was hilarious. It was informative, but it was also crude, lewd, and just God knows where it was going to go next. Ice Queen nymphomaniacs and horny zombies. What more do you need from Empire of State? Yes, I know. You really love the horny zombies.

1:08I love horny zombies. If you haven't heard, go back and listen and make whatever sense of it you can. But we continue our story of Greenland today. The largest island in the world with a population, one of the smallest populations, around 50 ,000 people, 89 % of whom are Inuit. I mean, just can you recap the Viking madness in a couple of sentences in case people aren't going to go back and listen to it? I mean, I really, really hope they do because it's such a rip-roaring story. Sure. It's led by our favourite psycho killer, Eric the Red. You can't do it without doing that. I think that's a rule now on this podcast.

1:48But yes, go on. There will be so many listeners who have no idea what we're talking about. This is a reference to a talking heads record of Elytra and I's youth psycho killer. Anyway, Eric the Red identifies what Europeans and Westerners want to get out of Greenland, which is resource extraction. And it is the fate of the people of Greenland to be at the collecting end in all periods of history of resources which other people want. and they don't really want the Inuits to actually live there. And this is as true of early Viking Greenland when Vikings are after ivories and sealskins as it is today when they're after rare earths.

2:35In all periods of history, people have just treated Greenland as a place to extract resources from. And the Inuits who live there are stuck with all these rival powers trying to take over their country for reasons other than wanting to look after the Inuit who lived there. Now, the Norse settlement in Greenland is always a tenuous affair because there are very few resources there to support life. You can't grow wheat, for example. And while you can fish and live off seal meat or walrus meat, these are difficult things to hunt. And it relies on supplies of things that cannot be found in Greenland from the outside.

3:18And when Scandinavia is decimated by the Black Death, and when high-quality African elephant ivory begins to be cheaper and more easily available than warrace ivory, the colony becomes more and more tenuous. the young leave, the old stay on, trying to live their own ways. But by the 14th century, when there's a spiral downwards of the medieval ice age and things get colder and the habitable area diminishes and the winters lengthen and the summers shorten, the colony becomes more and more isolated, small, and in this dywood spiral finally ends in 1500 with the Norse colony of Greenland becoming completely extinct.

4:03I mean, it's more than two sentences, but it is a comprehensive summary of what we've just done. But you sort of wait for about 200 years for the next colonisation attempt to take place. And that happens, again, the Danes will have a go in 1721, but it is led by God, isn't it? Yes and no. Okay, all right, let's have a debate. Let's have a debate. Tell Tell me why no. Because the man, the Lutheran missionary and godman, as you could rightly say, Hans Egade, who leads the expedition to Greenland, is certainly partly inspired by the urge to find the old Norse colonists, which he imagines are surviving still in their long houses.

4:51but he's also inspired by profit. And he establishes his own private colonial trading company, the Bergen Greenland Company. But does that come later? Because I was under the impression that this was a Lutheran effort that, you know what, we're going to have to go and make sure that people aren't pagans or are they Catholic? What are they? And it is sort of his desire for Protestantism to be the overwhelming religion, not just of Denmark, but of the world, doesn't that sort of launch him off first? Or is it the prophet motive? Well, I think it's both. And I think that's what's interesting about it.

5:31It's this peculiar mix of missionary and capitalist, Bible in one hand, share certificates in the other, with the promises of lucrative resource extraction, just like Eric Lorette. And that's what's so interesting about it, that this is a period when, you know, muscular Protestant missionaries are traveling the world. And we're seeing this also from Denmark in India. So there's a whole history that is often forgotten of the Danish East India Company. Have you ever been to Trankimare, Anita? I haven't been to Trankimare. What am I missing? It's one of the nicest places in the entire world. And I strongly recommend a trip to Trankimare.

