Greenland’s History of Determination and Colonization: Dr. Frank Sejersen

Greenland hasn’t existed much in the public imagination, especially in the United States. It is a vast, icy, white island on the map over 1,800 miles away from New York City. It’s hard to imagine an entire cultural community inhabiting the harsh Arctic climate, but the island has been a destination for resilient populations for thousands of years.

The history of Greenland and the Inuit people has largely been ignored in discourse concerning President Donald Trump’s interest in the island. Conversation in mainstream media is largely focused on land over people, but Dr. Frank Sejersen detailed both a rich and troubling history for the native people of Greenland.

Sejersen is an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen in the Greenlandic and Arctic studies department. He has also studied and worked with environmental, human rights and political issues in the Arctic for over 30 years.

The Greenlandic people: Inuit history, culture and lifestyle

The ancestors of the contemporary population in Greenland arrived there around 1200 CE.

“That population is basically fairly new, but before that, there were at least two other cultures that came from Western Alaska primarily,” Sejersen said. “The Inuit that came into Greenland in 1200 was a particular kind of culture where they had dog sleds, they had boats, they were hunting whales, and they were moving quite fast. They were, one could say, top of the pups as Arctic peoples. They were really having a very complex culture and technology at that time.”

How they used natural resources was divided in two categories: the sea and the land. The land provided moose cocks and reindeer as primary resources, and the sea provided seals and whales. Birds and fish were also important resources. Hunters often specialized in a particular animal.

This civilization wasn’t isolated, Sejersen said. There was a lot of trade between inward communities, but also into Canada, Alaska, Siberia and Europe. “Greenland has always been connected to world dynamics,” he said.

In the 19^th century, people in Greenland were starving, but they didn’t know why, Sejersen said. They thought the animals were seeking revenge on the Inuit population for hunting them. Really, the Scottish and Norwegian’s had decimated the seal population, he said. Greenland has always been entangled in global economic dynamics, whether or not the population there had known it.

The Inuit people persevered through issues like resource shortages through moving around, migrating across the island. Mobility was one of their key techniques for survival, Sejersen said.

“Another way is to turn to another resource. If your seals were not easy to catch, they would turn their concentration on reindeer, for example,” he said. “You also had many periods of hunger and death. But the oral history had a testimony of resilience, of a strong community where you were sharing the resources.”

Spirits and souls were a key part of Inuit culture and spirituality. Some were good, some were bad, but the Inuit people navigated them to maintain what they believed to be a good relationship with all spirits.

Some spirits were animal spirits, Sejersen said. While hunting, they would be hunting the same seal, for example. They would hunt it, eat it and it would return to the ocean as the same seal, seeking out the same person who hunted it.

“You had a personal relationship with the seals, and you inherited that social relationship from your grandparents, so it’s a very different kind of world view one could say,” he said. “We today would say that, ‘No, you have to manage the animals in a sustainable way, as stocks, and you have to have quotas. In the old days, the thing that you had to manage the social relationship with the animals.”

The Inuit people built a deeply spiritual and religious practice in their community prior to Danish colonization.

Danish arrival and early colonization

The Norse settlements in Greenland were established after 986 CE by settlers coming from Iceland. They were the first Europeans to explore and temporarily settle in North America. Their settlements existed for about half a millennium before they were abandoned for reasons still unknown.

The then-union of Denmark and Norway had still believed the Norse settlements existed despite no contact with them and continued to claim sovereignty over Greenland. Denmark-Norway sent a missionary expedition in 1721 led by Norwegian Lutheran priest Hans Egede to find the Norse colonies and maintain their Christianity.

Searching for months for the Norse settlements, he only found the local Kalaallit people. He began to study their language and later convert them to Christianity.

Egede’s arrival is often considered the beginning of the colonization of Greenland, but the history of colonization is much more complex, Sejersen said.

“They had traded with Dutch whalers and Scottish whalers for hundreds of years before that, so they were quite competent in handling strangers,” he said. “They found that the goods that the Danes came with was pretty awful compared to the Dutch.”

The Danes colonized small communities at first, each a different colony. In the beginning, they didn’t know that Greenland was an entire island.

When the monarchy of Denmark and Norway broke apart in 1814, Denmark kept Greenland. Danish-Greenlandic colonial relations were defined by a Danish paternalistic policy in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries to ensure that the Arctic island would be profitable.

“It’s a very complex cultural encounter that we are seeing. On the one hand, the Danes considered the Inuit to be very childish,” Sejersen said. “The mission was trying to make them change their worldview. The trade wanted to push them into hunting seals primarily. That created a tension between the trade and the mission where the trade wanted the hunters to be out on the land, spread out or in different communities. But the mission wanted the population to be centered around the church.”

These communities began to grow, and there was a lot from the Danes that was very attractive to the Inuit population, including tobacco and coffee. The Danes also grew respect for the native Greenlanders, learning their language to begin to educate the population.

By 1861, the first newspaper was published in Greenland, Sejersen said. People could read, write and were discussing public and political issues in their communities. The political history is directly related to the education and literacy of Greenlanders. Greenland is now among the countries with the highest literacy rates in the world.

Modernization, urbanization and independence

One way the Danes attracted families in Greenland was the goods they brought to the island. They established a system of credit.

“You would buy some coffee, but then you would have a credit in the shop and then you had to go out hunting to come back to pay the credits,” Sejersen said. “Suddenly, you were entangling more and more.”

The Danes shifted their trade strategy away from sealing to fishing, making it easier to centralize and process. People began to move to communities around fishing, quickly building up the area and the local industry.

Even as Greenland began to urbanize, it was not a political entity, Sejersen said. It wasn’t until 1857 that the Danes established parsissaets, local councils in their local language to settle conflicts and minor spending decisions. These councils were essentially hand selected by Denmark, choosing the best within the community to represent the larger whole. But one interpretation is that this institution was still representative of the Danish voice, Sejersen said.

Municipalities were first established in 1908 with elected municipal councils to oversee local affairs.

“The whole idea was, at least according to the Danes, that we have to help Greenlanders to position themselves to be masters in their own house. And that sounds nice, doesn’t it?” Sejersen said. “But if you consider also that the Danes, they looked at them as children, then suddenly, you can see it’s that we [Denmark] are the tutors, and you [Greenlanders] have to be trained because you are not clever enough. There was always this inequality.”

In 1953, the Constitution of Denmark ended Greenland’s status as a colony and fully integrated it into the Danish state. Later, in 1979, the Greenlandic home rule referendum passed, granting the island greater autonomy from Denmark. They established their own parliament and greater sovereignty in areas like education, health, fishing and the environment.

By 2009, Greenland gained full self-government, but they still are “second best” to Denmark in foreign policy and affairs.

Many Greenlanders yearn from greater independence from Denmark. And the polls show this is true by a narrow margin. About 56% of Greenlanders would vote for independence in a referendum, according to a January 2025 poll by Danish polling group Verian. The same poll revealed that an overwhelming 85% of Greenlanders do not want to become part of the U.S.

What comes next, and how, leaves a lot of questions.

“Most people in Greenland want independence,” Sejersen said. “But the question is, at what price? And how fast? And what kind of relations do we want to have with the international world?”

And they won’t be answered any time soon.

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This story is part of a semester-long investigative reporting project into Greenland’s people, history, and culture. It was created by an advanced reporting class in the Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies program at UW-Milwaukee. Other stories from the project are available on Edge of the Arctic: Greenland, the Land of the People.

This work was made possible through the support of MPC Endowment Ltd., the philanthropic affiliate of the Milwaukee Press Club, and a private donor.