Initial note: This article discusses the problem of suicide in Greenland, but throughout the text it does not include any details about the methods used, speculate on the motives of any specific individual, or describe the act of suicide as anything else. different from what it is. This is a public health issue and how it is treated affects the collective ability to prevent it. The graphic depiction and public glorification of suicide is dangerous for people at risk of committing suicide. Therefore, to prepare this article, the guidelines for journalists of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention have been followed.
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In May 1952, a ship left the port of Nuuk—the capital of Greenland—bound to Copenhagen. There were 22 Inuit children on board. At that time, the population of the largest island in the world was subject to colonial rule, lived off fishing and hunting and suffered from a serious tuberculosis epidemic. Few natives spoke Danish.
Upon arriving on the continent, the children spent the summer in quarantine. At the reception center they were told that it was a “summer camp.” There they received a visit from the Queen of Denmark. At night they always cried. They had things from home.
When the summer ended, they were rehoused with host families so they could learn Danish. By December, a weekly newspaper published an article congratulating the success of the experiment. “The lifestyle here in Denmark is very different from what these children of nature are used to, but their ability to adapt is remarkable. Disputes—caused by their adaptation to civilization—occur very rarely,” he prayed.
The following year, 16 of the 22 children were repatriated to Greenland. The remainder remained in Denmark with their host families. When they met their clan again in the port of Nuuk, they could not tell them what they had experienced: they had forgotten their mother tongue.
The children were not returned to their families, but rather relocated to a orphanage of Nuuk “so that their living conditions would not worsen.” The orphanage staff were Greenlandic, but were ordered to communicate in Danish at all times with the children.
This was a social experiment that was part of the rapid modernization of Greenland. The objective: to create a Danish-speaking elite that would reach important positions in the island’s Administration and bring progress. The families were barely informed of what would happen to their children and their consent was only obtained with great insistence.
Even today the victims meet occasionally; They’re just not elite. Instead, they ended up being a marginal group within their own society. Without language or roots, they lost their identity and sense of belonging. Several ended up drunk and died young. The Danish Government has not yet apologized for the episode.
To expand: “The children taken from home for a social experiment”, Ellen Otzen on BBC, 2015
Of Danes and Greenlanders
Since approximately 1200, the Inuit have been children of the island of Greenland, which they know as Kalaallit Nunaat, ‘our land’. At that time they shared it—although with limited contact—with the Viking colony founded by Erik the Red, to which it owes its current name. In an exercise of advertising mastery, the navigator called it “Green Land” compared to Iceland, whose toponym means ‘land of ice’.
After a worsening of the climate, the Viking colony became extinct; The last skeletons buried there show that their owners suffered from malnutrition. The Inuit took over the place. Even without effective occupation, the Kingdom of Denmark did not stop considering Greenland its colony; Proof of this is the inclusion of a polar bear in its coat of arms in 1660.
In the 18th century, Copenhagen became interested in the island again, this time permanently. In 1721 he sent a religious mission to find out about the former Viking settlers and convert them to Protestantism, since it was believed that, having not heard of the Protestant Reformation, they would continue to be Catholics.
By 1830 it had already become clear that there were no survivors of the colony founded by Erik the Red. The priority objective of colonization became civilize to the natives. The basis of this goal was social evolutionism, spread throughout Europe in the first half of the 19th century as an ideological substrate of colonialism.
The Danish presence grew and the Inuit saw its modus vivendi increasingly conditioned. On the one hand, evangelization efforts deprived many natives of their traditional beliefs; On the other hand, the colonists imported diseases from Europe that were unknown to the immune systems of the Inuit. Smallpox or tuberculosis wreaked havoc.
Denmark’s policy towards Greenland was paternalistic and exclusivist; Even the Danes had to obtain a special permit to gain access. In the run-up to World War II, attempts were made to preserve the lifestyle of the Inuit hunters by censoring the spoiling of Western luxuries and the loss of autonomy. There was a certain Rousseauian conception in this image of the Inuit as the good wildpure and innocent.
During World War II, the paths of Denmark and Greenland diverged. The metropolis remained in the Nazi orbit, although with relative autonomy, and the colony, under American tutelage, with prior authorization from the Danish ambassador in Washington. At the end of the war, the Americans—who had guaranteed supplies to the island—offered to buy it for one hundred million dollars.