6:11But Trangybhima is this forgotten South Indian Dalish colony, which, because it wasn't a great success, is perfectly preserved in its, well, not even 18th century form. It's a 17th century form. Well, where is it? Where in India? It's a day's ride down the coast from Chennai, Madras. And it's a gorgeous, gorgeous drive. And at the end of it, you find this perfect late 17th century grid-planned baroque town, completely intact with a barracks, a fort, the gateways, totally perfect. And the old governor's house is now a hotel and you can stay in it. How amazing. And it has a very, very good museum on the Danish East India Company, which is something which I knew existed.

6:57The place is called Fort Dansborg. And what's interesting about it is it's founded in 1620, which is 20 years before Madras. So the Danes get to the Coromandel coast before the English do, or certainly they set up this settlement. And then there's one other, which again is often forgotten, but very important, which they found in 1698 on the Hooghly, originally called Frederiks Nagor. Frederiks Nagor, really? You're joking. No, I'm not. And that is today, or since the 18th century, has been known as Serumpor. So that's King Frederick of Denmark. It's named after. King Frederick of Denmark. And Naga means area of in the local dialect.

7:37Or town. Area, town of Frederick. Yeah. And Serumpur later becomes very important because it's where the missionaries base themselves because the East India Company doesn't like missionaries. So even British missionaries base themselves in Serumpur. And if I'm right, I think the first translation of the Bible into either Bengali or Hindustani takes place in Serenport. And it's the first printing press producing documents in any Indian languages in Serenport. There's something like that. There's a long and interesting story of missionary activity taking place just upstream from Calcutta. Anyway, the point of all this is that we forget it, but the Danes also have a huge colonial trading company history.

8:16And so when our friend, the missionary, Hans Egade, decides to go and try and convert the remaining Vikings from their old Catholic way, the way he envisages to do it is not to just go off with the Bible and faith and hope, but he actually founds a private colonial trading company. It's called the Bergen Greenland Company. And he gets money from the Bergen merchants, which is$9 ,000, the king, which is$200, and only$300 from the Copenhagen Missionary College. We should make clear here that, of course, at this point, Denmark and Norway are one country under the same king, and hence why Bergen is part of the Danish attempt to recolonise Greenland.

9:02It's this unique and interesting mixture of missionary and capitalist that distinguishes this effort. But when he gets there, and he has these sort of high hopes of, Yes, all right. I accept your point, making lots and lots of money, but also converting Catholics to the true faith. And if they've gone back to Norse paganism, even worse, converting them. What he finds, though, is Inuit communities living there. Is he bothered about trying to convert them as well? Or are they sort of beneath his radar and beneath his attention? No, this mix of capitalism and missionary, which are the initial inspirations of Egadi's Greenland voyage, remain hand in hand throughout the 18th century and often compete with each other.

9:45So the Inuit are not particularly interested in converting initially to Christianity and, in fact, resist it in many cases quite strongly. And this gets in the way of making a profit from the colony, which is the other motive, particularly of the shareholders who put up the money for all the boats and the IKEA kits, which will be unfolded on the shore and turned into dwelling houses and so on. So Egade, despite finding there are no north to convert, founds a settlement near the modern day capital, Nuk, and he begins to convert the indigenous Inuit to Christianity while encouraging them to gather the resources which will pay for the whole mission.

10:27In other words, furs, ivory, and in this age, whale blubber and oil. Remember, this is the great age of whaling. and one of the initial problems that the colony faces as well as everything else is that the Dutch are busy whaling in this area and burned down one of the early Danish buildings and forts in Greenland at Niernuk and poor old Egody's Bergen Greenland company quickly goes bankrupt after six years partly because of the Dutch intervention. So his company goes bankrupt Willie, but that's not the end of the adventure because by now, I guess, the king has got wind of the fact that there is profit in them, their hills.

11:09And that's normally the pattern from private enterprise to royal charter that we've seen in other places like with the East India Company. Is that what happens here? Yes. I mean, the king was already an investor in the original Bergen Greenland Company, but he now comes in on his own and he turns the small, scrabbling Danish colony on Greenland into a royal monopoly. And that's very important because it means that others can't muscle in. So just like the East India Company has a monopoly that it defends very fiercely for 300 years in India, and no other British merchant bodies can muscle in there, several try, the royal monopoly on Greenland means that the crown has a complete control of the ivory skins, furs and blubber, which are coming out of there.

