Disko bay was dotted with small icebergs as I left the cottage I was renting in a small town in western Greenland one grey Sunday morning in early March. I sank up to my knees, having failed to work out where the safe path up the hill to the road was under the snow. People say the icebergs aren’t as big as they used to be. Somebody showed me a picture of Ilulissat from the 1990s, a 300-feet-tall iceberg Alping it over the town. There were none that large to be seen now, but the previous evening, when the sky had been clear, I’d seen big bergs on the horizon, hazy and grey, released from the mouth of Ilulissat icefjord like a fleet of castles scattered on the sea.
I walked up the road, past houses whose wood-panelled exteriors, painted in bright colours, hide their inner strength: concrete walls fixed to solid rock. Like all Greenlandic towns, and many Arctic towns in Canada, Russia and Alaska, Ilulissat has no roads linking it to other settlements. There are cars and taxis. I came to a junction with a sledge pictogram on a road sign, indicating that runner traffic, mainly snowmobiles, crosses the route of wheeled traffic. A dog sled shot over, almost flying.
The 18th-century Lutheran church overlooking the bay, with its dark timbers and elegant bell tower, was unlocked, warm and smelled of polish, but there was nobody about. It’s said to have been built, in this treeless place 180 miles north of the Arctic Circle, partly of driftwood. Not far away, in an anonymous modern building, I came across a Baptist outpost. I put my head inside, saw a handful of worshippers in a small bare room listening to a dark-bearded figure preaching in Greenlandic, and decided to come back later. When I did, I met the pastor, who turned out to be an American, Chris Shull, born in Philadelphia and raised in Maryland. In 1999, long before Donald Trump openly coveted Greenland, Shull was called to preach in a place where there were no Baptists, a place he knew nothing about. ‘I just started praying about a place where God would want me to go,’ he said when we sat down to talk the next day. ‘And God revealed Greenland to me.’
Shull is soft-spoken, courteous and intense, confident and determined in his faith and calling, but still wearing the mantle of a shyness he presumably never had occasion to lose. He’s 46. He and his wife have raised five children in Greenland. The children, partly home-schooled, don’t have good Greenlandic, but Shull speaks it decently. He’s lived in the country for eighteen years. When he first experienced the divine revelation of his mission, he could neither move to Greenland nor learn the language. Denmark had no truck with self-employed preachers settling in its territory, and there were no Greenlandic teaching materials in English. Shull moved to Reykjavik, and while he fought for the right to set up his church in Greenland, he began translating Danish-language Greenlandic textbooks into English, teaching himself Danish in the process.
In Ilulissat, which is Greenland’s third largest town but has fewer than five thousand inhabitants, Shull made friends and the odd convert. He shrugs off the uncontroversial nature of abortion in the town. He holds services in the local prison. He runs a children’s club. He imports Kool-Aid from the States: the children really love it. He counsels the desperate. In a country that has far and away the world’s worst suicide rate, six times the global average, Shull says at least one man has told him he saved his life. He takes part in an essential rite of Greenlandic manhood, the seal hunt. ‘I’ve shot at a lot of them. I miss a lot. It’s very hard to hit them.’ He takes as the sign of his acceptance not the invitations to parties where guests are invited to cut themselves a piece of whale meat from an open plastic bag, but the fact that people aren’t offended any more when he turns the whale meat down.
The family has dual Danish and American citizenship. Shull is unusual, perhaps unique: an uncompromising supporter of Donald Trump and a self-described American patriot who is also a committed Greenlander, proclaiming his intention to live there for the rest of his life. At different times in our conversation he used ‘we’ to mean ‘we Americans’ and ‘we Greenlanders’. He’s strongly against America absorbing the island. His contempt for Democrats runs deep – ‘Democrats are pretty much anti-God. They don’t like Christians’ – but his fondness for Trump is founded on the idea that, unlike most politicians, the current president is a sincere man who follows through on his promises. He does what he says. And yet when it comes to taking over Greenland, Pastor Shull believes, or hopes, the president is only being provocative.
‘The first time [Trump said he wanted Greenland], in 2019, people were upset. They said: “Hey, we’re not for sale.” But then it kind of blew over quickly. This time it definitely made more of an impact. We try to stay out of it, but people ask us what we think
Like most modern Greenlanders, Henrik Jensen, a young fisherman I met later that day, wasn’t a churchgoer.* He’d spent much of that Sunday preparing for the local heats of the Avannaata Qimussersua, Greenland’s biggest dog sled race, scheduled for the end of March. He expected to qualify. He hoped to win. He had placed second last year. I asked him to imagine living through the most extreme scenario implied by Trump’s Putin-like rhetoric: an actual invasion, US Marine helicopters landing, Americans declaring themselves in charge.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I would be surprised.’ He thought about it some more. ‘I would be surprised, but also – I would just do what I do. Like today.’
After I asked the question I remembered I’d asked something very similar once before, in 2014, to a Ukrainian official in Donetsk, about an imminent Russian takeover. His eyes had widened; his mind raced through the implications. Nobody in Greenland takes such an absurd scenario seriously, and yet Jensen had turned the idea over in his mind, thought about what he values – his family, his house, his boat, his dogs – and couldn’t see how he would be prevented from living as he does now. He’s young, only 26, and an optimist. It wasn’t as if he wanted it to happen.
‘And what about Denmark?’ I asked him. ‘There seem to be a lot of Greenlanders who are feeling quite angry about Denmark.’
‘I’m not angry,’ he said. ‘They are good to us, but they have made mistakes, like everybody. We’re not human unless we make mistakes. But I still want to be independent.’
