Denmark’s Claim to Greenland Is in Doubt Because of Its Treatment of the Inuit, the Island’s Original Inhabitants

This essay examines Denmark’s claim over Greenland not as a matter of abstract law, but as a lived historical relationship between a colonial state and an Indigenous people, the Inuit of Kalaallit Nunaat. The Inuit are the original inhabitants of the land, a living Indigenous population whose presence predates Danish arrival by centuries and whose cultural, social, and material life remains rooted there today. The essay argues that Denmark’s authority over Greenland was exercised through policies and administrative decisions that, in documented cases, intruded into family life and reproductive autonomy, and that this record weakens Denmark’s moral claim to sovereignty at a moment when Greenland’s strategic value has once again drawn global attention. Some Inuit politicians, advocates, and scholars have accused Denmark of genocidal conduct, while others describe grave and systemic human rights violations, including attempts to control or reduce the Inuit population through coercive contraception and sterilisation practices. These allegations concern a population that still exists and endures in Greenland today. The spine of the argument is the Inuit experience: what was done in their name, to their bodies, and over their objections.

When Denmark insists that Greenland is Danish, it is asking the world to accept a tidy constitutional story: a modern welfare state overseeing a distant territory through law, consensus, and gradual devolution. It is also asking the world not to look too closely at how that authority was exercised when Inuit lives conflicted with administrative priorities. The problem for Denmark is that the record is no longer obscure. It is documented, investigated, apologised for in relation to specific historical episodes, and crucially remembered by the people who lived it.

Inuit sledge from northern Greenland during early twentieth century Arctic exploration. Public domain photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

This matters now because Greenland is once again being spoken about as an object: a strategic asset, a mineral reserve, a geopolitical hinge. Denmark has responded to renewed American interest by invoking a rules based international order and the sanctity of sovereignty. But sovereignty does not float free of history. It is anchored in how power was acquired and used. And in Greenland, power was used in ways that raise the question whether Denmark’s claim rests on a colonial inheritance rather than a morally settled right.

Greenland Is Not an Empty Place

Kalaallit Nunaat, Greenland’s name in its own language, is not a peripheral extension of Europe. It is the ancestral homeland of the Inuit, whose presence long predates Danish arrival and whose relationship to the land is continuous, cultural, and embodied. Inuit society was not nomadic drift waiting for governance. It was organised, adaptive, and rooted in place. Danish authority was not established through an Inuit plebiscite or negotiated cession. It arrived through missionary settlement, trade monopolies, and bureaucratic control, later hardened into legal sovereignty.

Inuit family inside their home in Greenland during the nineteenth century. Public domain photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

Denmark’s preferred vocabulary is modernisation. The Inuit experience was management. Over time, Greenlanders were treated less as a people with political agency than as a population whose outcomes, health, education, fertility, and mobility, could be optimised. This distinction is not semantic. It helps explain why policies that would likely have faced far stricter scrutiny in Denmark were implemented in Greenland with administrative confidence.

The claim that Greenland belongs to Denmark is therefore incomplete. It may describe current constitutional arrangements, but it does not answer the deeper question of legitimacy: who has the moral right to decide Greenland’s future. On any serious understanding of self determination, that right lies with the people who live there and whose lives are shaped by those decisions. That is not a radical claim. It is the baseline principle Denmark itself invokes elsewhere.

The Policy That Revealed the Structure

Historical investigations and subsequent reporting describe contraception practices from the nineteen sixties to nineteen ninety one under Danish administration in which thousands of Greenlandic girls and women were fitted with intrauterine devices. Many accounts and findings indicate that informed consent was absent in significant numbers of cases, including among minors, and that in some instances parents were not informed. The independent inquiry and contemporaneous policy discussion, as later summarised publicly, link the practices to concerns about fertility and population growth during a period of rapid social change.

This was not presented at the time as a series of isolated errors, but emerged from policy implemented at scale. Women affected have described discovering years later that contraception had been inserted without their knowledge or consent, shaping their reproductive choices and, in some accounts, their ability to have children when they wished. Psychologists and advocates in Greenland have described the lasting consequences in terms of trauma, mistrust of institutions, and ruptures between generations. The episode became known as the spiral case, after the Danish term for the device.

Decades later, the issue could no longer be contained. Denmark and Greenland jointly commissioned an independent investigation. The investigation documented extensive consent failures and systemic oversight problems and concluded that the practices would constitute serious rights violations under contemporary standards. Denmark subsequently issued a formal apology, and a compensation scheme followed. These steps mattered. They also constituted an acknowledgment that state linked governance in Greenland had operated in ways that Denmark would not have accepted for its own population.