11:55And this, again, works as a model for the king, but obviously reduces the indigenous inhabitants to selling only to one exporter who can control the price and who pays bottom dollar rather than top dollar for these products that these guys are gathering. So it's not at all a happy situation for the Inuit, many of whom do not want to convert to Christianity, and many of whom want to be able to choose who they sell their goods to, but they're not allowed to. I mean, is this company sort of shareholder driven? Is it that the king has got investors, just like we saw for the East India Company? And so it is a dividend enterprise.

12:34Exactly. So you've got a highly discriminatory system whereby the Inuits can only sell to this monopoly company, and the profits go not to the Inuit, but to the shareholders in Copenhagen. Okay, but it's not, yeah. I've just sort of, you know, you might have in your mind that the king sends it out and the king pays for it and the king takes all the profit. But you forget that actually even the king's not willing to put all his money into it. He'll get shareholders on and investors on. So it immediately becomes a corporation. Exactly. I think he has a majority of the shares. And this, by the 1770s, becomes something called the Royal Greenlandic Trading Company.

13:12and continues to have this monopoly, which survives until the 1950s. Extraordinary. That's really late. A complete straggle hold on all trade in the area. And then you have the usual colonial discrimination. This is the high era of colonialism around the world. And racial attitudes are obviously very different in Europe to how we look on them now. So in 1782, a whole series of extremely discriminatory racial laws are established. Anita, do you want to tell us about those? Well, I mean, yeah, it's a miserable list, to be honest. I mean, Danish people could only marry a Greenlander woman who has some white blood.

13:53So it's this whole miscegenation thing that happens every time you have sort of a colonial enterprise. Children had to be raised as Greenlanders. So your path is mapped out. So if you are a child of one of these mixed-blooded Greenlander women, you're going to be a hunter and a gatherer for the corporation. So you're going to go out, you're going to get raw materials, just keep the supply line going. And all marriages have to be approved and certified by the colonial authority. So you have no autonomy at all. You don't get to fall in love with who you want. You don't get to go and decide what your children are going to be.

14:26You can't even have any hopes and aspirations for your kids because what they are, they are assets of the corporation. It is entirely dehumanizing, but it is a way the machine keeps rolling. And there are travel accounts and memoirs from the time that show these very discriminatory racial attitudes at work. So the local Inuit are treated as the natives. They are supposed to be Christian, and yet they're not allowed to trade with anyone else. So it's a sort of double bind. They're forced to remain in their place, providing skins, blubber and ivory. They're meant to be Christian. They're meant to pay taxes, but they're not allowed to choose who they trade to.

15:08So all in all, it's a pretty rough deal for the Inuits. It is not a happy history any more than any other colonial history is happy for the colonized. The colonial administration continues to require the Inuit to remain as hunters. And this continues right through into the 19th century. when for the first time the Americans begin to take an interest in Greenland. And we're going to deal with this in more detail in a future episode. But we're talking sort of around about 1867. So if you think Trump offering to buy Greenland is an outrage, how can you just offer to buy a country? Well, it happened before.

15:45It happened in 1867 where they were thinking about, well, I mean, Greenland could be quite good for us. It's obviously doing the Danish no harm at all. and they had precedent because they'd already purchased Alaska from the Russian Empire. So, you know, you can buy yourself a country. It wasn't unknown to do that. We've got our wonderful friend, Daniel Imavar, who has had a great problem with his book about the hidden American empire because now it's very much out there. Yeah, but I mean, but it was hidden at the time. And so, you know, these negotiations, which the Secretary of State was conducting for five and a half million dollars to buy Greenland.

