View from the North 40: History 101: Wassup with Greenland

I don’t know what you’ve heard about Greenland, but it’s a strong, independent, saucy country that don’t take no nonsense off of any countries, even Denmark, which it is married to but not necessarily living with. If you know what I mean.

Archaeologists have found prehistoric evidence that different Inuit cultures have inhabited Greenland starting in about 2500 B.C., but life was not easy there on the largest non-continental island on the planet. If you recall from almost any map depicting Greenland, the place was misnamed because it’s just a big white mass with an irregular, lace-like fringe of open ground around the edge.

All evidence points to the place being abandoned — even by the hardy Inuit — from about A.D. 1 to 700.

Greenland has its qualities, no doubt. It has shiploads of fishing, some metals and precious gems to mine, and it’s home to about 10 percent of the world’s naturally occurring, freshwater ice cubes. It also has the most extensive catalog of recipes on how to prepare and serve sea creatures that have randomly washed up on the beach and started rotting.

Don’t get me wrong, the Greenlandic people eat lots of fresh sea- and land-based meats and a small selection of vegetables for a few months of the year, but it’s a harsh island, so they don’t waste anything, even the Greenland shark, which is poisonous and difficult to prepare, but it’s supper when you got it.

Greenland has its qualities, but it has been a tough place to eke out a living.

Iceland, the only neighboring island of any size, is a little more hospitable ecologically speaking, with more open land and a lot of amazing thermal activity that produces in-home heating and some amazing hot-tubbing opportunities. A bunch of Norse people from a confederated Denmark-Norway moved to Iceland in the 870s.

They made a living on land and sea during the summer and sat around their villages hot-potting and drinking homemade schnapps all winter. It was a good life. Then some guy named Eric the Red lost his temper one day, and messed up, and lots of blood was shed, so he got exiled from Iceland to Greenland in about 995.

The thing is, though, the island wasn’t called Greenland then. It was something like “An Oden-forsaken Place Unimaginably Worse Than Iceland,” but ol’ Eric didn’t want to go into that vast, icy wasteland alone, so he called it Greenland and recruited a few hundred people to go with him. He must’ve been a heckuva salesman because life was tough there.

Fourteen shiploads of Eric the Redders stormed the beaches of their promised land, took over a few areas in the southern fringes, leaving the north and west fringes to the Inuits. At their peak, these settlers had 600-some homesteads.

Somewhere in the 1400s the island had a mini ice age and the people all died or bugged out of there. The exodus was not recorded, though, because, well, everybody had forgotten about the failed experiment of Greenland — except the Inuit who said, “Meh, we’ll come back when it warms up.”

And it did, so they did.

Somewhere in the early 1600s Denmark, wanting to expand the might of its empire remembered they owned Greenland and, no kidding, sent a series of expeditions north to touch base with their people. When they couldn’t find their own people, they baptized some Inuits and called them family. A missionary post was established and it was the only real link to Denmark until World War II, when Greenland got forgotten again.

But that wasn’t a bad thing.

Germany occupied Denmark, but fortunately Hitler didn’t care about Greenland. The island was abandoned to find its own way through the war. Essentially, the country made friends with its neighbors Canada and the U.S., agreeing to let them set up Thule Air Base, which the U.S. still operates.

In the 1950s, Denmark tried to assert its dominance over Greenland, which had apparently got to feeling too independent during the war and, like some of the Rosie the Riveters, didn’t want to give up its own identity to the patriarchy. Greenland tried for about 20 years to submit, but then got a legal separation from Denmark. As an autonomous country they also cut ties with Europe and the pre-union European Economic Community about a decade later.

Greenland remains delicately balanced on the edge of the world, in some sweet self-governance zone, tenuously tied to both Denmark and North America, but largely doing its own thing.

Given the island’s history, it’s not a surprise that President Donald Trump’s offer as the leader of the most powerful nation in the world to buy the island country was met with this chill statement in the New York Times from premier Kim Kielsen: “Greenland is not for sale and cannot be sold, but Greenland is open for trade and cooperation with other countries — including the United States.”

The chill tone of the reply proves that Greenland really does have the largest reserve of ice cubes in the world.

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