Some Greenlandic politicians and scholars have characterised the campaign as genocidal, pointing to its scale and population control rationale. Others frame it as a grave human rights violation without attaching the legal label of genocide. That debate continues in academic and legal forums. What is clear from the inquiry and official responses is that health governance in Greenland involved large scale contraception practices that, in many documented instances, lacked informed consent.

A Pattern Written Across Generations

The spiral case is frequently discussed alongside earlier state programmes that shaped Inuit lives. In nineteen fifty one, Greenlandic children were removed from their families and sent to Denmark as part of an assimilation experiment intended to produce a class of modern Greenlanders. Many returned unable to speak their own language and alienated from their families. Others were adopted in Denmark and never returned. The programme has since been widely acknowledged as harmful, and a formal apology was later issued.

Two years later, Inuit communities near Thule were relocated in connection with the expansion of a military base serving American strategic needs. Families were moved with little warning, and livelihoods were disrupted. The episode generated legal claims and international scrutiny and remains a focal point of dispute over state responsibility and redress. Once again, Inuit presence proved conditional when strategy intervened.

Seen together, these episodes reveal a consistent logic. When Inuit autonomy aligned with Danish priorities, the relationship was framed as partnership. When it did not, Inuit lives were adjusted, moved, reshaped, or subject to intrusive policy intervention. This is not the record of a neutral custodian. It is the record of colonial governance.

Ownership, Reconsidered

To say that Greenland belongs to the Inuit is to speak of moral and political legitimacy, not a short form statement of constitutional law. It is to distinguish between legality and legitimacy. Legal sovereignty can persist long after its moral foundations have eroded. Colonial authority is often most secure on paper.

Inuit belonging to Greenland rests on three foundations that no statute can erase. First, continuous inhabitation: a people whose identity, language, and culture are inseparable from the land. Second, self determination: a principle recognised in international law and repeatedly affirmed by Denmark itself. Third, historical experience: a documented record of governance that subordinated Inuit agency to administrative goals.

Against this, Denmark offers a constitutional arrangement and a promise of gradual reform. What it cannot offer is a history in which Greenlanders consented to the authority exercised over them. Custodianship is not ownership. Administration is not moral title.

The Rules Denmark Invokes and Those It Bent

Denmark’s defence of its position increasingly relies on the language of a rules based international order. Yet Denmark’s own foreign policy record shows that its commitment to those rules has been selective. When the United States invaded Iraq without broad international authorisation, Denmark joined the coalition. When Washington exerted sustained pressure on Venezuela through sanctions and recognition disputes, Denmark expressed concern but did not take a leading public role in condemning or confronting those measures.

This is not a charge of hypocrisy for its own sake. It is a question of credibility. A state that appears to apply norms selectively when alliance politics demanded it cannot convincingly present those norms as absolute when its own authority is questioned. The contradiction becomes sharper when the territory at issue, Greenland, has itself been governed through practices that violated fundamental rights.

Why This Moment Matters

Renewed global interest in Greenland has sharpened a question long deferred. Denmark’s response has been to close ranks around sovereignty. Inuit voices have articulated something different: a demand that Greenland’s future be decided by those who live there, not by distant capitals calculating advantage.

The issue is not Denmark versus America. It is whether Greenland will continue to be treated as an object of strategy or recognised as an Indigenous homeland whose people have the right to decide their own future. History suggests that states rarely relinquish control voluntarily, especially when strategic value rises. But history also records moments when moral clarity forces a reckoning.

The Reckoning Denmark Cannot Avoid

Denmark has apologised. It has offered compensation. These steps are necessary. They are not sufficient. Reconciliation is not a sequence of settlements. It is a change in posture. It requires acknowledging that the authority exercised over Greenland was not merely imperfect but structurally colonial and that such authority cannot claim unquestioned legitimacy in perpetuity.

Greenland’s future will unfold through existing institutions and democratic processes. But the ethical conclusion is already clear. A sovereignty whose administration has been credibly found, in specific historical inquiries, to have permitted large scale consent failures cannot plausibly claim moral ownership over Inuit land.

If Denmark wishes to defend a rules based order, it must begin by confronting its own history. Greenland is not Denmark’s possession. It is a place whose people endured the consequences of being treated as one.