Greenland's Stolen Children

In 1951 a group of 22 Greenlandic children were ripped from their families and communities and shipped to Denmark as part of a social experiment. The children were made to speak Danish and sent to Danish schools. The children were meant to become role models for a new bilingual school system and to get ahead in life by forming the nucleus of a colonial comprador elite in Greenland.

Very little came of the grand designs and the children suffered the consequences for the rest of their lives.

Amid UN demands for decolonisation after WWII the Danish colonial regime had big plans for modernisering Greenland. They saw the Danish language as an important part of the effort and believed Inuit language and culture to be backwards and primitive, an albatross around the neck of a modern Greenland. Together with the Red Cross and Save The Children the Danish regime hatched the plan to make the children become "civilised" by assimilating into Danish culture and learning the Danish language.

Local Danish priests in Greenland were tasked with selecting the children, who were all supposed to be orphans, six to seven years old, healthy and intelligent. When they failed to find enough eligible children requirenents were relaxed. Out of 22 trafficked children only six were actual orphans and the oldest child in the scheme was nine years old. Families were misled to give up their children, being made to believe that the separation would only be temporary.

The children were supposed to stay at Save The Children's summer camps in Denmark and later on with Danish foster parents for 15 months. But the stay was prolonged as the construction of the orphanage in Nuuk they were supposed to return to got delayed. Eventually six children were adopted by their Danish foster parents with the remaining 16 returning to Greenland. The children's families had not been told that the children would stay in an orphanage instead of going home to their communities.

The returning children had forgotten the Greenlandic language so when they got back to Nuuk they were sent to school with Danish-speaking children, defying the programme's stated goal of "bridging" Danish and Greenlandic society. They were seen as foreign by both Greenlanders and Danes and struggled with loss of identity. The geographical distance as well as the linguistic barrier alienated them from their families for life.

The children stayed at the orphanage until they turned 15. Most of them eventually moved to Denmark, a few moved to other countries and only six stayed in Greenland. Of the 16 children in the orphanage three completed higher education, seven of them did not complete any secondary education. Half of the children would grow up to struggle with substance abuse, mental illness and homelessness. Many were affected by unemployment. Half of the 22 children in the scheme died before turning 70.

At no point does the surviving archival material suggest any concerns for the wellbeing of the children among those responsible. Nobody was asking about consequences due the children. It was seen as a given that assimilation to Danish culture was beneficial.

It was not until 2020 that the Danish state would give the children an official apology. In 2021 six surviving children sued the Danish state, the case was settled in 2022 with each victim receiving a DKK 250.000 compensation. In 2024 four of the Greenlandic children who had been adopted by Danish families sued the state for a similar compensation.

To this day the trafficking of the 22 children is a national trauma for Greenland and is seen as an example of the colonial mentality and disregard for Inuit culture that still festers as a dark undercurrent in Danish-Greenlandic relations.