It’s not easy to travel around Greenland in winter. The traveller is dependent on aircraft – Air Greenland’s fleet of scarlet propeller-driven planes, carrying 37 passengers each, and helicopters – and the weather is capricious. Even the big Airbus from Copenhagen, Greenland’s main winter connection to the outside world, can’t always land. The flight from Denmark takes four and a half hours; when we reached Greenland, the pilot began to circle, warning us the weather was so bad we might not make it. The usual alternative is to fly to Reykjavik for fuel, fly back to Copenhagen and try again the next day. Just when we were resigning ourselves to this, the plane began its final descent and we somehow landed, in what looked to me like a full-on snowstorm. There was one round of applause when we touched down, and another when the plane stopped. All this is by way of saying that winter journeys in Greenland are heavily prejudiced towards the practical and the larger towns, like Ilulissat, which also tend to be more prosperous and bustling, and away from the smaller settlements, where poverty and decline is the norm. I’d been warned my itinerary might give me a lopsided view of Greenland’s standard of living. But there can also be a tendency towards what might be called underbellyism – for an inquisitive writer to overcompensate for apparent prosperity. In Jensen, I felt I’d stumbled across a man who exemplified worldly success in modern Greenland, but at the same time was sticking as close as possible to the old Inuit traditions; this was part of the picture, too, along with the barely-clinging-on villages where homes lack running water and trash piles up in open heaps year after year.
Jensen was young, healthy, cheerful, walking on the balls of his feet, with a wife, a six-year-old son and a four-year-old daughter, a home of his own, a six-metre fishing boat, a car and 36 – three teams’ worth – sledge dogs. He was born and raised in Ilulissat, like his family as far back as he knew, and seemed as joyful in his blessings as a man could be without it being annoying. His main income comes from catching halibut. He drags a line strung with thousands of hooks behind his boat. He caught nineteen tonnes last year, worth about £75,000, working mostly on his own, selling the catch to the collectively owned processing plant by the harbour. When he isn’t fishing, he shoots seals; he uses the meat to feed his dogs. In autumn, he loads a dog team and his hunting sledge onto his boat, sails north with his buddies, mushes inland, shoots reindeer, loads the kill onto the sledge and takes it back to feed his family. In between the fishing and hunting, he works with tourists, or practises with his racing sledge. In November, the family takes a holiday, usually to Dubai.
‘We’ve been there five times,’ he said. ‘We love it.’
He drove me out to meet his dogs, which are Greenland sled dogs, rather than the huskies or malamutes seen in Alaska and Canada. With his hands bare, in spite of the -15ºC cold and the cutting wind, a lit cigarette between his fingers, he touched the noses of some five-month-old pups who gathered round him, black and white beasts with snow stuck between the fine outer hairs of their coats. In a month, they’d be old enough to pull a sledge. They’re not hard to train, according to Jensen; you just harness the mother to the front, and her children follow. The dogs sleep outside, bound with long, loose chains, curled up tightly on beds of straw in scoops taken out of a wall of snow. Nearby was his son’s snowmobile (he mushed for the first time when he was five), a cargo sledge, a general purpose sledge and the stripped-down racing sledge, weighing only eleven kilos. In the Avannaata Qimussersua, the dozen dogs have to haul the sledge and the seated musher over a 40-kilometre course. Ninety minutes is a good time.
I asked Jensen if he was going to vote in the upcoming election, which fell a few days after the qualifier. He said he would, but hadn’t decided who for. All he knew was that he wasn’t going to vote for the incumbents, a coalition led by the left-wing Inuit Ataqatigiit (IA).
‘Why not?’
‘They are too social-like
‘Socialist?’
‘They want to help those who don’t want to work. Everybody needs to work, if they want independence.’
Nor did he approve of IA’s successful opposition, on environmental grounds, to a new mine in southern Greenland. The open-cast mine would have dug out valuable rare earth minerals essential for modern manufacturing, but would also, as a by-product, have excavated huge amounts of uranium. IA’s leader, Múte Egede, won the 2021 election on the basis of his campaign against the mine. But most Greenlandic politicians, Egede included, still hope for better, cleaner mines that will underwrite their country’s independent future. Jensen said that taxes were already too high and Greenland should have let the mine go ahead. ‘I know we’re going to pay more taxes if we’re going to be independent,’ he said. ‘But over time, we can use our resources to help get taxes down. We have a lot of things to sell the world.’
Like capital cities everywhere, Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, 350 miles south of Ilulissat, struggles to find homes for all who need them. The population is growing. There are multiple cranes on the skyline, and I saw construction workers fitting panels for new apartment blocks in cruelly low temperatures, but there’s a fifteen-year wait for a council flat, and you can expect to pay the equivalent of a quarter of a million pounds for a two-bedroom apartment. When I called on Bibi Nathansen, I found her comfortable in her warm and spacious kitchen in an eight-storey block in Qinngorput, a new district out beyond the airport. Only it turned out she wasn’t comfortable at all. She’d been given notice to move out. The flat came with her job as news editor at the Greenland public broadcaster, KNR, and she’d quit. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do about work, or a roof over my head, or money,’ she said, with more serenity than the bare words suggest. ‘I went to the bank and they said: “You can’t buy anything as long as you’re alone.”’
Hearing somebody tell you they just resigned from a secure job that came with a flat because they didn’t like the job any more sounds radical, to a non-Greenlander at least, when it’s fifteen below zero with head-high snowdrifts outside, but Nathansen didn’t seem to regret it. Her actions resonated with the public mood: impatience with the status quo, a readiness, perhaps, to take a risk for whatever goes under the obscure stamp of independence.
Most of Europe and the wider world take Donald Trump’s insistent demands for the United States to ‘get’ Greenland (‘one way or the other, we’re going to get it,’ he told Congress) as the sign of a new era of American aggression, when the US will seize other people’s territory by force and intimidation, alone or in co-operation with other powerful, like-minded tyrants and satraps. It’s a reasonable fear. Trump’s lust for Greenland is of a piece with his demand to ‘get back’ the Panama Canal; to absorb Canada as America’s 51st state; to build, with Benjamin Netanyahu’s blessing, a beach resort on the corpses and ruined cities of Gaza; to partition Ukraine with Vladimir Putin and plunder it in perpetuity. It also fits with Trump’s much older declaration that, although he claims to have disagreed with the invasion of Iraq, ‘we should have taken the oil.’
Trump’s play for Greenland didn’t go down quite this way in the island itself. None of the Greenlanders I met want to, or expect to be forced to, accede to the president’s high-handed claim. But even as it eyes the future imperialist power, Greenland has to deal with the current colonial power: Denmark. Officially, Denmark doesn’t see itself as having a colonial relationship with Greenland. Greenland has considerable powers to run its own affairs and on paper Greenlanders have the same rights within the Danish Realm (Denmark, Greenland and the Faroe Islands) as any Dane. But the immediate effect of Trump’s menaces, and the visit to Nuuk in January of his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, was to highlight the paradox of Denmark defending Greenland’s freedom, when it is Denmark’s ownership of Greenland that makes the country unfree in the eyes of many Greenlanders.
