Danish prime minister personally apologizes to removed Greenland children

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has personally apologized to a group of Greenlandic Inuit who were taken from their families in 1951 as part of a social experiment as a child. Six of the 22 are still alive. The apologies were conveyed at a meeting at the National Museum in Copenhagen.

The children were brought from Greenland to the then colonizer Denmark to be re-educated there. The idea was that once back in Greenland, they would form a Danish-speaking elite that could set an example for the rest of the Greenlandic population. In that way, they would contribute to the development of Greenland and improve the ties between Greenland and Denmark. The children were between 5 and 9 years old when they were taken from their families.

"What you went through was terrible and it was inhumane," Frederiksen said at the meeting. "It was unjust and heartless. We can take responsibility and do the only thing that is just: apologize for what happened."

Forbidden to speak Greenlandic

Initially it was the intention to send orphans to Denmark, but they proved difficult to find. Subsequently, children were also selected from families with only a father or mother. They were promised that the children in Denmark would receive a better education. “Our parents said yes, but they barely knew what they were agreeing to,” said Eva Ilum, one of the children.

Human rights organization Save the Children, the Red Cross and the Danish government were involved in the experiment. They thought that this would save the children from poor living conditions.

Once in Denmark, the children were housed at Save the Children's summer camp location for four months. There the children were no longer allowed to speak Greenlandic. After those four months, they were placed with host families, where they stayed for a year.

After that, six of the children were adopted by Danish families; the other sixteen went back to Greenland. They were not allowed to live with their families, but were placed in a Red Cross orphanage. Custody went to the director of the orphanage.

Stranger on our own soil

Some children never saw their family again, or only sporadically. On Sundays, the family was occasionally invited for coffee. Communication was then difficult. The children were sent to a Danish school in the Greenlandic capital Nuuk and were not allowed to interact with Inuit children. As a result, many no longer spoke Greenlandic.

As a result, the children themselves were seen as foreign by the Greenlanders themselves. In later life many of them moved back to Denmark, because they could not settle in Greenland.

Compensation

With the ceremony in Copenhagen, a process of reparation that has been going on for several years comes to an end. A historic report on the matter was published at the end of 2020. Prime Minister Frederiksen already apologized in a letter to all survivors.

It took until a few weeks ago before compensation was also paid by the Danish government. The six survivors received 250,000 Danish krone - about 34,000 euros.

"The eviction of the children is a dark page in the history between Denmark and Greenland and we should not close our eyes to it," Social Affairs Minister Astrid Krag said of the compensation. "What happened had a major negative impact on the children, who lost their language, cultural identity and attachment to their family."

Also out-of-home placements of indigenous children in other countries

Other Western countries also engaged in practices aimed at assimilating indigenous children into the dominant white culture. In Canada and Australia this happened on a much larger scale.

For example, between 1910 and 1970 in Australia 100,000 children were taken from Aboriginal families and placed with white families: the 'stolen generations'. Australia only paid compensation for this last year.

In Canada, for more than a hundred years, Indigenous children were placed out of their homes and placed in boarding schools to promote assimilation. This concerns a total of more than 150,000 children. They were not allowed to speak their own language and were forbidden to wear native clothing.

They were also often mistreated and sexually abused. Several mass graves containing hundreds of deceased children have been found in recent years at the boarding schools. A commission of inquiry labeled the practices "cultural genocide". Canada is releasing equivalently 28 billion euros as compensation .

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