16:27I mean, they got quite near the wire. The negotiations had travelled quite a lot, but it was all done in secret. And in fact, William, the papers about this attempted purchase only became public fairly recently. So we'll get into that in more detail with Daniel Imabar. And then there's more, because I think in 1916, the US buys another set of Danish islands, which are now the US Virgin Islands. These are the Virgin Islands that, you know, people might go jetting off to in the Caribbean. This is 1916. There had been attempts previously by the United States who are trying to extend their sphere of influence to get more territory in that particular area.

17:05And they buy the Danish West Indies for quite a lot more than the five and a half million in gold that they were offering Greenland. They pay 25 million in gold. And in exchange, Denmark says, okay, look, we'll sell you this if you just get off our back about Greenland because they'd been quite sort of harassed and harried about Greenland. The deal hadn't gone through before in 1867, but the American's interest had never gone away. So they said, look, if you could just lay off Greenland, we'll sell you this and let's call it quits. And so that happens. The Danish West Indies becomes the US Virgin Islands.

17:40It's an unincorporated territory of the United States. Again, we'll get Daniel Imavar on because he knows all about how these deals work and they sort of fit into the sphere of influence thing. We're about to take a break, but the next bit of history is something we're going to be dealing with. And it's an extraordinary story that we're going to deal with Daniel in the next episode. But very briefly, when the Germans take Denmark, the US takes Greenland for the course of the Second World War. And in the second half, we're going to come back to what happens when the American occupation of Greenland ends in 1945.

18:20Welcome back. So we've just given you sort of the early history of this Danish interest in Greenland and this tug of war that's going on between the United States and Denmark. And really, actually, it all gets taken out of the Danish hands because of this occupation that William was telling you about. The Nazis are in Denmark. And so, you know, they can't really do anything about Greenland because they're occupied. So the United States says, actually, in a nutshell, We'll look after it for you. We'll talk about it later. When Denmark was eventually liberated from German occupation in 1945, the US rescinded its emergency powers over Greenland.

18:54They did transfer control back to Denmark, but this is what the United States has done before. We've seen it. Look at the Chagos Islands as well, for example. They will keep a substantial presence on strategic islands. And that's what they do here. So they leave, sort of, but they leave a presence in Greenland. And it's quite a substantial presence in Greenland because geographically speaking, William, it's a really important place now in geopolitics. It is. And this is now 1946. The new United Nations is asking all its members, including Denmark, if they possess colonies. and this puts Denmark in a difficult position because of course it does have this colony in Greenland.

19:43I mean we should explain that the United Nations doesn't like colonies. I mean the whole thing and this is why it chafes. The idea of the United Nations chafed even when they were talking about it at Yalta because Winston Churchill thought you know what they're going to start nipping at our British Empire and I don't like it. We have just recorded a wonderful session with my friend Thant Mintu on United Nations, which we must make available to all our viewers. It's a bonus episode, but it was so good. I think we must make it. Genuinely think it's one of the best bonus episodes. And I think that's a really good idea, William.

20:14Let's do it. We'll make it open to everybody so you can just see, you know, sort of the colliber of guests we get on on the bonus. He also talks about and do listen to this. Colliber. I'm joking. It is. It's not like the Lewis Chester. I know what I'm doing. I thought it wasn't the Lewis Chester moment. But what Thant does talk about is that the whole birth of the United Nations is predicated on the fact that we're going to be a free and more equal and much nicer world after the war. And so we don't like colonies. So, you know, when, William, you say that, you know, they ask all the countries, hands up who's got a colony and Denmark sort of half-masked.

20:53We kind of do. It is a difficult thing to have colonies after the creation of the United Nations. This organization, which was originally founded by FDR, ends up being far more dominated by post-colonial countries like India under Nehru or Nasser in Egypt than anyone had anticipated. And the pressure is on. So in 1953, Greenland is redefined as a district of Denmark, just as, for example, the French Caribbean islands become part Departement of France, as does Réunion in the Indian Ocean. So all these countries are forced to rejiggle how they look on colonies, and many of them make them part of the mainland in legal terms.