From the window of Nathansen’s flat, I could see the runway of Nuuk’s new airport against the white sky, jutting out from behind black crags patched with snow. Trump Jr had landed there in Trump Force One, distributed MAGA hats, eaten lunch at a hotel and after a few hours glad-handing, flown away again. ‘The story of Denmark and Greenland is bigger than the Trump story in Greenland,’ Nathansen said. ‘But the Trump story, and how Trump Jr came to Greenland – that’s why the difficult questions were asked between Denmark and Greenland, and that’s where it all started. Nothing’s going to be how it used to be before Trump Jr came to Nuuk. We’ve never been, as long as I remember, so angry at Denmark before, and the divide between us is so big
Greenlanders will tell you there are two Danish clichés about the island. One is that Denmark’s 300-year rule over Greenland has been benign, generous and open-hearted; the other is that Greenland is utterly dependent on the subsidy it receives from the Danish government, that it’s a charity case and a burden on the Danish taxpayer. As unwelcome as Trump’s interest is, it puts a value on Greenland that the self-consciously charitable Denmark has never given it – or, as the cynical part of the Greenlandic population has come to believe, has pretended not to.
A few weeks after Donald Trump Jr’s visit, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, DR, put out a documentary called Greenland’s White Gold, about a Danish-owned mine that operated at Ivittuut, near Arsuk in south-west Greenland, from 1859 until 1987. The mine, really more of a quarry, yielded cryolite, a rare mineral that made possible the cheap mass production of aluminium. The Danish financiers who backed the venture made plenty of money out of it. During the Second World War, when Denmark was occupied by the Nazis, US troops occupied Greenland, partly to secure the air bridge to Britain, but mainly to protect Ivittuut cryolite, which was used to smelt the aluminium for Allied warplanes. After the war the mine, and its wartime earnings, were handed back to its Danish shareholders. The most easily accessible reserves were exhausted by 1962, but the mining company had a processing plant in Denmark that carried on turning out cryolite, using already mined ore, until 1987, by which time it was part-owned by the Danish state.
In the film, Naja Graugaard, a part-Greenlandic Danish researcher whose grandmother was from Arsuk, and her collaborator, another young academic called Marie-Louise Jensen, examine the archived account books of the cryolite company to tot up how much money, in modern terms, the mine and factory made, and how this figure compares to the amount the Danish government has spent on Greenland over the years. Various figures are put forward over the documentary’s 55 minutes, but the one that leaps out is the conclusion that over its lifetime cryolite yielded 400 billion kroner in today’s money, equivalent to £45 billion.
This figure was much discussed on Greenlandic Facebook, the favoured medium of political discourse on the island. Only three years ago, DR broadcast an exposé of the Danish state’s implantation in the 1960s and 1970s of IUDs into Greenlandic women and girls, often without their or their parents’ consent or knowledge. The Spiral Scandal affected more than 4500 women, an enormous number in a country that even today only has a population of 57,000. The combination of these stories – the colonial power trying to save money on Greenland’s welfare spending by means of a clandestine programme of birth control while also quietly shipping billions of kroner out of the country for its own benefit – incensed Greenlanders. Trump’s bid to possess their country, with its emphasis on Greenland’s potential mineral riches, might have made Denmark seem like the better patron, but the documentary served to make Denmark look more Trump-like than Trump in the eyes of already dissatisfied Greenlanders.
What made things worse was the hostility to the documentary in Denmark. It was claimed that the filmmakers had misrepresented the figures: 400 billion kroner wasn’t the profit from the mine, but the turnover before expenses were deducted. DR pulled the film from its website ten days after it came out and reportedly sacked the editor responsible. Greenlanders were further provoked when a DR satire show, Close to the Truth, ran a segment called ‘Greenland’s Brown Ice’, mocking the title of the film. In the sketch, a parody of Graugaard, with Greenlandic tattoos drawn on her chin in felt tip, investigates the sales of an ice lolly called Giant Eskimo (popular in Denmark until 2021, when its manufacturers, to the disgruntlement of most Danes, changed its name, accepting that Inuit people found the word ‘Eskimo’ derogatory). Parody-Graugaard asks a child how many lollies she can eat, multiplies the answer – a million – by the number of children in Denmark and weeps that the Danes have ripped off Greenland to the tune of a trillion kroner. (The real Graugaard weeps in the documentary when told the 400 billion kroner figure.) Greenlanders who complained in the comments were accused by Danes of failing to see that DR was the butt of the joke, of being too sensitive, of wallowing in their victimhood.
‘We’re tired of being told that it’s us that’s sensitive,’ Nathansen said. Of the documentary itself, she added: ‘Things have been done above our heads and without our influence, things we didn’t even know about. We can’t change the past, but there’s the ethical question of how you treat other human beings and their country – the lack of respect, or just taking the things you can use and leaving the rest.’
I was reminded of the run-up to the referendum on Scottish independence in 2014, when I was living in England and hearing from friends and family in Scotland about England’s contempt towards their country as if that contempt were universal. I realised how efficient social media was at showing people in one country the worst things being said about them by the least likeable people in the other. There are Danes, particularly those with connections to Greenland, who are more inclined to see things from the Greenlandic point of view. During the White Gold uproar, many of them spoke up. Before coming to Greenland I talked to Morten Rasch, a Danish climate scientist who worked there for many years. He felt DR had been too quick to cave in to Danish pressure to renounce the documentary. The film had made a good case that the costs of the mine, as well as its profits, had been to Denmark’s benefit: the workers’ wages were Danish miners’ wages, equipment costs went to Danish suppliers and so on.