This was the turning point for the Danes. It became clear that it was no longer possible to maintain the island’s isolation and that the occupation of Greenland was still too weak, making it susceptible to the ambitions of other powers. Something had to change in the management of the issue; what it was was unclear.
The Americans were granted their northernmost base, Thule, a key base during the Cold War. Denmark had a lot to gain in Greenland by fishing for shrimp and halibut—an incredibly coveted fish—but first it had to take care of appearances.
The American and Soviet superpowers supported decolonization, but behind it was the desire to gain influence in the new states by replacing the ossified European powers. The consequence was the bad image of the colonizing countries. Copenhagen wanted to be removed from the UN list of colonial powers; Thus, in 1953 the colonial status of the island, incorporated as a province, constitutionally ended.
The motto was to treat Greenlanders on an equal footing. The economy would be oriented towards industrial fishing and the welfare state, which was beginning to take shape in the Nordic countries, would be promoted.
The population was centralized. Nuuk, formerly known as Godthåb – ‘good hope’ – became the destination of a growing forced rural exodus, as well as the heads of the administrative demarcations into which the territory was divided. From a practical point of view, it was necessary to concentrate the population to provide it with basic services in a territory almost devoid of roads. The relocated people suffered the prejudices of the inhabitants of larger towns.
Literally dozens of settlements were closed; the Government simply removed them from the list. Its inhabitants were resettled in concrete blocks that offered all the desirable comforts, except one: the sense of belonging that their lifestyle provided.
As a whole, Greenland went from a subsistence, self-sufficient economy based on hunting and fishing to a wage-based economy, totally dependent on the former metropolis. Some tried to ignore their new condition and fished in the middle of the afternoon in the port of Nuuk, near the Royal Arctic Line ships.
In just a few years the Greenlanders went from Prehistory to the Postmodern Era. From hunting the polar bear in perpetual snow to watching the life and miracles of the Simpson family on television. It would not be without consequences.
The wave that kills in its tracks
The suicides came to Greenland as a slow but inexorable wave. They first affected Nuuk in the early 1970s. They then spread to other towns in the southwest of the island and, years later, moved up the west coast to the north. By the end of the decade they were making their presence felt in eastern and northern Greenland.
In the same way it arrived, the wave reached its peak and stabilized in that sequence: capital, west, east and north. It is not coincidental; There is probably a correlation between the arrival of the West, with its double-edged wage and subsidy economy, to Arctic lands and the beginning of the problem. Nuuk, being the capital, and the southwest in general – the only place on the island where agriculture has sometimes been possible – have a subpolar climate thanks to the Gulf Stream. Therefore, after hosting Erik’s colony the Red and being the epicenter of Danish colonization, it was the first region slapped by modernity.
Although the older people consider the change on the island positive, the process was still traumatic. The generation gap widened and left young people without references and older people bewildered. The family lost part of its role in education. The woman adapted better, because in modern life she was also expected to perform household chores.
The men, on the other hand, were especially affected, since the survival of the clan no longer depended on their hunting and fishing activities and their role was void of content. With rampant unemployment, the professions considered masculine They were held by Danes, especially in the highest positions. There was a glass ceiling for Inuit men, who lost the channels of expression of their virility, a traditional measure of worth. This proved lethal.
In Greenland in the late 1980s, suicides killed more than cancer: 117 people out of every 100,000 took their lives each year. This figure far exceeds the average for the region; It is 23 times greater than that of Spain and 27 times greater than that of Mexico. If China had a similar suicide rate, as many lives would be lost each year as there are inhabitants of Montevideo or Barcelona.
Before the 1970s, although it was less common than in Europe, suicide was relatively normalized in Inuit culture. Those who were a burden could choose to end their lives in the interest of the proper functioning of the community. This decision was carefully considered with the help of the wise men of the clan, who, when the time came, could offer assistance.
«The deceased was 19 years old. He had frequently raised the issue of suicide before committing suicide, but he had not sought help to resolve his emotional problems. Before committing the crime, his partner had ended the relationship and stated that she would not return to him. The medical examination that was carried out indicated that he had 2.05 alcohol in his blood. The night of his death he had been drunk at a party, where…