Greenland, It Will Never Be For Sale

President Trump, casting a covetous eye on Greenland, has my attention. I have a history in that place, so little known to Americans in general, having spent the entire year of 1964, at Thule Air Force Base, now Pitufik Space Station, 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle.  The road I’ve traveled since has me deeply concerned about Trump in every respect— believing that everything he represents and wants is contrary to the best interests of our country, to the world, and for mankind altogether, excepting perhaps oligarchs.

At Thule I was responsible for over-seeing the maintenance of our air-to-air missiles and for supervising the loading of those missiles on board our F-102 fighter jets in the event of declared hostilities with our great “bugaboo”, the Soviet Union.

Many years later, after volunteering for and spending a year in Vietnam, I became a full-fledged “peacenik”, an adjunct professor of peace studies at the University of Maine, angry and in despair about this country’s militarism and particularly agitated about our vast empire of military bases on foreign lands.  My experiences in Greenland and Vietnam were surely foundational to my conversion.  I had become well-aware of the wide-spread, anti-base movement and sympathetic with the neighbors of these bases who, so often, experienced profound environmental degradation, noise pollution, and violence.

The heartless displacement of the Inughuit people of Thule, done without forenotice to enable the construction of a military base in 1951, thirteen years prior to my assignment there, offers a good case in point.  The place they called Uummannaq had been their home for centuries, and was the sacred burial grounds of their ancestors.  In May of 1953, three hundred men, women, and children, having been given four days to vacate their modest sod homes, set off by dog sled for a place called Qaanaaq, 150 kilometers across the icecap. No promised houses awaited them and they were forced to live thru the cold, wet summer in the tents they’d been given.  They were denied the right to return to or hunt in their ancestral homelands.

I’d also learned that in 1968, a B52 had crashed on the icecap while attempting to make an emergency landing at Thule, spreading radio-active debris across the land.  Four nuclear weapons were on board; one, never to be recovered.

This history and my developing curiosity about the real stories behind our military empire, inspired my quest to visit Qaanaaq, a trip I was able to realize in 2008.  That journey, and the people I met provide the basis for my perspectives on Trump’s covetous ambitions.

The Principals

Aqqaluk Lynge – Former member of the Greenland Parliament. Former chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council (1995-2002). Member of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues,  Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters—Dartmouth College (2012) Author of “The Right to Return: Fifty Years of Struggle by Relocated Inughuit in Greenland” 

 

Aqqaluk Lynge

 I had the good fortune to meet and to interview Mr Lynge, who at the time was a visiting scholar at Dartmouth College.  He enabled my subsequent meetings with Qaanaaq people who had been among those evicted.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Uusaqqak Qujaukitsoq:

Hunter, fisherman, and leader of the so-called Hingitaq 53, the group of nearly 500 Inughuits who launched legal proceedings against Denmark seeking their right to return.  Uusaqqak had been a 12 year old boy, living at Uummannaq at the time of the eviction.

 

Tautianguaq Simigaq:

Simigaq, a hunter, had been one of 13 Inuit who worked on the B52 crash site, 11 of whom had died by the time of my visit.  He was among several hunters who reported seeing deformed walrus, seals, and fox in the area of the crash in the years since.

Traditional Inuighuit hunter in kayak

It is no exaggeration that my visit with the people I met in Qaanaaq and Siorapaluk, the northernmost year-round inhabited settlement in Greenland, remain in my soul all these years later.  Uusaqqak and his wife, Inger, invited me into their modest home and, though their English was limited, we spent many comfortable hours together, he sharing his life story to include the trauma of the dislocation, hunting and fishing, and education in Copenhagen.  His travels had taken him far and wide.  As a representative of the Inughuit people he had proudly once met Nelson Mandela.  Their 30 year old son, Magssanguaq, a virtual renaissance man, spoke English and Danish, and was a teacher, a musician, a poet, and an accomplished photographer.  He had a keen sense of the injustices his people had suffered as victims of colonialism and would become my interpreter and guide.

Mags and I devoted much of our time in Qaanaaq to visiting and interviewing elders  who had been victims of the displacement.  Those sessions were, without exception, emotional in the telling and the listening.

My immersion into Inuighuit culture, a deep one during my brief visit, but a lasting one of reflection, leaves me profoundly hopeful–  believing that it will not come to pass that Trump’s rapacious nature shall determine the eventual fate of Greenland.  I was made mindful of Syracuse University Scholar Philip Arnold’s “The Urgency of Indigenous Values” in which he argues that the very future of the world is dependent upon the ascendency of “green values” of indigenous populations everywhere, as opposed to the “raider” values of our dominant culture.  The history of the Inughuits who had lived on their sacred lands at Uummannaq for centuries is known by all Greenlanders, 89% of whom are of Inuit descent.  I would assert that Trump represents, even personifies “raider” values, and is seen that way by a large majority of all people of Greenland.

This morning I have read that Trump is bringing Columbus Day “back from the ashes.” Hmmm!  How might that play with indigenous people?

Speaking of Trump and his eye on Greenland, the senior statesman Aqqaluk Lynge had this to say on 60 Minutes: “He mentioned Greenland like it was a toy or something. It was ugly!” (https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=889308826606822)  Watch it.  They’re not words of casual sentiment.