The Trump assault had caught Denmark off guard because it was based on Greenland’s desirability, a concept Denmark had long ago rejected. ‘If you look at [Denmark’s] general perception, it’s very much that Greenland costs us a lot of money each year, they drink too much, they commit suicide, they have big problems with incest. That’s just not how I see it,’ Rasch told me. ‘There are problems with poor people in Greenland, but I also see a Greenlandic society that is a society like ours. And what has happened since Trump put a value on Greenland, actually said that this is so important for the US that we want to take this territory
In the 1990s, Rasch worked at a Danish research station in Qeqertarsuaq, on Disko Island, across the bay from Ilulissat. He sees now what he didn’t see so clearly then, that the Danes held themselves apart from and above their supposed fellow citizens. ‘In the 1990s, Qeqertarsuaq was a town of twelve hundred people and five thousand dogs. And then there were about forty or fifty Danes with all the leading positions in the community, and we’d have lunches, you know, during the weekend, very much expat, talking about problems with our Greenlandic employees, that every time the sun was shining, none of them came to work because they went seal-hunting or whale-hunting instead. And that was not a proper way of running a society – that was our perception. And then Greenland started the Greenlandification process – by then they had this Home Rule government. And one of the things they started to do was to kick out Danes. They started with schoolteachers, most of whom were Danish. In our expat community we were sitting at these lunches and saying: “This will never work. They will never be able to run a society in this way.” And then I came back five years ago, and the whole community had changed. The population had fallen from 1200 people to 800. The number of dogs had fallen to 350, and there were only three or four Danes in town. And I noticed it was a well-functioning community. People were still going hunting during the weekend or when there were whales, or polar bears, or seals. But I think that what you lose in what you might call “Western efficiency” you gain in self-esteem by having the ability to rule your own life, and being the master in your own house
Even Greenland’s most outspoken Trump supporter, a former bricklayer called Jørgen Boassen, says he doesn’t want America to take over. He talks about a free association agreement with the US along the lines of its deal with the Marshall Islands, the Pacific archipelago where America test-detonated 67 nuclear weapons in the 1940s and 1950s. The Marshall Islands gets nominal sovereignty and a hefty subsidy from Washington; the US is responsible for its defence. When I bumped into him in a café in Nuuk’s modern shopping mall, Boassen told me Greenland might get more out of the US that way than it gets out of Denmark now (4.3 billion kroner, £482 million, about half of government revenue). ‘Everything is possible,’ he said.
Boassen has a starry-eyed enthusiasm for Trump combined with some contradictory rhetoric. He’s angry about Denmark’s ethnic prejudice against Greenlanders, but also angry that Denmark doesn’t let its ethnic prejudice rip against non-European immigrants; he’s angry that Denmark is confronting Russia over Ukraine, since Russia is clearly not a threat, but also angry that Denmark isn’t spending more to defend Greenland from Russia, since Russia is clearly a threat. His rise to prominence is a paradigm of the way Trump and his sprawling court are spreading their war on democracy beyond their own country: rapid, purposeful, driven by private networks, personal connections, individual obsessions and the chance of personal gain rather than by institutions or principles.
According to Boassen, last year he asked a friend at the Greenlandic government’s office in Washington how he could get an invite to Trump’s election night party. He heard nothing back, but when he saw his friend in Greenland a few months later, the friend took a picture of him in a Trump T-shirt. Later the friend met Tom Dans, a Trump-proximate former financier and one-time US government official, who has made the Americanisation of Greenland a personal project. Dans asked Boassen’s friend if there were any Trump supporters in Greenland and was shown the picture. Dans found Boassen on Facebook, got in touch, and paid for him and his fiancée to fly to America. Dans took them knocking on voters’ doors in Pittsburgh, then flew them down to West Palm Beach for Trump’s victory party. Before the event, Boassen met Nigel Farage. They sang ‘Rule, Britannia’ together and Farage told Boassen that Greenland had been Ukip’s inspiration on the road to Brexit (Greenland voted in a referendum in 1982 to leave the EEC, by 53 per cent to 47 per cent). At the party, Boassen met Donald Trump Jr and invited him to Greenland. A few months later, he got a text from the powerful young MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk, one of the Trump family’s favourite liberal-baiters and youth whipper-uppers. Kirk asked Boassen to come up with an itinerary for Junior’s trip and round up a gang of Trump-positive locals to greet him. After the trip, Boassen was rewarded with a job. He’s now the Greenlandic representative for Dans’s organisation, American Daybreak, although there’s no office. I asked how many people worked for American Daybreak. ‘Only Tom Dans and me,’ he said.
When I asked Boassen which party he was going to vote for in the election, he said: ‘The right one.’ I remembered voters in England using a similar form of words about voting for Brexit – it wasn’t a difference of opinion, but right and wrong. I guessed, and he confirmed, that Boassen was talking about Naleraq (‘Cairn’), the populist party that was rising in the polls. The three other main parties are the once dominant Siumut, the social democratic party that led Greenland to autonomy in the 1970s; IA, winners of the 2021 election, whose socialist ideals linger in its embrace of Greenland’s highly monopolistic economy; and the Democrats, Thatcherites with a Scandinavian twist. They all claim to want independence. But they’re not in a hurry. A commission set up by the IA government to look at the preliminary steps won’t report until next year, and no date has been set for a referendum. Naleraq claims to want independence more quickly, although it, too, is coy about timing. It’s the most explicitly Denmark-sceptic party, and the most explicitly America-curious. As far back as the 2021 election, the man who now leads Naleraq, Pele Broberg, was talking about using Trump’s interest in buying Greenland as an opportunity to play off the US and Denmark against each other, to Greenland’s financial benefit. Broberg decided to go into politics when he was running a café in Nuuk and had a customer, an artist, who refused to speak any language except Greenlandic, which not all the staff spoke. He was annoyed at first, but came to believe the artist was right. Later, during a brief stint as minister in a coalition government, he seemed to suggest that only those who are majority Inuit should have the right to vote in an independence referendum, even though he is the child of a Danish mother and an Inuit father. ‘What you feel and think as an immigrant has no bearing on this referendum debate,’ he told the Danish newspaper Berlingske.
In the run-up to this year’s election, there were prominent defections to Naleraq. One of Greenland’s two MPs in the Danish parliament, Aki-Matilda Høegh-Dam, left Siumut for Naleraq, followed by her fiancé, Kuno Fencker, a Siumut MP in the Greenlandic parliament. Before he quit, Fencker went to the US and visited the White House with Boassen and Dans (this was right after Trump’s inauguration). Fencker also met Andy Ogles, the Republican congressman behind the Make Greenland Great Again Act, which directs Congress to support Trump’s efforts to buy Greenland.
