U.S. President Donald Trump says his country needs Greenland for national security. That has Greenlanders worried about their own national security.
Inuit advocacy groups, as well as Greenlanders who live in Canada, are emphatically opposed to American designs on their homeland. And, they say, they’re tired of being used as geopolitical chess pieces by powerful people in faraway capitals.
“We want to say loud and clear that there’s no such thing as a better colonizer,” said Sara Olsvig, chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council and a former member of both the Greenlandic and Danish parliaments.
“We have already been through colonization and we know what it means when the interests of others and more powerful nations and peoples affects us negatively and when decisions are taken thousands of kilometres away from us.”
If they look to their polar neighbors they can find some. Alaskan natives still maintain a lot of traditional lands outside places white people want, I know some Yupik folks who grew up in their village. They also were brutally colonized, it was horrible and evil what we did to them, but they’re still here, and part of starting to do right by them is to acknowledge it.
There’s also the Navajo Nation and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy who maintain enough size that recognition of these nations is something people really ought to be considering. You’ve also got native folks in the pacific northwest and most states (36/50) still have at least one reservation.
I totally understand what you meant, but one of the forms of anti indigenous behavior is to pretend they aren’t still around, still oppressed, and still relevant. ICE has been attacking Native Americans in the past year.