Greenland

 For hundreds of years, they treated Greenland and its people with unprecedented respect; Greenlandic and Danish are both official languages. According to Kjærgaard, there is no record of a Dane killing an Inuit in the 18th and 19th centuries; thousands were slaughtered in the US. Hammond agrees. “Thank God it was the Danes who colonised us, not the British or Americans or Dutch or Germans,” she says. “The Danes respected our lifestyle and culture and that has made it possible for us to maintain our own identity as a people.

“The reason for this exceptional colonial history, thinks Kjærgaard, is not that the Danes were uniquely civilised (they were more typical colonial oppressors in the Caribbean) but because the Norwegian-Danish kingdom had a grand passion for Greenland. Nordic people travelled hundreds of miles beyond Iceland to first settle here in the 10th century. Some suggest that lonely Erik the Red jokingly named it “green” to fool his fellow Vikings into joining him, although southern Greenland was actually a lush colour compared with Iceland. The Norwegians disappeared from Greenland during the 15th century but the Danish-Norwegian kingdom returned in 1721 to “recover” the old country. After the Danish-Norwegian kingdom broke up, Denmark inherited Greenland with a keen sense of duty.

From an article taking a look at Greenlanders’ hope for independence from Denmark.

7:07 pm  •  11 December 2008