Perhaps the biggest prize for Naleraq was the country’s social media star, Qupanuk Olsen, a former mining engineer whose chirpy English-language YouTube channel and TikToks about Greenlandic culture and lifestyle have around a million followers across the two platforms. I met Olsen at a pre-election hustings. Why, I asked her, did the pro-independence, anti-colonial Greenlanders I’d met draw in their breath sharply when I mentioned Naleraq?
‘Maybe we have been seen as if we, like, that we are racist, maybe?’ she said.
‘Are you?’
‘No, we are not, of course not. People are just misunderstanding our main point that we want to protect the Greenlandic people, the Inuit people who are in Greenland. We want to protect them by law, so we no longer experience discrimination for being who we are.’
Fencker was more explicit, and more prickly. When I asked him about Greenland’s economic prospects if the country went it alone, he evoked its mineral resources, including its working gold mine, and the value of its fish, which, he said, were exported unnecessarily cheaply. He levelled the same accusation at me that was levelled at those who challenged optimistic economic forecasts for a Scotland independent of England and a Britain out of the EU: that I was working for Project Fear (the exact accusation was that I was a ‘leftist fear-mongering journalist’; later he said he’d been teasing).
He compared Denmark’s block grant to heroin given by an abusive man to a child bride to keep her dependent. He talked about the poverty of small settlements in order to question who truly risked being worse off. ‘Even if we become independent without the block grant, and everything goes as badly as you are predicting? Those people will not suffer at all. They will actually gain more than [they lose]. Who is prospering in this current system?’
I asked him to tell me.
‘The elite, and those are very few people, and I’m not going to be racist here, but you know, those who are earning a lot of money in Greenland are obviously people who are utilising the laws they have put on us
The elections were held a few days later. Naleraq doubled its seats in the 31-seat legislature, from four to eight. But the biggest winners were the Democrats, who became the largest party, with ten seats. IA and Siumut were crushed, going from 22 seats between them to just 11. The Democrats’ triumph was widely seen in the Euro-American media as a rebuke to Trump and a sign that Greenlandic voters weren’t looking for an early confrontation with Denmark. Certainly the Democrats, who have a close relationship with Denmark’s Conservative People’s Party, quickly ruled out Naleraq as a coalition partner.
There’s a fluidity to the intimate world of Greenlandic politics that’s not always obvious from the rigid ideological framing outsiders tend to extrapolate. Although he’s originally from Ilulissat, Fencker has never killed or tried to kill a seal, and saw no contradiction between, on the one hand, his attempts to draw a line between exploitative Danes and native Inuit, and on the other, his own partly Danish, partly Inuit ancestry. In his mind the Inuit/Danish distinction seemed more to do with the will to belong than with some form of blood right. He was proud of his Danish colonial administrator ancestors: his Danish grandfather, he said, had spoken better Greenlandic than he did. ‘Even though he was ethnic Danish, I consider him Greenlandic,’ he said. ‘Both my parents are a little bit mixed, you know, who isn’t, but we are 100 per cent Greenlandic, and also a part of the Inuit people.’
Similarly, and contrary to their image as a Denmark-facing party, the Democrats had mused in their election platform about a free association agreement with Denmark and the US. ‘We must be open and realistic about our options,’ the document reads. ‘The United States is the only realistic partner besides Denmark, and therefore it is necessary that we initiate an honest and respectful dialogue with them.’
Had MAGA America been patient and diplomatic, a Trump envoy could have had a comfortable conversation with the prime minister designate, Jens-Frederik Nielsen. But this is not the Trump way. Only two days after the election, meeting the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, in front of the media, Trump yet again demanded possession of Greenland. ‘We really need it,’ he said. ‘We have a couple of bases on Greenland already, and we have quite a few soldiers, and maybe you’ll see more and more soldiers go there. I don’t know.’
The following day, the Greenlandic party leaders issued a joint statement condemning ‘the repeated statements regarding the annexation and control of Greenland’. The next day, Nielsen and Egede led a demonstration affirming Greenlandic nationhood to the US consulate in Nuuk. A thousand people came – the equivalent of a crowd of 450,000 in London. A week later, it was announced that Usha Vance, wife of the American vice president, J.D. Vance, planned to attend the Avannaata Qimussersua dog sled race that Henrik Jensen hoped to compete in. A group of US officials had decided to come to Greenland without being officially invited; it emerged that the race had been the recipient of unsolicited sponsorship from the US government (Dans later claimed on X that he’d arranged the trip). Two US air force Hercules transport aircraft landed at Nuuk and disgorged black armoured limousines. The vice president popped up on social media to announce that he was coming along too. Denmark airlifted a planeload of police to the island. Then, belatedly realising the hostility they had generated, the Americans climbed down and the trip was radically scaled back. The Vances confined themselves to a visit to the US military base at Pituffik. The Avannaata Qimussersua was saved from the Vances elbowing their way in, and Jensen won. Nielsen got his coalition: all the parties except Naleraq. In an interview with NBC, Trump said: ‘We’ll get Greenland. Yeah, 100 per cent.’ He said there was a ‘good possibility that we could do it without military force’, but that ‘I don’t take anything off the table.’