21:40And that conceivably is to extend rights to the people in these places, that they're no longer the colonized, you know, they're no longer underlings. I mean, that's theoretically what should happen if you're part of a country. You have the same rights, same access to rule of law and everything else. But in practice, it doesn't happen in Greenland. Yeah. So in Greenland, there's a whole lot. And this is, you know, there are similar stories in Australia with the indigenous there. There's similar stories in Canada, which we're going to deal with, with indigenous in Canada. But in this post-war period, there are all these well-meant attempts to take the indigenous communities and modernize them, in inverted commas, to bring them into the Western ways.

22:23and a government commission in 1950 highlights the negative consequences of Denmark's colonial policy, including the low standards of living for the Inuits, the isolation, the severe inequality, and they bring about a number of reforms. One is the sort of forced relocation of the Inuit into Nuuk and the other urban centers, which are very few, and villages are forcibly shut down by the Danish government if they're deemed too small or lacking in economic activity. And all this is well meant. It's paternalistic. The people in Copenhagen think that they're trying to help the Inuits, but it involves force.

23:01It involves compulsion. And so you have Inuits communities being sort of corralled into urban centers. And the aim becomes to assimilate these hunters who who for so long have been forced to hunt by the Danish colonial authorities, they're now being forced to become urbanised. And this disrupts community and screws up families. What do they do about language, William? I mean, do they let Inuits keep their own language? Because that is a really important aspect of self-identification for people who live under, even if it's not colonial, if you've been redefined. Can you keep your language in this new world?

23:41You can keep your language, but there's definitely a premium on speaking Danish, like in all other colonial societies. And Danish speakers are viewed as being superior to Greenlandic speakers. Civil servants born in Greenland, in other words, Inuit-born civil servants, only paid a fraction of the salary paid to those born in Denmark. So although Greenland is now supposed to be part of Denmark, there is the old colonial divisions or the old colonial hierarchy continues. And then there are further in the 1950s, there are further social experiments to try and improve things. Again, well-meaning, but again with pretty catastrophic results.

24:24and in 1951, 22 Inuit children aged from five to nine are separated from their families and sent to Denmark. And again, this was encouraged by well-meaning organisations like Save the Children, Denmark, and the idea is to create a kind of Inuit intelligentsia or Little Danes as they're called. Oh God, do you know what this sounds like though? This sounds so much like, I mean, we're going to cover it in Canada in great detail, but these sort of reform schools that children are taken from their tribes or taken from their homes and transported miles and miles away. It happens in Australia where Aboriginal children are taken and they're often put into, I mean, I don't think it's the case here with Denmark.

25:06These seem to be sort of Danish schools, but certainly in those areas they're put into religious schools where they face complete humiliation and brutality often and horrible sort of legacies of death as well in those places. These are not separate schools. These are normal Danish schools. Yeah, Danish schools. There are only 22 of these kids in the first run. But, of course, they find it very difficult to fit in. And when they return to Greenland, they're forced to live in an orphanage separated from their families. They are banned from speaking their native language because they've been educated in Danish.

25:39And they think it's a bad investment if they've educated them in Danish and they just go back to speaking Inuit. it. So these poor kids are kept in their orphanage, forced to become Danes. But of course, what happens is they're seen as strangers by other Greenlanders, struggling to fit in. And many of them return to Copenhagen and back to Denmark because they don't fit in in Greenland. And they've got used to living without ice, without the winter darkness. The number that really strikes me is of these 22 little souls, up to half developed mental illnesses or substance abuse problems, because you are fracturing a person's identity.

26:15taking them from one place, from the people who love them and who know them and who know their stories, transporting them to a country that may not be very kind to them. Whatever the paternalistic projection was here, they have a really rough time when they go to Denmark and then they move back into orphanages as if their families are dead and they're not dead. So you can understand why this has a complete wounding effect on their little minds. It's absolutely true. And now this is a live issue. Save the children, formally apologised for this initiative in 2015. The Danish government issued another apology in 2020, but has refused compensation.