Ever since Trump’s obsession with Greenland emerged, he and his underlings have been coming up with reasons why it should become part of America, not one of which makes much sense. In The Apprentice, an impulsive Trump would sometimes take against a good contestant and fire them, upon which, as Patrick Radden Keefe wrote in the New Yorker, ‘editors were often obliged to “reverse engineer” the episode, scouring hundreds of hours of footage to emphasise the few moments when the exemplary candidate might have slipped up, in an attempt to assemble an artificial version of history in which Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip decision made sense.’ The difference in the case of Greenland is that Trump has internalised some of the dubious rationalisations. The one heard most frequently is that America needs Greenland for its national security, that America’s enemies, notably Russia, have designs on the island, which guards the approaches from the Russian Arctic over the Pole to North America and the Atlantic. It’s true that on a map with the North Pole at its centre, the world looks very different from the cartography we’re used to. Russia, stretching across ten time zones from Chukotka to Murmansk, faces Alaska, northern Canada, Greenland and Iceland across a rapidly thawing polar ocean. It’s also true that Russia has built or renewed a string of military bases along its Arctic rim, opposite America, and that Denmark has virtually no military presence in or around Greenland. Russia has large industrial cities, such as Murmansk and Norilsk, in the Arctic, and its main nuclear submarine fleet is based there. But America already has a military base in Greenland, Pituffik. There’s nothing to stop the US enlarging it, and an existing treaty with Denmark gives Washington pretty much carte blanche to set up more bases. If Trump really thinks Greenland is essential to US security, he would buy the icebreakers and patrol ships to police its waters and the airstrips and planes to guard its skies: owning the land won’t in itself make America safer. And if he considers Russia a growing threat, why work so hard to help Putin wind up his invasion of Ukraine on Russia’s terms, why bully and threaten allies who challenge Russia and bring Nato to the brink of collapse? Earlier this year, the Republican-controlled Senate held hearings on Greenland, hearings sniggeringly called ‘Nuuk and Cranny’ in the legislature’s schedule. From the session chair, Ted Cruz, down, eager Trump-pleasers portrayed Russia and China as America’s bane and menace in the Arctic. On the same day, Trump was on the phone to Putin, taking down Russia’s terms for Ukraine’s capitulation.
The other rationalisation is that Greenland possesses a unique trove of valuable minerals that the US needs to reduce its dependence on China and other supposedly unreliable near monopoly suppliers – the same security argument, but from an indirect, economic angle. Trump has a lust for plunder – see Iraq and oil – but, again, the argument doesn’t stand up to examination. Building and running a mine in Greenland, with its lack of infrastructure, its difficult climate and limited local workforce, is a long-term, high-risk endeavour. If there were some rare and essential mineral that was found there and almost nowhere else, as was once the case with cryolite (available synthetically since the 1930s), an American mine could exploit it now, without America owning the country – the model of investment and exploitation that has served American capital well since the 19th century. If it didn’t mind going to war with Europe and the Greenlanders, the US could in theory seize Greenland, give US companies a mining monopoly and ease their path by trashing Greenland’s environmental restrictions. But this wouldn’t solve a more fundamental problem: the only way for America to break Chinese dominance in minerals, particularly rare earths, is to invest government money in both mines and the more complex, valuable business of processing the metals. And if American firms were to get big new subsidies to do this – they get some already – why would they do it in Greenland, when there are more readily accessible deposits in other places, including the US itself?
Perhaps it’s better to look elsewhere for the source of Trump’s preoccupation with Greenland and Canada. In the mythology of the real estate deal, for instance. ‘I do it to do it. Deals are my art form,’ his ghostwriter has him say in The Art of the Deal. Could Trump be following the business principle espoused by his French counterpart Bernard Tapie: ‘Never buy anything that’s for sale’? Should we look for the significance of the North in the president’s psychohistory? Trump’s mother’s first language was not English, but the language of a people who live on a small, chilly archipelago in the North Atlantic: she was a native Gaelic speaker from Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. His paternal grandfather, a German immigrant, made a small fortune running a hotel in northern Canada during the Klondike gold rush, selling food and booze and renting out trysting places for miners and sex workers.
It’s also true that there are personal frameworks for conceptualising the world that don’t make logical sense but aren’t considered signs of insanity. Trump has a penchant for the aesthetics of the conceptual, a deep attachment to symbols of power and identity, to flags and colours and, in particular, to shapes on maps. For Trump, all sorts of things are ‘perfect’ and ‘beautiful’ – the reserves of oil under American soil, or the ocean separating America from Europe, which is beautiful not as a body of water but as a distance. On some psychological level, the urge to possess Greenland might be a kind of geopolitical colouring-in, where the map is not the notation of a changed political reality, but it is the changed political reality that allows the map to be coloured in to one’s satisfaction, so that nothing spoils the beauty of the image. As Trump said recently of his desire to add Canada to the US, ‘this would be the most incredible country visually. If you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it – between Canada and the US. Just a straight artificial line. Somebody did it a long time ago – many, many decades ago – and it makes no sense.’
One afternoon I walked from the cottage in Ilulissat to the Icefjord Centre, a grand modern building of glass and angled wood, built to interpret the landscape and its history for the growing number of tourists who visit Greenland, mostly in summer. Many arrive on cruise ships. One liner due to sail into Disko Bay in July, the MS Nieuw Statendam, can carry more than three thousand passengers. Ilulissat’s population is less than five thousand. The tourist flow will increase in 2026, when a new international airport opens.
Braids of spindrift smoked over the hard-packed snow of the road surface as I tramped out of the human town and into its canine shadow. Hundreds of sledge dogs were curled up tightly asleep on the snow, or waiting patiently on their haunches to be summoned to work, or brawling with rivals; most were chained but some roamed free. Their owners had put up makeshift sheds of cast-off planks to house their gear. There was a continuous high-pitched yowling and growling and yipping. I passed other pedestrians, tourists self-consciously venturesome in newly bought polar gear, from snow boots to snow goggles, rolling like astronauts on the moon, no doubt looking at me and thinking similar thoughts.
Lars Gabrielsen, a local builder, fisherman and tourism entrepreneur, as well as a Siumut candidate in the local elections, came to the centre to meet me. He’s glad to see tourists. In principle, it’s good for business and good for the town. But he doesn’t like what he says is the Dane-centred tourist infrastructure. He’s mounted a campaign against cruise companies that use Danish agencies and against young people from Denmark doing holiday jobs at the expense of young locals. In Gabrielsen’s telling, Danish intermediaries siphon off money that should go to Greenlanders, who are left to drive the tour boats and mush the dog teams. ‘If the Danes could have figured out how to be dog sledders, they would have taken all our jobs,’ he said. ‘We must live with respect for each other, and with the same opportunities. It shouldn’t be that you can get a higher level job because you’re Danish when you can’t speak Greenlandic, and we must translate ourselves for you to understand.’
Ilulissat was the birthplace of the Danish explorer and champion of Greenlandic culture Knud Rasmussen; his childhood friend and fellow explorer Jørgen Brønlund is commemorated by a bust in the middle of town. It was Gabrielsen’s great-grandfather Tobias who found Brønlund’s frozen body after an expedition in north-eastern Greenland, along with the diary in which Brønlund recorded his own death in advance. Gabrielsen complains he isn’t often hired to tell tourists about it. ‘“Lars, can you take this visitor on a tour of the city?” No. Danish boys, who’ve maybe been here three months, they get the job, and they can’t tell the story.’
Such resentments propose the existence of a struggle between artificially held-back Greenlanders and entrenched Danish privilege. I heard and have read enough to make me believe this struggle is real. But they also propose the existence of generations of Greenlanders in their teens, twenties and thirties who will launch themselves willingly into that struggle. My impression is that these generations are still finding it difficult to process the enormous trauma visited on their parents not just by Denmark’s neocolonial attitudes but by the speed with which a society of hunter-gatherers was hurled into European modernity. In Frederik Nielsen’s novel Tuumarsi, the seal-hunting hero, the founder of a new settlement, is unwittingly living out the last years of the old Greenland. The novel was published in 1934, barely ninety years ago, but apart from coffee, tobacco, Christianity and the occasional interaction with a Danish bureaucrat, the world it describes could be that of six hundred years earlier, when the ancestors of the present-day Inuit spread down the Greenland coast. In 1953, without Greenland’s consent, Denmark incorporated Greenland into its realm, making Greenlanders equal citizens with Danes, but also changing their status from a colonised people – with UN rights of self-determination – to an indigenous people. Restrictions on alcohol sales were lifted. People were moved from traditional stone and peat houses to flats. Men who lived by hunting and fishing were trained as plumbers, carpenters, bricklayers.
Women, who had always worked, were given jobs to do as well. In Nuuk I met Susanguak Biilmann. She was born in 1984 and told me about her mother, who, like many Greenlandic teenagers in the 1970s, was sent by the government to Denmark to finish high school and learn Danish, living with a Danish host family. She never talked to Biilmann about it, but her daughter suspects the experience contributed to her mother’s alcoholism. Biilmann’s father was absent. Her mother became a nurse; every two years they had to move to another town before her drinking got her sacked. ‘It was really hard for our parents to be in that time,’ she said. ‘We hadn’t had alcohol in Greenland, and they tried to hide their feelings with it. Many couldn’t get pregnant after the Spiral Scandal, and many lost their language when they were sent to Denmark.’ Nathansen’s mother was also alcoholic; her grandmother had lived in a stone and peat house in the mountains before she moved to the city. ‘This new way of living, it’s been so fast,’ she said. ‘We lost track of ourselves and lost a lot of people, both to suicide and development.’
I visited a homeless shelter in Nuuk crowded with men of all ages, strumming guitars, playing cards, looking at pictures of women in their underwear on the internet. There are beds for homeless people in Nuuk, but not enough for everyone; I heard of people sleeping in the corridors and hallways of unfinished buildings. One 62-year-old man, Jakob, was born in the mining town of Qullissat, now derelict, then lived in different towns and in Denmark. His grandfather, he told me, had lived the old Inuit way, hunting from a kayak. Jakob had found seasonal work as a plasterer. He moved to Nuuk after his mother died and his girlfriend was murdered. His father wasn’t around. ‘I didn’t meet him until my confirmation,’ he said. ‘I was fourteen. That was the first time we met, but we didn’t hug, we shook hands.’
Alcoholism seems to have peaked in 1987, and the suicide rate, although still extremely high, is slowly dropping. There are more high school places in Greenland; English is beginning to rival Danish as a second language, which independence-minded Greenlanders see as a good thing. But in higher education there remains a mismatch between Greenlandic-speaking students and Danish-speaking teachers, one of the reasons for the high dropout rate. The years of psychic upheaval, the 1970s and 1980s, have left their mark on today’s young generation.
In Niviaq Korneliussen’s debut Greenlandic novel, Crimson (also published as Homo Sapienne and Last Night in Nuuk), a multiple-viewpoint queer coming of age story which came out in 2014, the only male character equates his friend’s self-pity over her inability to cope with life with a certain self-pitying mood in Greenland itself. ‘Enough of this post-colonial shit,’ he says. Living in Denmark, he admits he doesn’t know who he is:
Greenland is not my home. I feel sorry for the Greenlanders.
I’m ashamed of being a Greenlander. But I’m a Greenlander.
I can’t laugh with the Danes. I don’t find them funny. I can’t keep up a conversation with the Danes. I find it boring. I can’t act like the Danes. I’m unable to imitate them. I can’t share Danish values. I don’t respect them. I’ll never look like the Danes. I can’t become blond or fair-skinned. I can’t be a Dane among Danes. I’m not a Dane. I can’t live in Denmark.
Denmark is not my country.
Where is home?
If home isn’t in Greenland, if home isn’t here, where is my home?
In Ilulissat, both Gabrielsen and Jensen saw national and personal independence as aspects of the same ideal, as versions of self-reliance. Away from the politics of independence, it was notable that the two parties that got the most votes, Naleraq and the Democrats, are on the right economically, wanting lower taxes, leaner welfare and a smaller role for the state. In Greenland, public monopolies run the airline, shipping, telecoms, some of the largest hotels and the huge trading company KNI. The Democrats want to cut taxes, shrink government, make it harder to get benefits, means-test pensions and expose the state telecoms firm Tusass to competition, for instance from Elon Musk’s Starlink.
And yet when it came to personal independence, Gabrielsen brimmed with compassion for the young. At 57, he has survived a hard life: the illegitimate son of a French pilot and a mother who absented herself not long after his birth, he was raised by his grandfather, and grew up a tearaway. When he was fifteen, his grandfather died, and his teacher, who saw something in him, offered to take him in. At seventeen, he learned carpentry and began his independent life. He is deeply aware of how hard it is for Greenlanders, particularly young Inuit men, to be self-reliant when the model of Greenlandic self-reliance, the hunter (and, implicitly, the hunter’s wife, who raised his children, prepared the family’s food and made the family’s clothes), no longer has the same meaning. ‘We’re very respectful when we talk about the lives of our parents and their parents, but we don’t live those lives. Many of us are lost. We are really, really weak. We like to talk about our first generations. As you say, we romanticise those days because it’s very, very rough living in your head these days. Modern people are lost. That’s why we’ve lost a lot of the young.’
What did he mean, ‘lost’?
‘Killing themselves.’ Or, as he put it in his idiosyncratic English, ‘not starting’ – he was talking of the thousands of young people who fall out of education, work, the welfare system. ‘That’s why I say we lost them.’
It’s hard for any nation, and perhaps particularly hard for Greenlanders, to reconcile the boons of modernity with a love of tradition, but sometimes it happens. On the plane to Ilulissat, I sat next to a hospital health assistant who told me she’d gone on a reindeer-hunting expedition the year before. She’d shot her first reindeer, and carried the carcass back to the boat. She showed me a picture on her phone. She was smiling in the tundra, with the flayed legs of the deer over her shoulders, her hands clasping its ankles. An Inuit woman hunter; it was both absolute tradition and absolute modernity.
Greenland’s people live on the mountainous coast, mainly in the west. The landscape greens in summer. In the south, a few trees grow. But the interior of the country, which is, overall, about the size of Saudi Arabia (it looks bigger on standard maps because of the distorting effect of flat representation) is covered year-round in a vast sheet of ice. At its thickest point, the ice is almost two miles deep. As the effect of mankind’s rapid pumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere collides with natural very long-term variations in the Earth’s climate, the ice is melting faster than it’s being replaced. Ken Mankoff, an American polar scientist who specialises in the nature and quantity of ice sheet melt, told me loss is exceeding gain – mainly from snowfall – by 330 billion tonnes a year. Global warming in Greenland is happening much faster than elsewhere. ‘It used to be twice as fast, and three times as fast, and now I think they’re warming four times as fast,’ he said.
Greenland’s ice sheet is scattered with research stations where scientists have drilled, or are drilling, down to the bedrock to recover samples of ice from the time when Greenland last had a temperate climate, at the threshold of the last Ice Age, nearly 120,000 years ago. Inside the ice, amenable to analysis, are microscopic bubbles containing ancient air inhaled and exhaled by woolly mammoths and the Neanderthals. US scientists, and US funding, have been important in these efforts; America’s Summit Station is the only high-altitude base to operate year-round. But American researchers now have to justify their grants to a government run by people who think man-made climate change is a hoax and a scam. At the Nuuk and Cranny congressional hearings, Dr Jennifer Mercer, section head for Arctic sciences at the US National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programmes, managed to get through her testimony without mentioning climate change or global warming once. She looked like a woman in a hostage video, forced by her captors to lie about how she’s being treated.
For as long as Greenlanders can remember, glaciers have been calving into the sea; Ilulissat is the most tourist-accessible place to see icebergs released from the glacier in the hinterland accumulating at the mouth of an icefjord. In a stable melt-accumulation system, it would still be happening. What’s different now is that the edge of the ice sheet itself is beginning to sag and split. ‘It’s falling apart,’ Mankoff said. ‘There are two things going on. There’s more warm air, hotter summers and rain, the atmosphere is melting it from above. And it’s also sliding faster
‘It’s melting like hell,’ Rasch said. ‘It’s crazy. If you go back five years, if you wanted to illustrate climate change, you would have a before and after picture. You would see a picture of a glacier
Greenlanders are all too conscious of the rapid pace of climate change. In Nuuk they used to laugh about going to Ilulissat; it was much colder up there, they said. But it isn’t now. Normally, Gabrielsen said, late February and early March are still and cold, in the minus 30s and 40s. It used to be possible to drive a car out onto Disko Bay in winter. Now the sea is open. Jensen, half Gabrielsen’s age, made the same complaint. Once, he said, he could have mushed all the way across the bay to Disko Island at this time of year.
Greenlanders see advantages to warmer weather. They have a past of adaptability and resilience. In the 14th century, an earlier, natural episode of climate change contributed to the departure of the original Norse settlers; scientific evidence suggests that their crops failed and they tried, without success, to adopt the Inuit hunters’ diet. As the Greenland ice sheet melts, the removal of its weight will cause Greenland to rise, while across the world, the ocean will threaten every low-lying shore, even as far away as Mar-a-Lago.
Ileft it late to see the icefjord. When the light was fading one grey but clear evening, I set out along the wooden walkway down the shallow valley that leads to the abandoned village of Sermermiut, at the icefjord’s mouth. After a while the walkway was swallowed up by snow and it became hard to follow the route. There was no obvious life in the landscape except for tufts of dry sedge poking out of the snow, shaking in the wind, and a lone crow patrolling the rocks on the ridge, emitting the occasional caw. You don’t have to go very far from the towns in Greenland to feel that you’ve crossed a boundary from the confined to the beginning of the absolutely open, that you’ve stepped from the minutiae of the human ‘us’ to the edge of the non-human universe.
It was getting very dim. I left the walkway and began to climb towards the ridge, tricky in snow boots on a steep slope, trying to pick a way over sedge and rock and patches of rough ice to avoid sinking into the snow. From the top, in the dark blue end of the light, I saw the icefjord mouth, a part-frozen, part-open expanse of mangled ice, broken and mended over and over again, and the high cliff of an immense iceberg, so solid and majestic that it didn’t seem possible it could be mobile, floating and melting, that it would be seawater by spring.
Rasch had told me his entire scientific career had been built on a teenage error, when he’d ticked a box marked ‘geology’ instead of ‘theology’ on a university application. But perhaps the distinction isn’t so obvious. It’s not absurd to imagine an overlap between the sense of loss of the hunters driven to the city and the yearning that drives city-dwellers to the wilderness. No doubt the young Danes trickling into Greenland in the high imperial era were high on religion and romanticism, but did Europeans ever impute to native people in the countries they colonised the same wonder and awe they felt at their surroundings? Was the transcendental climax of Tuumarsi, or the exalted Christian imagery of 19th and 20th-century Greenlandic folk tales – small epics of subsistence, manhood and murder, the Gospels overlaid on stories of guilty fugitives in icy valleys – really about Christian belief, or was it about delight in a new medium for an expression of Greenlanders’ age-old encounter with the very thing outsiders come to seek, the ineffable sublime?
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